Black Music & Identity: How Commodification Changed The Narratives of R&B Music

BLACK MUSIC & IDENTITY 1

Running Head: BLACK MUSIC & IDENTITY

Black Music & Identity:How Commodification Changed The Narratives of R&B Music


Meika ColeOakland University

Department of CommunicationFall 2013

ABSTRACT

This paper engages in a careful examination of how African-

American identity has been impacted by popular culture,

specifically the commercialization of black music. Over the last

30 years, the soul of black music has been replaced with a more

homogenized sound that embodies the characteristics of popular

music, as defined by a European ideology. As the genre gained

crossover acceptance in the 1940’s, texts that once signified

black cultural identity and family unity have now been replaced

with those of extreme materialism, violence and promiscuity. The

more commercialized the genre becomes, the message of love,

freedom and self-expression for the black community gets more

diluted leaving me to question whether or not the soul of black

music is dead and if it can ever be revived.


Introduction

Music has a way of connecting people and is said to reach

beyond race, distance and time. For me, music has either ushered

unforgettable memories of my youth or it has helped me through

the difficult seasons of my adulthood. Being an African-American

woman growing up in the shadows of Motown, the music of the

1970’s had meaning for me on a personal and political level. The

ideologies that were prevalent to the Black community were


birthed out of struggle and resistance. In my collective, Black

music was our escape. From churches to barbershops, many of the

institutions that constitute the Black public sphere have been

invaluable to the transmission of communal values, traditions of

resistance, and aesthetic sensibilities in regards to black

identity (Neal M. A., 1999).

Black music told stories of love, black power and community.

Black music garners its strength and power from the veracity of a

greater African-American culture forged under the oppression that

was a direct result of racism. As stated in Ronald Radano’s

Narratives in Black Music, Black music of real worth speaks with

certitude and conviction of the rightness of blackness against

the wrongness of white supremacy. At its best, Black music

expresses a kind of cultural exceptionalism, a racially informed

distinctiveness and moral integrity that reflect its grounding

traditions of Africa and an intimately linked slave era (Nadano,

2003, p. 2).

I was raised in Pontiac, Michigan, 30 miles north of

Detroit. My father was what I considered a Black Nationalist

plant rat and my mother a nurse with a strict Baptist upbringing.


Because of these differences, I had the best of both worlds;

Religion and Politics. Religion was the foundation of the black

community. There was a symbiotic relationship between the sacred

and secular in black culture which contributes to its circularity

(Keyes C. , 1998, p. 208). The politics is what connected us and

gave black artists a voice. Every Friday night in our basement,

my father and his friends discussed matters of the black

community, over the lush sounds of James Brown, Earth Wind & Fire

and a multitude of other artists.

Black music was the thing that gave me hope and an identity.

Through black music, the Isley Brothers taught me how to “Fight the

Power”, Rufus & Chaka Khan helped me to understand my place in my

collective because I was “Every Woman”. Al Green gave me lessons

on staying in love with “Let’s Stay Together” and Stevie Wonder helped

me realize the importance of unity with his song “Love In Need”.

For me black music helped me define my identity, but as huge

profits were made and the music changed, the identity of Black

Americans became lost in the shuffle popular culture. Black

music has become angry and almost irresponsible. In a

documentary with Oprah Winfrey, renowned activist, Reverend Al


Sharpton expressed his concern with today’s black culture

stating:

“Today we are without boundaries. When I was growing up,

Aretha was singing “Respect” James Brown was singing “Black and

Proud”, Marvin Gaye “What’s Going On”. Now its Nigga, Nigga, Nigga.

Hoe, Hoe, Hoe or I gotta get mine…what are we putting in our

kids… if I didn’t have church, the community or the standards of

that music, I probably would have been much different (Sharpton,

2013)

The Construction of Identity through Music

In examining popular aesthetics in music, British socio-

musicologist, Simon Frith states that as we discuss and reflect

on the construction of identity, words such as difference, genre,

hybridism, context, place, locality and others comes into play.

