I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ column about Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city in the New York Times yesterday, and was struck by his description of the way that much of the hip-hop canon that’s concerned with violence (which, of course, not all of it is) situates its speaker in relationship to that violence:

Hip-hop originates in communities where such hazards are taken as given. Rappers generally depict themselves as masters, not victims, of the attending violence. Their music is not so much interested in exalting to our preferred values as constructing a fantasy wherein the author has total control and is utterly invulnerable.

When your life is besieged, the music is therapy, vicarious mastery in a world where you control virtually nothing, least of all the fate of your body. I had a friend in middle school who would play Rakim every morning because he knew there was a good chance that he would be jumped en route to or from school by the various crews that roamed the area. But, in his mind, the mask of rap machismo made him too many for them.

I think that passage hit me in particular because of some of the thinking I’ve been doing lately about the way violence operates in film and television. I’ve been showing my boyfriend The Wire, and I think both of us were hit pretty hard, him for the first time, me in new context, by the opening of the ninth episode, “Stray Rounds.” To my mind, the sequence, in which Bodie’s crew’s beef with another set of dealers spirals out of control, is one of the most effective critiques of Hollywood treatment of guns ever filmed:

No one on either side of the gunfight gets hit. No balance of power changes in the slightest. And even more to the point, no one is any good at using the guns they’re brandishing so casually. Much of the time, they’re not looking when they pull the triggers on their handguns, much less aiming at actual targets. Even if they were taking aim, it’s not at all clear to me that any of the participants would be decent shots. Part of the reason they’re not aiming, though, is because they’re terrified, and hiding behind cars. This is a world where bullets don’t miraculously breeze pass our heroes, or where our heroes have the uncanny ability to know when to dodge and are fast enough to actually do it. When Bodie needs a new clip in the middle of the fight, he fumbles awkwardly for it in his sock. Nothing about this is sophisticated, much less effective.

While this scene is a particularly striking sequence, this attitude is relatively common in The Wire as a whole. Even Omar, the character in the show who possesses the most virtuosic ability with a gun, fails a lot. He misses when he tries to assassinate Avon and gets shot himself, though mostly through his assailant’s good luck. As Maurice Levy points out during his testimony against Bird, most of Omar’s assaults are “by pointing,” rather than involving Omar actually pulling the trigger. When Omar shoots Brother Mouzone, it isn’t a single, accurate killing shot: it’s painful and non-fatal and Mouzone survives. Later, when Omar and Mouzone team up to kill Stringer Bell, the same is true: there’s a chase, and fear, and it takes more than one shot to bring their collective enemy down.

In other words, The Wire makes a series of points that Hollywood almost always ignores. Guns are hard to use. Firing them accurately takes a significant amount of skill, and even then, is extremely difficult to do in moments of stress, or fear, or when a gun is being fired at you. Even given all of those things, guns are extremely lethal, and getting shot with one, even if you don’t die, is extremely painful and frightening. At a moment when we’re hearing a lot of talk about the magical abilities conferred by simple possession of a gun, those are things worth remembering.

Senator and 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio is a “hiphop connoisseur,” or so the National Journal’s social media person would have us believe. The last time Rubio cashed in some rap cred was in a November interview with GQ, and that interview appears to have a decent shelf life with the DC media. It’s the sole source for the lead section of the National Journal listicle that argues the Florida senator’s “eclectic taste in music” is a key to his appeal as the next face of a political party that’s not so much reinventing itself as taking sandpaper to its rough edges. Rubio’s hip. He’s with it. He knows the name of hiphop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. He knows Tupac was from New York. He knows Eminem is “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth.” He– wait, what?

GQ: Your three favorite rap songs?
Marco Rubio: “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A. “Killuminati” by Tupac. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”…I’m not like an athlete. The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He’s a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that’s what I enjoy about it. It’s harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can’t put it on.

