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Cornell professor talks queer narrative of hip-hop

C. Riley Snorton, assistant Professor at Cornell University, speaks about hip-hop and sexuality at the “Distinguished Lecture Series” on Douglass campus. – Photo by Photo by Edwin Gano | The Daily Targum

Rapper Lil B raised eyebrows in 2011 when he released his album, “I’m Gay (I’m Happy),” then went on record stating he never had interest in men and was attracted to women. At the same time, he claimed he was still both heterosexual and gay.

Lil B defended his album by saying the album title was a way to “break down barriers” and exemplify that words mean nothing.

“Don’t let a word make you discriminate upon another human,” he said on air to MTV’s RapFix Live.

Many people accused Lil B of naming his album “I’m Gay” as a marketing ruse —something plastic and in orientation with capitalist flows. But C. Riley Snorton sees the album as more than just music — it is an intersection of gender, sexuality, blackness and capitalism.

Snorton, assistant professor in Africana studies and feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Cornell University, spoke to a tightly packed audience yesterday at the Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett building on Douglass campus for the second Institute of Research on Women “Distinguished Lecture Series” event.

The event aligned with the IRW’s DSL theme for 2014, feminist optics: gender and visual studies.

The lecture, “From the Down Low to the First Gay Rapper, or Tracing a Trajectory From Glass to Plastic,” examined black sexuality through the lens of popular hip-hop lyricists, such as Lil B, Azealia Banks, Nicki Minaj, Frank Ocean and Odd Future’s Syd the Kid.

Snorton was interested in thinking about glass as a structure for thinking about “blackness.”

In his book, “Nobody Is Supposed to Know,” he suggests that the “glass closet” acts as a metaphor and analytic to explore how black gender and sexuality is subject to hypervisibility and confined spectacle and speculation.

He decided to focus on hip-hop rather than on pop or classical music because of its history with American people. Hip-hop has especially strong ties to people today, where millennials are listening to Wiz Khalifa, Childish Gambino and Kanye West.

“Hip-hop has become national, quintessential music … it animates what it means to be American,” he said.

Jazz and soul are two other music genres that occupy the same space as hip-hop.

But though hip-hop creates and fills in the patches of the great American narrative, hip-hop is still “performative,” he said. People tend to see it as ethnographic, emblematic of a whole people, rather than as a great fictional story.

“Is there a space for people to live as queer … within the broader life-world of hip-hop music?” he said.

Nicki Minaj is one interesting example, Snorton said. 

Minaj has claimed bisexual, heterosexual and asexual identities. She has also claimed multiple alternate identities, including Nicki Lewinsky, a play on Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern with whom President Bill Clinton admitted to having an inappropriate relationship.

Roman Zolanski is another alter ego and Minaj’s admitted favorite. Zolanski, an “orange-haired homosexual male from London,” is mentioned in several of Minaj’s songs.

Minaj’s eccentric and somewhat unpredictable nature, especially regarding her alternate identities, have been the cause of discontent with her.

Snorton said Minaj resorted to a “common female rapper technique,” presenting herself as a “polymorphously perverse superfreak.”

“I do think [Minaj] gets regulated,” Snorton said. “People get frustrated with her. But people have also stopped raising questions whether she’s a gay rapper.”

Hip-hop circulates around world, he said, and is understood to be the music of this generation in the United States.

It is a commodity of capitalism — hip-hop and hip-hop figures are asked to be authentic but are also asked to have some room for “something else.”

But hip-hop is also understood to be a “portal” into a figuring of black sexual dynamics.

“What is both facilitated through capitalism in saying those kinds of things, and what is interesting and titillating at the cultural level of saying those things?” he said.


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