With this being said, Frith argues that identity is always

constituted out of difference and complements that there is an

alternative understanding of the relations of the modern and

identity that suggests that the modern transforms all relations

of identity into relations of difference. Thus, the modern


constitutes not identity out of difference but difference out of

identity (Frith, 1996).

Frith’s concept of musical identity, that of shifting and

sharing with many others’ ideas, definitions and the voices and

writing of teachers, is an important one. The theorization of

music and the articulation of social identity is a new model that

emerged where music has a formative role in the construction,

negotiation, and transformation of sociocultural identities.

Frith continues to say that music constructs our sense of

identity through the direct experiences it offers to the body,

time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place

ourselves in

imaginative cultural narratives...This is, perhaps

ironically, to come back to music via spatial metaphor. But

what makes music special for identity – is that it defines

space without boundaries (Frith, 1996, pp. 124-125).

In an essay written by William C. Banfield, he felt that

when black music became popular with White America, more emphasis

was placed on production and image than artistry and excellence.

His arguments leads to key questions like what the future holds


for music in general and, particularly, the sounds created by

African-Americans. Black culture may be his principal focus,

but Banfield's arguments extend across the broad spectrum of the

arts, exploring complex problems, posing innovative explanations

and inspiring readers to carefully consider the songs, films and

television shows that define their existence.

Mainstream American media dismissed important creative

cultural/social/spiritual aspect of Black artistic expressive

culture, and following that lead are the educational, cultural

institutions that arm our society with relevant and lasting

impressions of what is preserved. This de-evaluation leads to

not only the suffocation of major portions of Black culture, but

as a counterproductive ploy, investments are made into the

commodification of negative cultural imagery and overblown teen

pop “celebridome” (Banfield, 2004, p. 196).

Methodology

Using a discursive analysis and historization, I will

demonstrate the structural changes that took place within the

black music industry and show how it affected the narrative texts

that were once a vital part of the black community. In a focus


group, I will interview three African-American men, three

African-American women, 2 White men and one Latina woman between

the ages of 32 and 42 years old. In this research, I plan to

pose the question of whether the narratives are the same or

different and if the responses change based on gender, race and

age demographics.

Music as Culture

To begin, music embodies artistic expression by form,

harmony and emotion. The study of popular music is a relatively

new field in American social science. According to David

Riesman, the field of pop music represents culture. Popular

music has been written in both critical and celebratory modes.

Each of these modes has much to do with political and aesthetic

dimensions. The study of popular music culture—radio, movies,

comics, popular music and fiction—is a relatively new field in

American social science (Riesman,1950, p. 359). Because the

field of pop music personifies culture and media, the job of a

true music scholar is to define what popular music is and the

influence it has. The issue of music and identity is not how a


particular piece of music is interpreted, but mainly how it is

created and reflects people.

Because music thrives on capitalism, the problems of

consumption and overproduction polarize the actual musicology

aspect. “In contemporary capitalist societies, the culture

industry produces forms of culture which are commodities. Culture

is then produced to be bought and sold to make a profit

(Longhurst, 2007, p. 3). In culture creation, producers force

false needs on its consumer, thus replacing an individual’s true

needs (creativity) with what he describes as “pseudo-

individualization”. In his opinion, popular culture was

identified as the reason for people's passive satisfaction and

lack of interest in overthrowing the capitalist system.

Historically, music in a traditional sense has always been

influenced by western standards of European thought. In order to

fully understand the extent of European music history and its

dominance in society, we must turn our attention to the discourse

on race and culture introduced Stuart Hall. Hall first

introduced his theory of culture in terms of what he called ‘west

versus the rest’. This concept functions in four ways: First,


it allows us to characterize and classify societies into

different categories. Secondly, it sets an image or sets of

images. Thirdly, it provides a standard or model of comparison.