If you think “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth” is Eminem, you do not listen to enough hiphop. If “Lose Yourself” is your favorite Eminem song, you don’t listen to enough Eminem. And if you’re milking hiphop for credibility while marginalizing its challenges to the kinds of policies and narratives that Republicans run on, you might need to test your listening comprehension, period.

But there’s something worse than poseur bombast afoot if you tell a national men’s magazine that Em’s the only deep or even sort of deep emcee, during a conversation predicated on how cool and rooted and atypical-Republican you are as a person. You’re counting on that magazine being so enthralled by the notion of a Republican who has a passing knowledge of rap that they don’t notice how ignorant and shallow a statement you just made. You’re trusting that your interviewer won’t come back with a question about the potential subtexts of claiming that the only current rapper with rich and abiding lyrical value is the white one. Most of all, you’re manufacturing an image of a conservative capable of communing with the youths, giving future profile writers a ready-made clickbait depiction of you as “Not Your Grandfather’s Republican.” (Those reporters will even give you credit for understanding “how early ’90s rappers in California were like journalists who reported on the conditions in their communities,” as the Journal’s Elahe Izadi did, despite the fact that Rubio doesn’t express that (accurate) notion in the GQ interview she linked.)
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My guest blogger is Alan Pyke, a writer and commentator on film, television, fiction, music, and politics, with a particular fascination for hiphop. He reviews movies and concerts for BrightestYoungThings.

Over at The New Republic, Erik Nielson has a somewhat strange piece up about President Obama’s relationship to what he projects as a monolithic hip-hop community:

Although he said in a 2008 interview that he saw a place for hip-hop in the national dialogue, his engagement with it has largely consisted of slips and quips—calling Kanye West a “jackass” for interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammy’s, joking at the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner that he sings Young Jeezy to Michelle, revisiting the Kanye remark, and so forth. Yes, he has maintained a close relationship with Jay-Z, self-proclaimed hip-hop royalty, but perhaps more telling was his 29-song campaign playlist for 2012: It didn’t have a single rap song on it. This year’s inaugural playlist is revealing as well; while it does have songs by Nick Cannon and the Far East Movement that would qualify as rap, these aren’t exactly the names you’d expect from the man who claimed to “love” hip hop…

Other rappers have been far more ambivalent in their support. Speech, of Arrested Development, supported Obama in 2008, but came out for Ron Paul in 2011, saying he’d become disillusioned with Obama. But then, as the election approached, Speech hopped back on the bandwagon, taking to social media in support of the president and encouraging others to vote for him. Killer Mike came out in support of Obama in 2008, but on R.A.P. Music, one of the best albums of 2012, he went on the attack. On the song “Reagan,” he characterizes Obama as “just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters” and goes on to compare his foreign policy to the Gipper’s. Yet, even as that song was raising eyebrows across the country, Mike was insisting in interviews that he wanted Obama to win reelection, going so far as to claim that black voters would sell out their race if they didn’t support him in 2012: “If you don’t vote for Obama this time you’re a fuckin’ race traitor,” he said.

Nielson seems to assume that there’s such a thing as a coherent hip-hop community that determines both what does and doesn’t count as rap—even though MCing is a vocal style that’s thoroughly penetrated (and to a certain extent, been assimilated by) pop music—and that sets out a coherent political agenda that rappers collectively endorse. One of the things that’s been musically and politically fascinating about hip-hop in recent years has been its fragmentation, rather than its coherence. The East Coast-West Coast polarity is a thing of the past. Jay-Z made the transition to respectable mogul. Kanye West exemplifies the path of middle-class MCs. The internet’s made it easier than ever before for aspiring rappers to make tracks go viral—it’s a lot easier to email or tweet a link to a YouTube video or a SoundCloud playlist than to pass cassettes hand-to-hand. Hip-hop’s status as a giant business means that the antipathy for government Nielson talks about can mean a distaste for paying taxes as much as rage against the police. Credibility fights flare up all the time, but it’s not as if Nicki Minaj isn’t going to sign a giant American Idol judging contract because a Council of Hip-Hop Elders might look askance at her for it.

