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Female Hip-Hop Artist Against Misogyny

Female rappers have tried to reclaim their music by empowering women. Feminist rappers like Queen Latifah, Yo Yo, and Roxanne, speak their minds on issues that truly matter, but this isn’t unusual in pop culture. Queen Latifah was a prominent historic figure, and her rap surrounds the idea of women promoting other women and makes explicit assertions of female strength in comparison to their male counterparts in the industry. Queen Latifah has been candidly vocal through her music and in interviews on how she feels the need to empower women through her music. In a conversation with HuffPost Live, Latifah explained why she chose to speak out on songs like “Ladies First” and the Grammy Award-winning “U.N.I.T.Y.,” through which Latifah shared an empowering message for women.

“I chose to kind of take the route of uplifting women by trying to make some records that had some positive thoughts in it,” she said. “There are ways to make records that appeal to the masses but still have a message that leaves something with you.” She had no tolerance for misognomy, and spoke out against it while producing her own music to contribute to the industry. According to the article “Queen Latifah on Fighting Misogyny in Rap and ‘Uplifting Women’” by Rahel Gebreyes, Latifah shared that she has always “had a problem with [misogyny]” and was “never the kind of person to take things lying down”. With this motivation Latifah continued to grow, and has became an idol for many in the industry today.

Youth Listeners

Monitoring the amount of time teenagers spend listening to music improves our understanding on rap music, which gives other alternatives to why the maturity factor may have affected the findings in this study. Based on the article “Under the Influence of… music “ by Tara Parker-pope says “teenagers listen to an average of nearly 2.5 hours of music per day … adding up to 16 hours each week or more.” (Parker-Pope 2008). The easy accessibility to music due to the increase technology confirms that misogyny in rap music plays a major role in teenagers daily life. As a result there is an increasing amount of addiction to that type of music. Nowadays misogyny rap music is being played so often on the radio and many apps, that it has become normalized, therefore much of the youth cannot even tell that most male artists tend to include a bias against women. For instance, Youtube catches the person's attention due to the images being played in the video, making it seem as if the male is a “gangster/ thug” . In other words, introducing drugs and alcohol to teenagers in the music lyrics, along with hurtful words being thrown at women is becoming more common. It could be that teenagers don't realize the misogyny being done because at that stage in life they want to all be “grown and tough” , which could be a cause to youth having positive perceptions and attitudes towards misogyny rap music.