Fourthly, it provides criteria of evaluation which other

societies are ranked and around which powerful positive and

negative feelings cluster (Hall, 1992).

This concept of the West obscures the wide differences among

western peoples presenting them as a homogenous whole. During

colonization, the European, American and African slave traders

engaged in the lucrative trading of humans. Politicians and

businessmen who supported them, did not intend to put into motion

a chain of events that would motivate the captives and their

descendants to fight for full citizenship in the United States of

America. Once colonialism started, European settlers began to

dominate other civilizations and characterized them by these

standards, thus creating a system of representation that would

forever impact blacks. As the colonization of states increased in

Europe, matters of status, access, participation and membership

became key elements of state- and nation-building, which often


placed minorities in positions which limited the full exercise of

their rights (Powell, 1999).

Hall provides a representative selection of writings on

cultural studies and its concerns regarding Marxism;

postmodernism, cultural and political thought and the development

of cultural studies as an international and postcolonial

phenomenon, based on race and identity. Both ideologies from

Hall and Riesman gives the communication scholar an in depth

analysis on how culture is circulated and what makes music

‘popular’ based on those who are in power.

Commodification of Black Music

In order to fully understand how race and commodification

affects the dynamics of how popular music is produced, one must

take into analysis what Theodor W. Adorno says about music and

culture. Adorno, who was a member of the Frankfort School of

theoreticians, argues that popular music is a part of the culture

industry (Longhurst, 2007, p. 3). Because music thrives on

capitalism, the problems of consumption and overproduction

polarize the actual musicology aspect. “In contemporary

capitalist societies, the culture industry produces forms of


culture which are commodities. Culture is then produced to be

bought and sold to make a profit (Longhurst, 2007, p. 3). In

culture creation, producers force false needs on its consumer,

thus replacing an individual’s true needs (creativity) with what

he describes as “pseudo-individualization”.

In his opinion, popular culture was identified as the reason

for people's passive satisfaction and lack of interest in

overthrowing the capitalist system. Adorno claimed pop music is

standardized, meaning that regardless of what genre it is defined

under, pop music follows the same essential form and structure,

often lacking true creativity. Because of this theory, Adorno

measured it against what he labels as serious music. In serious

music, Adorno felt that it dealt more with the “true art” of

musicology. He felt that it rested on the valuation of an

intimate relation between specific parts and the overall nature

of a whole piece of music, which gives the piece its own

particular distinctiveness and individuality (Longhurst, 2007).

The critique of pop music as outlined by Adorno is essential

to this field of study because it rests on the ideologies of

highbrow and lowbrow cultural distinctions, which certainly


directs us to matters of race and class. In highbrow societies,

music is more elite or intellectual because of its emphasis on

classical musicology, whereas lowbrow consists of content to

depict traditional working class values. As outlined by Guthrie

P. Ramsey, a growing number of the music scholars now argue quite

profitably that music is a dynamic social text, a meaningful

cultural practice, a cultural transaction, and a politically

charged, gendered, signifying discourse (Ramsey G. P., 2003).

One way of exploring this is looking at the emergence of race

music and how it became a commodity.

Historically, Black popular music began within noncommercial

contexts. It began within the context of daily community life,

and its significance lies within those contexts. In an interview

with ethnomusicologist, Dr. Portia Maltsby, the scholar states

that “the assumption has always been that if the music becomes

popular in the mainstream, something has changed about the

music. The subtle implication is that it has been diluted or

watered down. But the reality is that the mainstream has crossed

over by embracing the aesthetic. In other words, the Black


aesthetic slowly began to change the sound of mainstream music

over time (Williams, 2011).

The significant influence of African-American music is well

established in the development of U.S. popular music during the

20th century. Its first commercialized presence in American was

mainly through the “race” record industry of the 1920’s.

Consisting mainly of blues and jazz recordings produced by and

for a black audience, race music relegated to secondary status in

comparison to Euro-American popular music (Keyes C. L., 2003).