And ultimately, it’s totally possible for rappers, like the rest of us, to weigh disparate elements of a presidential candidate’s agenda and record and decide that, in a two-party system, a guy with, say a foreign policy record you find deplorable might be worth voting for anyway because of his domestic agenda. It makes total sense that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (who by Nielson’s standards might only “qualify as rap”) might be more excited about President Obama’s evolution on marriage equality than the kinds of guys who toss around “no homo” disclaimers, that Jay-Z might be paying more attention to the economy given his work in moving the Nets to rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn while Lupe Fiasco prioritizes the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in the war on terror.

Saying hip-hop has a part in the national dialogue is an acknowledgement of what’s already happening musically, and a useful if overdue declaration that rappers aren’t pariah artists, excluded from the political conversation by virtue of their art form’s origins. But an openness to listening to new voices isn’t a commitment to a dialogue or a musical style. And Lord forbid hip-hop codify itself musically or politically as the price of getting to be heard politically.

Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s major-label debut “Finally Rich” has sparked verbal sparring among rap critics about cultural tourism and hiphop. This valuable conversation began with a glowing review by Jordan Sargent, and an angry response from RapRadar’s Brian “B.Dot” Miller. The central controversy is over the responsibilities we have when we talk about hiphop, and who should be allowed access to and influence over those conversations. Sargent is white, and Miller is black. Miller insisted on the New York Times ArtsBeat podcast that his distinction between tourism and legitimate participation in hiphop culture is based upon tenure and not melanin, and the disagreement over Chief Keef does not break along simple racial lines at all. But there is a natural suspicion of white voices in hiphop discourse.

The controversy over Keef is in many ways about the age-old lyrics vs. music wrestling match over how to value hiphop. Craig Jenkins has already eviscerated the “community of gatekeepers” who insist Keef’s lyrical content removes him from serious consideration or threatens to destroy hiphop. I’ll try to add something to the parallel thread about cultural tourism, white privilege, and good intentions.

Suspicion of white folks in conversations about hiphop is natural, and more valid than most acts of cultural gatekeeping. American history makes this inescapable. We’re a superpower built in record time thanks to 400 years of stolen labor and stolen lives, and another 150 of systematic oppression of the descendants of that thievery. (That that oppression is now abstract rather than legislated does not make it disappear.) This makes white appropriation of black cultural output inherently more problematic than, say, a Greenwich-born Bentley-driving 17-year-old who finds her angst validated and channeled in the music of impoverished Appalachia. Or a dentist’s son pouring the pain money can’t treat into an identification with music by blue-collar drug-addicted pop geniuses. The honky-tonk bar crowd might be wary of the rich girl, and the punk club might be angry to learn the mosher among them is going home to financial security and a nuclear family. But class divisions may go unnoticed, and even if they don’t the gap in privilege that financial class breeds is limited, and most of all, impermanent. Progress for the rich is, to borrow a phrase, fragile and reversible.

When it comes to hiphop, the privilege gap between the outsider and the insider is based on hundreds of years of brutality. When suburban white privilege comes to the rap show, it’s crossing a hell of a lot more space, and that space is going to be enforced by society far into the future. (To steadily decreasing effect, inshallah.) Straight, white, and male is the easiest difficulty setting in life. Even the white kids who were dealt a bad socioeconomic hand are holding it at a damn good table. And again, history: However sincerely we participate in hiphop culture, we’re beneficiaries of systematic oppression finding an outlet in the anthems of the systematically oppressed. This is the source of the suspicion that sometimes greets white hiphop heads, and which lingers to some extent even after we succeed in proving our sincerity and depth of knowledge or curiosity about the culture. This is why some people call us tourists even after we’ve stayed awhile and taken up residence in hiphop culture.

