Queen Latifah at Long Beach Pride

Here's a somewhat shaky video from Queen Latifah's headlining performance at the 29th Annual Long Beach Lesbian & Gay Pride Festival (source ).

I've stayed away from the "is she, or isn't she?" conversation, but her comments from the festival that she was proud to be among "her people" only leads to more speculation.  Aja Worthy-Davis makes a good case for a celebrity not "coming out" (which I should add, not publicly coming out is not the same as remaining "closeted").

"The question ‘why does a celebrity owe anyone a coming out' is usually met with the answer that living in the public eye means you accept a certain degree of invaded privacy, and that your life and choices have meaning to at least some people you've never met. The gay kid who was going to make a bad decision, go down a murky road, turned back because an actor he likes is gay too. Because someone like him made it, and is happy and healthy and whole. And I can respect that both gay and straight culture need positive gay role models, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that many young people (specifically those brought up in pro-gay environments) are being open about their queerdom as early as they can self-perceive it. And if that is a trend that continues as American culture makes the agonizingly slow tread towards legal and social equality, is it really fair to continue to demand that celebrities take on the (perhaps unwanted) task of publicly coming out for the sake of social visibility?"

Monica from TransGriot elucidates further that the stakes for black actresses are higher:

"If you're a public figure like Queen Latifah and Raven are you have to decide whether coming out is worth the money and roles you're going to lose out on in a vanillacentric Hollywood that is already hard enough for straight cisgender Black actresses to work in."

My $0.02? Queen Latifah doesn't "owe" anybody anything, and it shouldn't be a requirement that she now be an LGBT role model, assuming she has taken these few, small steps. She's made it pretty clear she supports gay rights; whether or not she wants to talk about her own sexuality is her business, plain and simple. Though living in the public eye, it's obviously not that simple.

Break It Down: U.N.I.T.Y.

Instinct leads me to another flow... every time I hear a brother call a girl a bitch or a ho...



No other song so plainly and so poignantly talks about street harassment than Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." This was one of the first "message" songs I fell in love with, and it stuck with me through the next twenty years or so.

Although released around time riot grrrl was just bubbling up from the surface, riot grrrl's politics made me feel less empowered than ever. Maybe it was a reality I was unprepared for hitting me smack in the face, but I never felt a sense of agency from punk rock's power, just alienation. Listening to "U.N.I.T.Y. I did.

I realize it's unfair, dangerous even, to pit one against the other, but the women-fronted punk of the early 90s is too often presented as a generation of women's entry into feminism. Riot grrrl had a host of problems: namely, it was inaccessible to those outside indie and punk's knowing few. (At least at first. By the time I'd heard of riot grrrl the mainstream media had reduced it to a sartorial statement.) Its problems of inclusion were a big part of feminism's past, and one of its greatest failures. It's easy to forget that not everyone comes to feminism by birthright.

The thing is "U.N.I.T.Y." was never explicitly feminist, which as a teen would have been a big turn-off. Not so much because I couldn't identify, but because I hate having feminism laid out to me in absolutes.

There were a lot of stealthily feminist hip-hop songs released in the 90s: along with "U.N.I.T.Y." there was "Ladies First," TLC's "Ain't To Proud to Beg," and "Unpretty" and Salt-n-Pepa's "None of Your Business." And they got a fair amount of airplay bringing those ideas to the masses, something riot grrl ultimately failed to do.

Hip-Hop, Agency, and Appropriation

I basically feel like it’s a shame and a crime that white people and/or hip-hop critics (maybe not all critics, or fans! But I don’t hear about it very often at all, and I live with a dude who made it a project, to educate me about hip-hop, and when I mentioned this song, he didn’t know what it was) and/or feminists don’t recognize the centrality and awesomeness of this song. Which addresses street harassment, sexual assault, domestic violence, and girl-v-girl violence, in that order, and is really just super fun to listen to, particularly after your first beer. -- Sady Doyle on Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." (source)

If I had to list a singular, stealthily feminist song from my teenage years, Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y" would be it. This, along "Ladies First," Salt-n-Pepa's "None Of Your Business," and TLC's "No Scrubs," "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" and "Unpretty" are everything I wish riot grrrl was. And they were all over the radio in the early-though-mid 90s.

I said on someone else's blog about a year ago that while riot grrrl was great at addressing sexism and misogyny, and Liz Phair made a lot of young women unashamed of their sexuality, somehow listening to those artists made me feel less than empowered. Maybe it was my own naivete at having the problems of being a young women in society presented to me plainly and unfailingly, but I felt more like a victim than I ever had before. But hearing Queen Latifah sing about punching her aggressors "dead in the eye," and Salt-n-Pepa urging me to sleep with whomever I wanted without apology gave me a greater sense of agency than the feminist punk rock I was supposed to be listening to.