Race music was birthed out of the black experience prior to the

American Civil War. Suffice it to say, the concept of black

music has in the past and in everyday criticism been used in an

unreflective way, where it is assumed that it is the music

performed by black people (Longhurst, 2007).

Black music functions on the following techniques: Call-and-

response, rhythm and improvisation. As outlined in Richard

Ripani’s The New Blue Music, the term race music was used to

specifically identify its catalog of music created by and

targeted to black Americans because of its blending of African

folk music with elements of blues and jazz also known as European


art music (Ripani, 2006, p. 21). In the early part of the 20th

century, there was a constant rise in popularity of African-

American blues and jazz due to the development of the arts as

part of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition, white and Latino

performers of African-American music were visible, rooted in the

history of cross-cultural communication between the United

States' races but African-American music was often adapted for

white audiences, who would not have as readily accepted black

performers, leading to genres like swing which was a pop-based

outgrowth of jazz. The white fascination with black music, which

increased commensurate with white efforts to protect whiteness,

encouraged its use as a mode of culture making, and even as a

form of critique (Randano, 2002, p. 116).

The concept of “race music” was first introduced in 1923 by

the Okeh record company.

Black music has always had a complicated relationship with big

business. In the late 1940’s, the word race began to have a

negative connotation and was replaced with the term Rhythm &

Blues (Ripani, 2006). Rhythm and blues became the first form of

black music to be exposed to the rampant mass consumerism that


has defined the post-World War II period. From 1948 onward,

black music was marketed as "rhythm and blues," a term attributed

to music journalist/producer Jerry Wexler (Ramsey G. P., 2003).

This term describes a wide range of musical styles by black

Americans to include, gospel, soul, and funk. R&B's predecessors

were mostly credited musician from urban industrial centers, such

as Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and New York. The emergence of

rhythm and blues is owed in part to the decentering of big

band/swing and the rise of the vocalists in the recording

industry (Neal M. A., 1999).

Mark Anthony Neal's What the Music Said and Soul Babies are both

interdisciplinary examinations of Black expressive art intended

for mass distribution and consumption. Neal argues that Rhythm

and Blues became an instrument of struggle in the mid-century

civil rights movement through its polytonality and protest

lyrics. While Soul Babies primarily concerns itself with postmodern

interpretations Black popular culture, What the Music Said discusses

Black popular music genres from a twentieth-century view of

cultural politics and postmodern interpretations of history.

Neal describes his exploration of the Black in Black popular


culture for the post-soul generation as a remembering process,

where the legacies

of early soul music, civil rights, and Black power movements are

found in the artistic cultural expressions of the neo-soul

generation.

The Influence of Motown

At the wake of a black music invasion, Berry Gordy, who

would become one of the greatest entrepreneurs in Michigan

history, changed the history of Black music. He had a vision of

taking black-inspired music out of the slums and giving it broad,

national appeal as a respectable art form. In 1959, Gordy

borrowed $800 from his family to start Motown Record Corporation,

named for the "motor town" of Detroit, where he lived and where

he worked on the assembly line. In its most commoditized forms,

as in the case of Motown recording artists Diana Ross and the

Jackson Five, R&B embraced middle-class narratives of upward

mobility and race-neutral lyrics that included romantic love.

Prior to this, black music was seen only as a minority taste,

especially of those who had migrated from the South to the North

during World War I. This population shift created a new


demographic group. Black music found its expression as soul

music. At that moment in history, R&B was associated with the

black civil rights movement through the transformation of black

music into a type of funky affirmation (Pomoni, 2009). Thus by

the mid-to-late seventies, rhythm and blues record labels and

their recording artists relinquished their potential power to say

something progressive to the masses in order to increase profit

margins and appeal to mainstream audiences and the Black middle

class (Neal, 2002).

