Music Videos, Performance and Resistance: Feminist Rappers.

Popular culture provides use with particularly compelling examples of the tension between dominance and resistance and one of the most engaging sites of such tensions is the feminist rap music video. Feminist rap music videos require the viewer to participate in their construction and analysis. This music explores tensions between black and white, male and female, in a direct and explicit fashion. For the feminist rapper, rap offers unique possibilities. Rap like all other forms of popular music, is not inherently feminist or political, and indeed some of the best known rap songs like Tone Loc's Wild Thing are obnoxiously sexist. Significantly rap involves post modernist qualities, an aspect of rap that has been ignored, perhaps because it is usually associated with white high masculine culture. To appreciate feminist rap videos, the viewer must first redefine the idea of a text, expanding it to include a multitude of nonverbal signs and freeing it from monologic and auteurist assumptions. Rap like other popular culture forms, can be usurped by feminists. In fact certain qualities of rap make it particularly suitable for feminist purposes. Because rapper endemically focus on themselves, once the performer is female, she can use this self-promotion without altering the musical form.