I hate pitting one against the other, rap and punk, because issues of class and race become too impossible to ignore (I'm a working-class white girl who grew up with hip hop), but anything thing less than admitting those songs were an integral part of my feminist upbringing would require rewriting my own history, and I'm not willing to do that.

So, then a couple weeks ago, this  blew up all over the internet:

Meet Kreayshawn, a self-described editor, cinematographer, and "rap beast" from Oakland, California. It's highly unlikely that you'll be able to get her infectious song out of her your head upon listening, and you just might end up adding some of her fab phrasing like "swag pumping out my ovaries" into your everyday vocabulary.

And you know what? I couldn't. "Gucci Gucci" is adroit, addictive as hell, and self-aware enough for my aging hipster sensibilities. So why does it make me feel so icky? Oh yeah, this:

And this is partly why Kreayshawn makes me mad. The White Girl Mob media darling blowing up the interwebs whose potential deal with Sony is making waves makes me angry in a way I haven’t been in a long time. Her appropriative swag is yet another reminder (not that we needed any more this month) of how little black women are valued in our society, even in genres we co-create. In a moment where cool is synonymous with swag, a particular manifestation of black masculinity, Kreayshawn’s dismissiveness and denigration of black women animate her success. (The Crunk Feminist Collective )

I thought this was important to note, since I found little criticism of "Gucci Gucci" coming from within the feminist blogosphere.

Addendum: According to Jezebel Kreayshawn (whose name I discovered via the comment section is pronounced "Creation." Seriously?) has been signed to Columbia Records. Said commenter Top Level Executive:

I'm not one who believes that a white artist/White group shouldn't do Black music, as most of my favorite white artists/groups are those who perform Black music. However, there's a huge and distinct difference between paying homage to Black music/Black culture and straight ripping it off...

Care Package to My 13-year-old Self

NPR had the right idea. Suggesting songs or albums that would help a 13-year-old get through her adolescence is a great way to connect with and guide the next generation, but I don't know many 13-year-old girls raised on a steady diet of Katy Perry and Ke$ha who could really get into King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King or Neil Young's After the Goldrush. Any chance one would have to drive a teenage girl away from pop music's message that she has to be thin, sexy, and available to boys, take it. But Neil Young isn't going to cut it. At 13, I would have dismissed it as "dad rock."(If you have to go the Bob/Neil/Bruce route, I'd suggesting buying her a guitar to go along with cds.)

Truth be told, I wasn't listening to much of anything at 13. My neighborhood didn't have MTV yet, and my parents kept the radio tuned to talk or country. What little music I listened to had to be so ubiquitous that it was unavoidable. The trifecta of Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, Culture Club's Colour By Numbers, and Thriller made up the entirety of my record collection. I didn't really start getting into music until my late teens or early twenties. Fortunately for me, a lot of great music came out during the latter part of the 80s and into the 90s with the rise of commercial "alternative" rock. (Biggest oxymoron in the world, I know, but it did shake up the music industry for a few years, and dealt the final blow to hairspray rock.) However, by then I was a little too old to really enjoy it. I wish some of it was around when I was younger. If I could send a care package to my 13-year-old self, this is what it would include:

Queen Latifah's "Ladies First" and "U.N.I.T.Y"
My earliest taste of feminism came courtesy of hip hop, and both these songs left a huge impression on me. Hearing Queen Latifah in "U.N.I.T.Y" threaten to punch her harassers "dead in the eye" planted the seed in my head that, "Wow. I can do that?" I never had to, but I used to play that song on a loop in my brain whenever I'm walking home alone.

Patti Smith's "Gloria"
Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine... Truer words have never been spoken, especially to a budding atheist like myself. I kind of wish someone would have pointed me toward this song when, at age eleven, I asked my dad how I could become excommunicated from the church. I actually got to see Patti Smith a few years ago, and it was the closest I've ever been to a true religious experience.



Le Tigre's Feminist Sweepstakes
Going with the entire album here, as there are few artists these days calling themselves feminists, and even fewer records that make the word sound not scary or antiquated.

TLC's "No Scrubs"
What I've always loved about this song, though it was a huge pop hit, was that it was completely free of the victimization of street harassment. Many times "message" songs make me feel more powerless than I did before. This one doesn't, and puts the onus on the creepy guy "hanging out the passenger side."

So, what songs are albums would you recommend to a girl just entering her teens?