Misogyny & Music

I'm going to be honest before reading the assigned reading and attending Monday's class I had no idea what misogyny was. After reading the assigned reading and listening to Monday' class lecture I can honestly say that I listen to music in a different way now. When I looked up the meaning of misogyny, dictionary.com's definition was, "hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women." It amazes me this still exists in our current generation. I thought we were past that and moving forward towards gender equality, but I now that I know what misogyny is I do not think we have. When I was looking for an article to write about I found many articles that spoke about unknown artists, but I wanted to find one about an artist everyone knows and has heard their music. At last I found an article on Kanye West.

The article talked about a video Kanye West had released a year ago called, "Monster." The article spoke about how at the beginning of the video Monster it states, "the following content is in now way misogynistic or negative towards any groups of people. It is an art piece and shall be taken as such." I then proceeded to watch the video.... the video consisted of dead women hanging by nooses, dead women lying in bed with Kanye, and at one point when Jay-Z was rapping there was a dead naked model in the background lying on a couch. Even after that introduction saying that the content in the video is not misogynistic, how can a women not take offense this video?! Not only is the video gruesome, but it is just downright offense. How can that be considered "art" to anyone? In my opinion, I felt like the people who gave the ideas behind this video think of women just as objects to men and that we are just around to please them. After watching the video I read some comments viewers left about the video... some said it was a great video and others said what kind of message are they trying to send. I might be biased because I have never liked hip hop or rap music, but after watching a video like Monster and reading the lyrics, I am beyond disgusted in what has become of this genre of music. I have heard people say "oh I don't listen to the words, I just like the beat of the song," in my opinion that is just an excuse. How can you not hear the words in the song? I know most artists are in the music business to make money and nothing else. They don't care about who they offend, they just want to make it big and make lots of money. At the same time I wish they would not portray us women in such an offensive light. Instead of moving forwards, its songs like these that make me feel like we are moving backwards. The only thing I can personally do is not listen to misogynistic music (such as this), buy it, or purchase tickets to their concerts.


Link to First Article:
http://www.salon.com/2011/06/06/kanye_monster_video/

Video of Kanye West's Song "Monster"