There are a lot of us expats, in an ill-defined space between those raised on black music and culture and those just-visiting dilettantes. We think we’ve earned some standing (and some codeswitching). But some folks regard us more as colonists. And that’s not a crazy sentiment, especially as regards white folks’ interest in violent drug rap. Dave Bry’s New Republic piece does a nice job of explaining why:

For me, a white person, a rap fan who does in fact enjoy Chief Keef’s album, for musical reasons, much the same as I enjoy Waka Flocka Flame’s music, even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message—a person who likes to think that I can compartmentalize various elements of artistic expression, and appreciate music without any agenda—it’s worth giving hard thought to what it means that a black person is saying that she can’t. It’s worth ruminating on how deeply and insidiously white privilege and the black lack thereof infect every aspect of life in America—even something as simple as enjoying a good pop song. […] We want it to be different, us well-meaning white people. Maybe that’s even part of why we listen to rap music, or part of why we started to, anyway, because we want to do our best to make amends, to bridge the divide. We don’t want to be outsiders; we don’t want for there to be such a thing as outsiders. We want it to be different, but it’s not.

We want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. (Quoting “The Wire” sagely is another primary identifier of us would-be expats.) I don’t agree with Bry about Chief Keef on artistic grounds – based on two spins of “Finally Rich” and video evidence of his formulaic plug-and-play vapidity as an emcee, I want badly to side with Keef’s critics – but he’s dead on that it should be impossible to consider the Keefs and Flockas and Gunplays of the world completely outside of moralized critique, no matter how much serious white fans of their music might wish it so. Still, I think Bry missed a spot.

When he says he enjoys thuggish rap “even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message,” he’s pleading innocent of partaking in ign’ant shit as escapist fantasy. This seems disingenuous. Part of the appeal of everybody from Keef to Nate Dogg is that they give us access to a synthetic blend of toughness, indomitability, and limitless sexual potency that most of us don’t actually enjoy. Those banal lyrics and deplorable messages aren’t just part of the fun– they are the fun. That folks like Bry or myself aren’t enjoying this stuff in a mocking or ironic way does not make it completely above-board. We’re getting sincere enjoyment from something that makes us feel more alive, but as his piece notes so eloquently, we don’t live with the consequences when the music stops. Insofar as we white sojourners praise and download this stuff because it lets us play gangster, we’re taking advantage of the privilege gap Bry discusses.

And that gap puts the lie to the expat aspirations of even the most sincere and versed of white hiphop heads. Jamelle Bouie’s recent piece on his decision not to carry a flatscreen TV to his friend’s house alone, for fear of being taken for a thief, reminded me that my tourist status can’t be erased by my own actions. It’s imposed by the culture around us that assumes the worst about a black face – an attitude with much deeper roots than rap music, but which has been drawing strength from rappers for decades.

But Chief Keef can’t be responsible for that attitude. Neither can any other rapper. Images of black virility, self-determination, and power have scared white folks since long before Ice Cube nailed the motives of white cultural reactionaries in an interlude on his 1992 album “The Predator.” Every white hiphop head should check their privilege almost constantly. That privilege does not oblige us to be silent about our tastes or criticisms– much the opposite, in fact. It obliges us to speak a lot, because it obliges us to speak carefully and inquisitively, and recklessness always takes fewer words than consideration. Just playing good rap for our friends isn’t being down for any cause unless we’re also participating in the conversation about systems of oppression. Hiphop kickstarted that conversation long before we got here, and however much time we’ve put in learning this culture we should always acknowledge that we’re guests.

Otherwise, we’re not just tourists or commuters to hiphop, free to walk unjudged through the streets our musical heroes depict. We’re worse than that. We’re subconsciously preying on that privilege in order to enjoy feeling Like A Bawse in private. We’re colonizing the music of someone else’s struggle.