In Nelson George’s book, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, he

chronicles the rise and fall of “race music” and its

transformation into the R&B that eventually dominated the

airwaves only to find itself diluted and submerged as crossover

music. He states that as black musicians assimilated and became

accepted into white society, they lost some of what made black

music distinctive (George, 1988). Smokey Robinson and The

Miracles were among Motown's first artists that topped the

crossover charts with their 1960 release 'Shop Around', which

also became the label's first million-selling album. Besides,

the extraordinary talent of Robinson to identify tunes that could


become smash hits and his contribution to other Motown artists

such as The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, Brenda

Holloway, The Contours, The Marvelettes and others, made him

practically an architect of black music. Motown created a

blueprint that would be worshiped for generations to come

(Pomoni, 2009). In reality, Motown shook up the music industry

with a stream of back-to-back hits forging the road for continued

dominance of modern R&B music.

R&B Meets Taste & Technology

As tastes changes and music evolved, R&B began to see an

increase in musical style differences. R&B now featured catchy

grooves, hand-clapping, impulsive body moves, improvisational

embellishments, and regular interplay between the soloist and the

chorus. Because R&B became so mainstream and its texts changed,

subgenres began to emerge, which aids in the discussion of

whether or not the genre is as true to its original contexts and

form. Because record executives wanted to tap into the sound of

young America, with a fresh-faced, clean-cut, crossover tilt,

most of the new artists started with an R&B base and then crossed


over to "pop." Genres such as funk, Hip-Hop/Rap and Neo-Soul

emerged.

The transnational culture around beats and bass-heavy music

fixates on the physicality of music media such as computers,

amplifiers, speakers and turntables (Zuberi, 2007). Not until

the emergence of rap and hip-hop, with their concentration on

post-industrial urban realities, did the political tenor of Black

popular music reinscribe itself back into Black public

consciousness. As Neal writes, for youth in particular, hip-hop

and rap became a "consecrated effort by young urban blacks to use

mass culture to facilitate communal discourse across a fractured

and dislocated national community (Neal M. , 2002).

The Effects of Commodification: Changes in the Narratives

Every aspect of the R&B scene has dramatically changed. As

stated by journalist David Nathan, the emergence of rap, the

perception of video as an essential marketing tool and its

orientation towards more youthful consumers has literally taken

the life out of R&B. An across the board emphasis on short-term

hits rather than long-term careers, shortened playlists at black

radio are all factors that have contributed to an R&B scene that


bears virtually no resemblance to what was once in place (Nathan,

1994, p.42). One of the areas where this has taken a turn for

the worst is in the relationships of black men and women.

Maintaining romantic relationships is extremely difficult,

but studies have shown relationships amongst black men and black

women are in crisis. Since the turn of the century, the ratio of

black men to black women has been unbalanced, causing a shrinking

pool of available African-American men. As a result, the dynamic

of black families have changed, causing black women to assume the

role of mother and father. As black women become more educated

and more employable in corporate America, their views on marriage

and their roles as women have begun to take an enormous toll on

how they are perceived by black men. Blacks find it challenging

to form and maintain relationships with each other. Because of

this, their attempts usually end in mutual misunderstandings,

mainly associated with the contrasting definitions of what the

role of a black woman is. According to Jerold Heiss, the issue

of how love is perceived comes from the old hierarchical

structure of power:


The behavioral sequelae of being in love are held to bedifferent for men and women, and the difference is assumed to handicap women in the competition of power. There are significant gender differences, but they are not in the predicted direction. For example, women do not prescribe more sacrifice for a woman than they do for a man. Women are not handicapped in the competitionfor influence by the love-role definitions that they and men hold (Heiss, 1991, p.577 ).

While this has been a constant issue in the Black

collective, today’s music seems to complicate this issue further.

