June 2013
11 posts
“Rap music is so diverse in its themes, its style, its content but when it becomes a vehicle to be talked about in mainstream news, the rap that gets in national news is always the rap music that perpetuates misogyny that is most obscene in its lyrics and then this comes to stand for what rap is. Really its for me the perfect paradigm of colonialism, that is to say, we think of rap music as a little third-world country, that young white consumers are able to go to and take out of it whatever they want. We would have to acknowledge that what young white consumers, primarily male, oftentimes suburban, most got energized by in rap music was misogyny, obscenity, pugilistic eroticism and therefore that form of rap began to make the largest sums of money.”
—bell hooks, cultural criticism — rap: authentic expression or market construct? (via ellesugars)
“Real talk: the secrets of life? Look at everybody like they’re a baby. Remember like, man, we’re young. Don’t be so hard on people. We’re just little baby insects or mammals or whatever. You feel me?”
—Lil B, from his lecture at NYU (via cuterappers)
May 2013
16 posts
“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
—Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
“Subculture forms in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance; it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched.”
—Hebdige (1988), Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (via fashinpirate)
