Benjamine Weill: “Rap is an intersectional object par excellence”

There are no more clips of style: a rapper, with big black glasses and a myriad of golden chains around his neck, surrounded by a harem, delivers a to flow manly about the money, violence, and/or all the crime he piles into his badass CV. A cliché, promoted for a time by the music industry, politics and the media, a sort of convenient and profitable box into which we have tried to insert many artists to the point of building a mythology of rap, absolutely out of step with its culture .origin, profoundly emancipatory. Has rap always been sexist? What place for women in this universe? How do you do justice to this musical style and its richness? Enlightenment with Rap Expert Philosopher Benjamine Weill which has just been released Who benefits from dirt? Sexism, racism and capitalism in French rapApril 5, 2023.

Interview with Benjamine Weill, author of Who Benefits from Dirt? Sexism, racism and capitalism in French rap

To miss. When did rap become sexist?

Benjamin Weil. The sexism of rap was built like the industrialization of rap. Sexism was already there then, as in the rest of society. Rap doesn’t became » sexist. It was industrialization that bet on sexism, from the mid-2000s, right after that of Diam. At that time, the rap game (which is the system both of the music industry, but also of broadcasters and prescribers, therefore of the media) focus more on artists who declare themselves more or less sexist. However, Europe is not limited to this rap.

Furthermore, too often we forget that rap comes from hip hop, and that it has been torn from its culture to be transplanted into industrial soil (that of the music industry, which responds to liberal logics). When you don’t know the history of something, you create mythology, fantasy. The idea that rap and feminism are necessarily antinomian is a construction. There is a possible feminism within hip hop culture, which is expressed by female artists who have always taken the microphone to give speeches feministswithout even claiming any movement.

You explain in your book that the industrialization of rap has also created a mold for female artists…

Indeed. This is called Smurfette syndrome. Developed by Katha Pollitt, it describes the process by which groups of men define the mode of the feminine that can exist with them. This then becomes a single model, the pretext woman who gives an illusion of openness to exclude all the others. In rap, Diam will play this role. Smurfette is made by man, for man. Diam’s, in a sense, doesn’t bother the masculine in who she is, because she doesn’t come to compete with him. In HI, also tells how this exploitation made her suffer a lot. For other artists it becomes very difficult to emerge. All female rappers are automatically reported by Diam, matched and discredited against her.

Where does the injunction to exacerbated virilism come from, which much of rap broadcasts today?

It’s something that has more or less always existed, but has become something of a false trademark. Today, the hypersexist figures proposed by the industry are unlocking a very virile imagery of rap. Images supported and developed by programs such as rap planet or with the substitution of the ” street culture “over there” street credibilityThere”. Basically, street culture was this spirit of enterprise, this system D, which was about facing your environment and emancipating yourself.

Then street credibility it has become a show of manly strength. This change happened during the 2000s. Before, artists like Expression Direkt or Ministère AMER (who, however, weren’t rappers known to be hyper busy in the sense that we will hear it today), all had a certain idea of ​​how to rap, which was to avoid the delinquency.

So, we introduced the idea that being a rapper meant doing dirty things. Not in the sense of producing a good sound, of creating an atmosphere, of making something out of the dirt we live in. But doing alleged dirt, dirt that values ​​delinquency and that has money as its ultimate goal. In this effort, the rapper confines himself to the news, he is caricatured in an image of the savage rapist. The media treatment of rap has a lot to do with it. This stereotyped image removes all nuances, all diversity and has a racist basis.

Who benefits from these images?

This dirt only benefits the music industry and the dirtiest system there is, which is capitalism. Nor does it serve the artists, who are themselves the bugbears of this system. They think they will get out of it, but tomorrow, if they fall into a case of sexist and sexual violence, the system will have no qualms about letting them go, or even rotting them. He will be very happy to find a scapegoat, who will avoid attacking Depardieu or Darmanin. The capitalist and liberal system needs labels, clichés to function and generate markets.

You say that rap is an “intersectional object par excellence”. What do you mean ?

Rap comes to cross different logics. If we want to approach it from a feminist point of view, without falling into white feminism, we must simultaneously integrate an anti-racist dimension. Conversely, reading rap only through the anti-racist prism, without feminist logic, is also missing out on something. The liberalism of industry and the industrial system makes the connection. Structures such as whiteness, capitalism and patriarchy interact through rap, which in turn are articulated in more sociological logics of male domination, class struggle and racialization. Which makes rap a deeply intersectional object.