R&B used to tell stories of Black love. Music from1940-1989

glorified love, relationships and spending your life with that

special person. In an article written by John Blake, he

questions where the love in R&B music is:

Listening to black music today is depressing. Songs on today's urban radio playlists are drained of romance, tenderness and seduction. It's not just about the riseof hardcore hip-hop or rappers who denigrate women. Black people gave the world Motown, Barry White and "Let's Get It On." But we don't make love songs anymore. We had so much harmony, so much purpose in ourmusic... Our whole purpose was the message is in the music, and that message was to love one another and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Lovesongs flowered during the 1970’s also because black people were more optimistic (Blake, 2011).


As R&B morphed into is most popular offspring, Hip-Hop/Rap,

the narratives of love and relationships have seemed to change

the black dynamic. Hip-Hop and R&B are akin to kissing cousins.

Rap music was developed in the mid to late 1980s in and

subsequently become homogenized for mainstream audiences. The

issue with rap is that it has become so popular; R&B artists are

being featured on these songs just to remain relevant. The

lyrics of many gangsta rap artists glorifies gang culture, inner-

city violence, drug use and a strong distain for authority

figures, particularly the police.

The contradictory narratives of marijuana, alcohol

consumption, and lascivious women have now been translated into

what Neal refers to as "digitized town meetings," that now

demonstrates a public forum for debate and critique of the

conditions of Black life, the nation-state and its institutions.

Gangster rap lyrics and imagery often make reference to acts of

physical violence and more serious crimes such as drive-by

shootings, robbery and murder. The genre's violent lyrics have

been put under even greater scrutiny by the media since the fatal

shootings of gangsta rap luminaries 2pac and the Notorious B.I.G.


in 1996 and 1997 respectively. The combined effects of violent

lyrics, imagery and media sensationalism has helped to make

gangsta rap the most successful and mainstream subgenre of hip-

hop.

According to research conducted by Ronald Roach, he states

that Dr. S. Craig Watkins, a professor of sociology, African

American studies, and radio, television, says that hip-hop

scholarship has focused on analyzing content and cultural

interpretation. That trend will change as scholars examine the

effect the music and media images from hip-hop culture are having

on the social identity and values of young people (Roach, 2004).

As we look at the effects of the commodification of black

music, the question that African-Americans must take into

question is how can we challenge today’s narratives? In my focus

group, my concentration was to understand how the participants

responded in regards to R&B songs; Between The Sheets by The Isley

Brothers and Sex Me by R. Kelly. Both songs incite

relationships, most importantly sex. Most of the participants

felt that the songs were different because of melody, word choice

and the context in how it was presented. The overall comparison


that was made was how straight-forward R. Kelly’s approach was in

saying exactly what he wanted, no slick melodies, no mention of

love; just pure need for sex. Because today’s R&B follows the

same direct approach to sex, leaving out the desire for long-term

love and affection, most black intergender relationships are in

crisis.

Because of this there is an increased prevalence of divorce

amongst Blacks, which has been attributed to their attitudes of

Black marriage, the quality of life among Black men and women,

the economic marginality of Blacks and the unequal sex ration in

the black community (Lawson & Thompson, 1995).

In 2010, Census figures show that 55.6% of American females

between the ages of 20 and 34 have never married. For African-

American women, that figure is 48.3% (U.S. Census Bureau). Over

the last fifteen years, the divorce rates for African-Americans

have also increased. While black men and woman are noted to be

significantly less desirous of marriage than their white

counterparts, of all groups black men are the least willing to

make this commitment (Franklin, 1991). In a book written by

black actor, Hill Harper, the writer explores discussions about


gender roles and communication within the African-American

community. Using a Q&A format with friends and strangers, Hill

uncovers the struggles that many African-American men and women

face as they try to interact with each other. “It seems in many

ways that it’s what we’re not saying that is contributing to the

demise of our relationships” (Harper 2010).

