When Hip Hop Unmasks Masculinity, Part 1

MASKulinity Podcast

• We continue our music series this week! This is part 1 of Professors Joseph Ewoodzie and Tyler Bunzey gracing the pod to talk gender in hip hop.
• Samantha talks everyone through alternative representations of masculinity in hip hop.
  • How does including classical instruments in hip hop impact our view of the genre?
  • How does the advent of rappers with different sexualities and gender performances into the mainstream impact hip hop now?
• Is it probable that there were LGBTQ rappers at the inception of hip hop? Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie weighs in…
• We continue to examine which voices who are valued in hip hop by zooming out and considering all of its historical influences.
• Tyler Bunzey offers some important cultural context around Southern rappers and the performance of gender in hip hop – how do different US cultures shape that performance within the genre?
• He also breaks down how gender and sexuality are racialized – why is queerness considered to be a white thing if Marsha P Johnson was at the forefront of LGBTQ rights movement?

Referenced on this episode:

• Interview with Black Violin
• Black Violin’s “Stereotypes”
• Tyler Bunzey’s Hip Hop Sublime theory
• Dr. Ewoodzie’s seminal book Break Beats in the Bronx
• Big Freedia challenges hip hop as we know it
• Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution
• Check out our last Beneath the MASK 🎭

COMPANION PIECES:

• Sugar Hill Band? Capitalism and MASKulinity in Hip Hop
• MASKulinity is Making Some People a Lot of Money
• Unpopular opinion on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer