Remember when female rappers wrote intelligent, insightful lyrics? Or even just fun, party, happy lyrics? Now pretty much it’s all about being a whore. Nowadays, the top female rappers now are literally former strippers or prostitutes, proud of it, and only seem willing or able to rap about that. Then, with the male rappers, in addition to rapping about selling drugs and other criminal behavior, pretty much the only other thing the male rappers seem willing or able to talk about killing other black men. Why is this acceptable? Why has this been normalized?

And since it’s not even shocking anymore to have unmarried parents and/or no father, now a ton of rap is about further breaking down the black family structure. My students love to ‘put me on’ to the new music just to see my reaction, last time they did it they played me a song called ‘F!ck My Cousin’. It’s literally this kid rapping about killing his own cousin!!!!! Usually the kids would laugh at my reaction but that time, after I talked to them about why this is so horrible and bizarre (cousin kindship is hugely important in the black community, any black American knows this), they seemed like they understood. It’s all so BIZARRE. I hate to be a conspiracy theorist but WTF is going on?? And why are we pretending this is really, in any kind of way, black culture?!