Harper speaks candidly of his issues with masculinity as it

relates to being the player and how maturity helped him to

reevaluate his views of Black love. Some of his questions range

from the difficulties of developing and maintaining long-term,

loving relationships and how the change in the family dynamic has

caused a rift in black communication. Media and it’s saturation

of gender roles in the African-American family has forced women

to feel as if they do not have to answer to a man, causing men to

feel as if woman are disrespectful (Harper 2007). While there are

statistics to show the decline in marriage for African-Americans,

the numbers still does not suggest that black women don’t desire

to be in relationships. It’s not simply an unhelpful

observation.


This culturally popular notion that 70 percent of black

women don’t marry is just a myth. For the last few years, I have

been hearing from every source imaginable that the vast majority

of black women will never marry. This never made sense to me

because so many black women I know are married. And indeed,

eventually, most black women do marry (Miller, 2011). Because of

this, black women are looking at many ways to try and understand

black men.

Because the discourse is so prevalent in the African-

American community, trying to find ways to disrupt the discourse

is an issue. Actor/Comedian Steve Harvey has used the topic as a

talking point for his morning radio show, The Steve Harvey

Morning Show, during the Strawberry Letter segment. The radio

show caters to listeners of classic Hip-Hop and mainly R&B that

is considered Adult Contemporary. According to steveharvey.com,

the radio show is nationally syndicated and airs in over 64

markets with over 7 million listeners. The morning show has also

allowed him to share relationship advice with his listeners

through the “Strawberry Letter”. In this portion of the show,

Harvey, along with his co-host Shirley Strawberry, read letters


from their listeners about issues concerning relationships with

men, which mirrors a rewriting of the narratives that were the

cornerstones of R&B music.

The Effects of Commodification: Increased Misogyny

Rap has been accused of encouraging misogyny due to the

objectification of women in rap videos, album covers and lyrics.

Many rap artists, including Eminem and N.W.A., have been

identified as artists who overuse derogatory words when referring

to females. Women have also been sexually objectified in gangsta

rap lyrics and are often portrayed as only being good for sex.

New York-based rapper Slick Rick's 1988 song 'Treat Her Like a

Prostitute' is an example of this. In recent years, scholarship

on Black womanhood has become more closely connected to

postmodern discourses on identity and resistance, following in

the footsteps of Audre Lorde's claim that identity and sexuality

have emancipatory potential (Balaji, 2010). However, in the post-

hip-hop era, feminists and media critics have once again brought

up the idea of who controls the image.

Music video models in hip-hop have been labeled “video

vixens,” “hip-hop honeys,” and “dimes,” among other things, but


they have never been defined by nonsexual traits nor represented

as anything other than sexual objects and property in this genre

of visual fantasy. Video vixens, at least by their outward

demeanor in these music videos, appear to cater to a male

consumer’s sexual wishes, acquiescing to the idea of being owned

by a man; moreover, these women’s own lack of self-definition, as

exhibited by the numerous videos in which women “blend” into each

other, negates individuality and presumes a certain level of

acceptance to the possibility of sexual imposition and violence

by men (Balaji, 2010).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the issues that encompasses gender relations,

violence and promiscuity in the African-American community stems

out America’s dark past. Trying to decode the history that

continues to haunt blacks is an ongoing project. It is so easy

to continue to blame issues of citizenship, gender and race but

at some point, African-Americans must begin the work of healing

and understanding so that they can work towards building better

relationships, which in my opinion begins with the rewriting of


the narratives of our music. I feel that studying Black music is

essential to defining just where the genre will be in the next

ten years. It is essential to see it is in transition because of

commodification. The more commercialized the genre becomes, the

message of love, freedom and self-expression for the black

community gets more diluted.

With this in mind, the African-American community must try

to develop ways to keep its culture from being totally erased.

In doing this, I hope that the results of the study might shed

light on what seems to be both a continuing, as well as a new

form of gender power struggle within the African American

community. As we add advances in technology and the move towards

a more socialized society, the question certainly becomes a

discussion of whether or not the genre is at its demise or in

cultural transition.


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Black Music & Identity: How Commodification Changed The Narratives of R&B Music

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