There’s finally a video for one of my favorite songs of last year, from Ab-Soul’s brilliant album Control System. “ILLuminate” is a standout from that record, a showcase for the Black Hippy alum’s addictive blend of introspective cultural commentary and blunts-and-brags swagger. The video, directed by Fredo Tovar and Scott Fleishman, provides appropriate imagery — a vaguely post-apocalyptic wasteland and a group of young people keeping the darkness away with their own creativity:

The timing for the video is pretty solid, too, coming three months after Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (and eight months after Control System). “ILLuminate” features Lamar on the final verse, and the two men’s complementary styles here provide a winsome invitation and representative introduction to the creative output of the Black Hippy set beyond Lamar. (Ab-Soul and Schoolboy Q were absent from GKMC, while Jay Rock made the absolute most of his feature on “Money Trees.”)

Ta-Nehisi Coates has started digesting the Kendrick Lamar record, and the major qualities he’s praised about it – its sincere vulnerability and the way it speaks for the unheroic and the common – should lead him and others to check out Control System as well. Ab-Soul’s version of vulnerability is certainly different from Lamar’s. Coates had a great line about Lamar being “obsessed with speaking as a civilian” in an art form “obsessed with soldiers,” and that’s a good way to understand the surface differences between Ab-Soul’s vulnerability and Kendrick’s. Soul flirts with speaking as a civilian but clings to soldierly posturing far more than his labelmate. As an example: When Kendrick pondered gang unification on good kid, it was as a threat to his own life. When Ab-Soul ponders it on Control System, it’s part of a fantasy about being able to fight off the U.S. military. “Terrorist Threats” is another great track from this record, but neither it nor “ILLuminate” are good examples of Ab-Soul’s vulnerability. That song’s insecurities about fleeting popularity and industry pressures to duplicate 2 Chainz are, in a sense, the performative version of vulnerability that TNC notes is common to rap.

The best example of the deeper, truer vulnerability in Control System doesn’t have a video yet, but it should. “Double Standards” features Anna Wise, who’s having a great run of guest vocals on excellent rap records. (She sang on multiple good kid, m.A.A.d city cuts last year, and on two tracks from Oneirology by Cunninlynguists, one of the best records of 2011:)

“Double Standards” is a lot like Kendrick’s “The Art Of Peer Pressure” in its reflective take on group dynamics and individual behavior. The simplicity of the hook strays close to the preachiness that makes that Macklemore “Same Love” joint almost unlistenable for me, even as I appreciate its value. But Soul saves it in the verses, with economical depictions of the wildly different norms about promiscuity and fidelity that prevail for men and women. Those norms are present in some of the best examples of the flawed or performative version of hiphop vulnerability Coates sees Kendrick breaking away from on good kid. Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” Ghostface’s “Back Like That,” and MF DOOM//Madlib’s “Fancy Clown” all traffic in the crippled, one-sided understanding of fidelity that Ab-Soul rips apart on “Double Standards.”

In the final verse, he points out that we inherit these attitudes, that they are trained into us at a developing age. This isn’t the first-person storytelling of good kid, but it’s predicated on the same genuine openness and reflectiveness on experiences that are common, daily, and unheroic. It’s a different formula of the same drug, and hopefully everyone who appreciates Kendrick’s output will make time to explore Ab-Soul’s.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I like Big Boi and Kelly Rowland’s “Mama Told Me” so much, other than the fact that it’s an utterly irresistible, summery jam that came out just as winter’s descending:

I think it’s mostly that it reminds me of a piece I’d like to see a hip-hop historian write, about the shift from sampling, which renders the sampled voice, be it male or female, passive, to the much more prevalent practice now of having female artists record original hooks and choruses for hip-hop songs that renders so many of them effective duets.

This is, of course, not, a new phenomenon. Jewell, in an oral history of The Chronic published last month in honor of the album’s twentieth anniversary reflected on her role in bringing women’s voices into hip-hop songs, saying ” It all worked. My singin’ over their hard rap lyrics; rap had never accepted that before. I put my soft, sultry R&B singing on their records. Now every rapper has to have a female on their songs.” My regular Twitter interlocutor Soul Honky, to whom I am much indebted suggested an earlier structural explanation: that the popularity of “It Takes Two,” which heavily sampled singer Lyn Collins, prompted a crackdown on sampling that made it legally and financially more expedient to have a female singer record original vocals for a track.

Whatever the origin is, there’s something fascinating about the fact that hip-hop, a genre that gets slammed for the misogyny of its lyrics by legitimate commentators and concern trolls alike, with hugely varying degrees of fairness, is also probably the kind of music that puts men and women in musical conversation within the same song with the greatest frequency. Part of what’s fun about “Mama Told Me” is listening to Rowland’s voice spill out from the limitations of the Solange-level-sunny chorus to take over the song in its second half. Part of what’s fun about listening to Estelle’s “American Boy” is to hear Kanye West, or at least the character he’s playing, flirt with Estelle based on the characteristics she’s laid out for what she’s looking for in a man. As a feminist, one of the reasons I love hip-hop so much is that it’s fun to hear men and women talking to each other instead of past each other, the way they so often seem to be doing in traditional pop and rock.

Ta-Nehisi is reading Raymond Chandler, and in exploring Philip Marlowe’s distaste for some of the women in his path, his observation that “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible,” turns to the question of visibile manifestation of male desire, and its relationship to shame:

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Masculinity’s central tenet is control—and perhaps most importantly, control of the body. Nothing contradicts that edict like erections. It unmans you, it compels you through sensations you scarcely understand. And it threatens to expose you, to humiliates you, in front of everyone. Laugh now at the boy at the middle school dance, who gets an erection on the slow number (God help him if he has orgasm.) But he does not forget that laughter, nor does he forget what prompted it. That boy is going to be a rapper. Or a painter. Or an author of fictions where men are men and somehow are invulnerable to the humiliating effects of the female form.

In the comments to that post, a number of people, rightly, bring up Prince as an example of someone who managed to decouple desire and shame, which I think is exactly right. When he sings in “When Doves Cry,” “Touch if you will my stomach / Feel how it trembles inside / You’ve got the butterflies all tied up / Don’t make me chase you / Even doves have pride,” Prince is offering up evidence of his arousal and embracing the power dynamic his desire occasions. The woman he’s speaking to has the initiative there. There is the possibility that he will be rejected or shamed. But he’s also gained power by being willing to run those risks, to speak honestly to her.

It’s also worth, as a counterpoint to Marlowe’s contempt, to consider Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks:

Her appearance in his bed is a repetition of Carmen Sternwood’s attempts to seduce Marlowe. But rather than reacting with disgust to his own attraction to her, or anger at her for arousing him, Cooper is kind, and self-denying. “What I want and what I need are two different things,” he tells her. His desire for her can exist within a web of his other values, including his devotion to the F.B.I. And perhaps most importantly, Cooper isn’t angry at Audrey for wanting him, an emotion that seems to underscore Marlowe’s repulsion to a number of the women that he encounters.

Because that’s the critical other half of this conversation, one that I discussed in part yesterday in exploring why James Bond and other sex objects designed for women’s consumption can be so threatening. If men can be shamed for visible and involuntary evidence of arousal, both because they’re deemed to have slipped in their control, and because they risk sexual rejection from the women who have prompted their reaction, women can be shamed for voluntarily expressing arousal and asking that their sexual needs be met. Such requests meet with such complicated reactions because they fracture sex, raising the possibility that for men and women, intercourse assumes varying levels of importance and delivers different levels of satisfaction. In other words, a positive reaction to evidence of male desire is the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of it. And that negotiation is a culturally fraught one.
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Jay-Z, warming up a crowd for President Obama in Ohio today, rewrote the lyrics to his much-analyzed song 99 Problems to declare that he’s got “99 problems, but Mitt ain’t one”:

I have to say that, if with the distraction of Mitt Romney off the table, we could end stop and frisk after the election and thereby get Jay-Z down to 98 problems, that would be an America I’d be pretty happy to live in.

