Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Hip Hop

My best friend is flying into town today and I'm giddy with excitement. I haven't seen her in about 18 months and she's staying for a whole whopping 10 days. Being that I'm all in a tizzy and can barely come up with a coherant thought let along string a whole blog post together, I'm going to let my darling readers come up with fodder to last us a week. I need questions, topics and fun things to write on.

For today however, one of our male readers (not Andy;) has a question that boggles my mind. So I'm turning the salvo to you. I'm sure with all the 300+ smart girls/guys on here we can come up with a decent answer. For the uber sensitive ones---don't you dare turn this into some slanging match. Remember, it's just an opinion and inquiring minds seek edificiation. So help the man understand....please!

Here it is:

Since you are a black woman, and so might have some deep intrinsic understanding of these things that I lack, please explain something to me. The R&B and hip-hop culture is responsible for the trend of calling women 'females'. Now white people are doing it as well to be cool. I never understood this. I'm a white guy, I don't like R&B (and saying that it stands for Rich & Beautiful brings up a gag reflex), and to me 'female' sounds like it's a little vague in regard to the species. Now, either rappers have all gotten PhDs in biology and have retained some of the jargon, or they fuck females of other species. A human female is called a woman. Is there a good reason why 'woman' isn't enough? Or is 'female' used to emphasize the woman's function as a sperm receptacle? ~ Alex

I am a Black woman, but being raised in Africa and not listening to mainstream 'secular' music until my 20s really limits my scope. Do not confuse R&B with HipHop Alex, they are quite different forms of music. When you think of R&B you should be thinking Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin etc. from the old school and from nowadays I actually only classify singers like Javier, Maxwell, Craig David, Alicia Keys and other soulful crooners as R&B. Everyone else gets lumped into HipHop. I can dig some HipHop but I do have alot of umbrage with the way the music has gone from the original beats when HipHop first came out to the sucky, mediocre stuff that's being pumped out right now.

But that isn't answering your question---honestly, I have no idea!

Help!

Labels: Girl Talk

Posted by Vixen @ 2:07 AM :: 6 trainees letting it rip!

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