Feminists and Kanye West

I have an almost compulsive habit of mentally flipping the genders in pop songs. When listening to a dude-centric song, I imagine how I'd tackle the song if I were a singer covering it, and I'm almost convinced Kayne West's "Runaway" passes the Willis test . (Well, maybe if you took out the part about dick shots.) Here's Willis herself explaining her method in her essay, "But Now I'm Gonna Move":

"A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test, a diatribe like "Under My Thumb" is not nearly as sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens's gentle, sympathetic "Wild World;" Jagger's fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female -- in fact, it has its female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra's "Boots" -- but it's hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he's too innocent for the big bad world out there."

Granted, "Runaway" is far from perfect, and switching up the gender practically changes the entire tenor of the song, but I can easily envision it being sung from the point-of-view of the woman being wronged, knowing her man is no good and daring him to "run away."

While his video for "Monster" came under fire from feminists to the point that some of them threatened to have it banned , I know quite a few feminist-identified women who are Kanye West fans; and I'll agree, even at his worst, his songs usually have some hope for redemption, even if that redemption comes at a cost.

Think Progresses Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a great post  last year that better elucidates Kanye's willingness to admit -- even embrace -- his own failures. Of "Mama's Boyfriend," a song he's played live, but that didn't make it onto his last album, she says:

" I think it’s fairly obvious that Kanye, if not an actual misogynist, has some fairly profound unresolved issues around women. But it’s interesting, and kind of a relief, that in this song he reserves his anger for the men who dated his mother, rather than directing it at her or at the women he dates who are raising sons as single mothers. Obviously, Kanye’s trying to do a better job by his surrogate son than his surrogate fathers did by him, explaining “I don’t read palms / And I don’t read psalms / But I did take lil’ man to church / Took lil’ man to school.” But I don’t really read in this the expectation that he’ll actually be able to break the cycle by raising the kid up a bit. Families are going to continue to be fractured, and kids are going to keep hating the cheesy-looking people who enter and exit their lives on the grounds that they’re not flesh and blood replacements."

This doesn't let him off the hook, per se, and I still think looking at pop culture through a feminist lens is vital, but his willingness to appear flawed, coupled with an almost hyper-self awareness, gives him a vulnerability not usually seen in pop music.

Links & Bits 8/26/11

Alyx from Feminist Music Geek talks about singer Aaliyah on the 10th anniversary of her death.

The Singles Jukebox discusses Taylor Swift's "Sparks Fly."

While Autostraddle tackles Kanye's and Jay-Z Watch the Throne.

Should Kanye's "Monster" video be barred from official release?

A handful of posts about Kanye West's leaked video, "Monster," were waiting for me yesterday morning as I checked my newsreader. Full disclosure: I am not a Kanye fan, nor am I a Kanye apologist (but I'm not not one either). But when something causes enough of a stir within the blogosphere, I feel obligated to check it out. Here's a short description of video via Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory:

The 40-second clip shows Kanye lying amid blue satin sheets, petting his own face with a woman's pale, lifeless fingers and later placing her hand on the crotch of the other unanimated woman sharing the bed. Although I wasn't able to spot it, the Wall Street Journal reports that there is also "the disturbing image of West holding what appears to be the decapitated head of a woman." Kanye's guest MCs get in on the necrophiliac fun, too: Rick Ross smokes a cigar while reclining in an ornate chair covered in protective plastic; and lingerie-clad women dangle lifelessly from the ceiling, their necks wrapped with industrial chain. In a behind-the-scenes video, we see Ross sitting at a table sipping red wine and feasting on a plate of bright-red raw meat that is placed right between the legs of a lifeless woman in thigh-highs and heels. The backdrop is straight out of "Dexter": There's a large plastic sheet splattered with blood and what looks like a tray of surgical tools. Jay-Z is shown spitting a verse in front of a naked woman lying on her stomach -- body limp, mouth agape and the purple "postmortem stain" setting in.

The blog Adios, Barbie posted a link to a petition to prevent the video's official release. This might get my feminist card revoked, but I'm not sure this is a good idea.

While I don't relish the idea of decapitated women, and I don't plan on seeking out "Monster," an outright ban of the video isn't the answer. To be honest, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of censorship in general. Judging from the screenshots, "Monster" is undeniably disturbing, but we need to be discussing what these images mean, and preventing the video from being shown at all shuts down that discussion making it even more scary and taboo.

One of my favorite comments on the matter comes courtesy of this Jezebel poster:

I'm curious how other women are responding to this. What do you think? Would you sign a petition to have a video barred from release because of its content? (Are we even watching videos anymore?)