Up and coming rapper Angel Haze took the instrumentals from Eminem’s efforts to exorcise his relationship with his mother, “Cleaning Out My Closet,” and laid down an account of sexual abuse she suffered as a child. The track’s been getting passed around a lot recently, and for good reason:

The physical details of the assaults and the way they were discussed in her community are horrific, and the song is powerfully emotionally precise, describing how Haze starved herself to avoid appearing attractive to everyone, and suggesting that she pursued relationships with women rather than men because her terror of male sexual attention was so deep-seated. “It happened so often he was getting particular,” she says of her abuser’s escalation. And I’m hard-pressed to think of a more concise explanation of what it means to come to terms with yourself in the wake of trauma than Haze’s line: “I’m sane, I’m not insane, but not the same as before.”

It’s rare songs like this that use hip-hop as a powerful confessional vehicle for women that make it disconcerting to listen to “White Dress,” Kanye West’s track for The Man With The Iron Fists, that began circulating around the same time as “Cleaning Out My Closet.” It’s ostensibly a song about a couple’s wedding, flashing back to their meeting—which includes Kanye letting her know that even though he met her in the club he still thought about wifing her, because obviously girls who wear form-fitting clothing aren’t normally marriage material, or something:

But in the first verse, there’s an unnerving line that’s meant to be sweet but that actually makes me, uneasily, think more of sex by surprise than a romantic seduction: “Just a satin gown, you asleep with no make-up / I’m just tryna be inside you ‘fore you wake up.” It says a lot that Angel Haze has to say the details of her own sexual assault are disgusting, an apology for recounting them even in a confessional song, but something like this Kanye verse is presented like it’s utterly innocuous.

As Maureen O’Connor explained at The Cut yesterday, something very strange is going on with a Billboard profile of Christina Aguilera. Us Weekly reported, and lots of outlets repeated, that the profile contained the following passage:

I got tired of being a skinny white girl. I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl … [In 2002,] I had gained about 15 pounds during promotion and during my Stripped tour. They called this serious emergency meeting about how there was a lot of backlash about my weight. Basically, they told me I would effect [sic] a lot of people if I gained weight — the production, musical directors. They claimed people I toured with would also miss out if I gained weight because I would sell no records or tickets for my shows. I was young, so I lost the weight quickly and was toothpick thin during [2006's] Back to Basics promos and touring.

I told them during this Lotus recording, ‘You are working with a fat girl. Know it now and get over it.’ They need a reminder sometimes that I don’t belong to them. It’s my body. My body can’t put anyone in jeopardy of not making money anymore — my body is just not on the table that way anymore.

Except it doesn’t exist, and no one’s sure where they come from. And while the fakery is deeper, the whole incident reminds me a great deal of something that happened in January. After the birth of Jay-Z and Beyonce’s daughter, a blogger named Renee Gardener wrote a poem about the use of the word “bitch” in Jay-Z’s music that made it sound like he was swearing off that particular epithet in his music: “Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich/ I didn’t think hard about using the word b*tch/ I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it/ Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it.” The poem was widely attributed to him and occasioned an out-pouring of praise. The idea of one of hip-hop’s biggest icons taking a conscious stand against misogyny and repudiating his past casual use of it was clearly powerful to a lot of people, except it wasn’t true.

There’s a clear hunger for celebrities who speak the truth about their industries, who shake off trends like fat-shaming, or the denigration of women, a hunger so intense that people will fabricate things, or buy into relatively implausible misattributions in order to satisfy those cravings. You’d think that incidents like these would show the power of authenticity and honesty as a product, demonstrate the demand for artists who don’t look like they starve themselves and singers whose views on women evolve, for a celebrity culture that’s more human and less homogenized, less shackled to its past.