Urbane Sprawl

The dearth of female hip-hop artists is not often in the forefront of my mind, considering my musical tastes veer more towards American Idol castoffs than any genre that lacks the belting of hypnotically catchy but artistically impoverished melodies.

Still, it’s a topic that keeps popping up in publications I’m reading. Just this week, Jonah Weiner asked in Slate “Where did all the female rappers go?” His conclusions generally center on a sociological-consumerist analysis of rap; after discussing most of the prominent female hip-hop acts of the last thirty years, he asks why they’ve made “so few lasting inroads” and answers:

For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female rap seem second class, occurring outside the “real,” “primary” work of hip-hop canon building, even as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they’re what feminists would call hip-hop’s unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it’s meant that many of the identities that female comers have carved for themselves—Boss’ gangsta bitch, Kim’s badass nympho, or, recently, Lil’ Mama’s lunchroom alpha girl—have registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white rappers, whether it’s the Beastie Boys’ nerdy boogie or Eminem’s white-trash horror-core.)

Female rap artists fall outside the prevalent narrative of the genre, and so their musical identities are necessarily sub-par — and, one must assume, in less demand by the hip-hop CD buyer. This is necessarily a demand-side explanation: female hip-hop artists are less popular to consumers of the genre because their product is less “authentic.”

But there might be a more basic economic supply-side explanation, too.

In September, Entertainment Weekly’s Margeaux Wilson wrote an article called “BET and VH1 Present…Awards Shows Without Women”:

Next month, VH1 and BET will air lavish awards shows celebrating hip-hop’s finest, including Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Jay-Z. But here’s the catch: Neither the Hip-Hop Honors (airing Oct. 6) nor the BET Hip-Hop Awards (airing Oct. 23) nominated a single female rapper. Next year’s Grammys may also follow suit, since the Recording Academy nixed its category for Best Female Rap Solo Performance in 2005. Why aren’t hip-hop’s leading ladies getting their props? ”Quite frankly, it’s a numbers thing,” says Stephen Hill, BET’s executive VP of entertainment, music, and programming. ”There were fewer than five videos submitted for the awards by female artists this year. None of them made the cut.’

But why are there so few? One source quoted in the article offered a very interesting perspective on the question:

Hair and makeup is killing female hip-hop…The grooming cost to break a female rapper versus a male rapper is 10 times as much per appearance. That tends to have an adverse effect on a record company’s willingness to even entertain a female rapper.

Could it really be as simple as this? If what the source says is true, then there’s a supply-side economic argument to be made for the dearth of female rappers. If rappers are generally launched by record companies, then — all else being equal re: the potential success of an act — the cheaper act to launch will be preferable.

One could point to popular female pop acts to refute this assertion, but it seems that the sex appeal and vocal range of female pop stars makes them better financial bets than their male equivalents; female rap artists don’t seem to have any comparative advantages over male rappers when it comes to factors that will drive sales of their records.

In this case, it wouldn’t have to be a fact that consumers are less interested in female rap artists than male ones — they would only have to be equally interested in the two. Then, given equal chances at profitability, the record companies would be incentivized to launch acts with fewer associated launch costs.

It’s hard to know how profound the Hair and Makeup Effect might actually be for aspiring female hip-hop artists, but it could offer profound and simple insight into the under-representation of women in the hip-hop world.

Yom Kippur is always an introspective time for me, however lacking I may be in observance. (Most Jews go to services and fast; I generally do one or the other, figuring either way I’ve got my atonement covered.)
 
As I ruminate on my moral failings from the preceding year, I’m always fascinated by how much more inclusive of sin is my religious moral sense than is my secular moral sense: behaviors that I wouldn’t normally think of as wrongdoing still set off my religious alarm as atonement-worthy.
 
Take gossip. During the year, my borderline-unhealthy obsession with ethics and etiquette keep me pretty primed to speech and actions I find objectionable. Still, I generally don’t have any qualms about talking about people behind their backs.
 
I’m of course more comfortable gossiping about people I don’t like than people I do, and I don’t like rumor-mongering or judging people too harshly without thinking deeply about their perspectives and circumstances. But, I think trading insights with friends about other friends and acquaintances is anthropologically interesting, socially bonding (and entertaining), and important for staying apprised of our friends’ emotional states and for strategizing collectively about how to help each other out.
 
At Yom Kippur, though, palpable guilt washes over me. Judaism strictly forbids gossip — in a prohibition called lashon hara — and though my secular ethics alarms aren’t set off by gossip, I’m always sure during atonement that G-d doesn’t want me to be talking about anyone behind their backs.
 
This dissonance raises an interesting point: is it morally okay to gossip? If not, why not?
 

Lying and Our Negative View of Gossip
 
The knee-jerk reaction is to say that, though we all do it all the time, gossip’s a vice we should try to curb — something to make resolutions about come New Year’s. For support of this position, we can see religious proscriptions like lashon hara.
 
The proscription is supported by our sensible distaste for lying, often tied up in gossip that entails propagating rumors we’re not sure are true. We are commanded religiously against bearing false witness; lying ranks as a top-ten sin, showing its select place as a more blameworthy subset of gossip more generally.
 
It’s clear even from a secularly ethical standpoint that slander is blameworthy. One’s good name is an essential part of his social identity — to sully someone’s name without giving him the opportunity to defend himself could be a violation of his sovereignty, just as scarring as a physical violation of his person. Both will cause pain and impair the victim’s ability to function successfully in the world.
 
We’ve institutionalized this idea in the law by requiring that defendants in civil and criminal trials be able to face their accusers (or, as the sixth amendment reads, the right
“to be confronted with the witnesses against him”). And we see it in reality shows every day when Hannah or Sheena demand that if you have something to say about them, you should say it to their face.
 
From an evolutionary standpoint, scientists have highlighted the importance of reputation for group cooperation. From a Times article describing Harvard studies of cooperation:
 
“People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.”
 
We’ve evolved to help each other out rather than to only fend for ourselves — cooperation is essential to building complex societies; we can achieve more collectively than we ever could each on his own. And when working collectively, we need mechanisms to demonstrate to the community that we will not screw others over for personal gain when given the opportunity. It’s dangerous to have bad things said about you behind your back.

 
The Instrumental Importance of Gossip
 
 So, slandering someone’s reputation, lying about them, or generally charging them with fault without giving them the opportunity for rebuttal is bad — atonement-worthy. But, as I said above, slander is just a small slice of gossip. When my friends and I talk about a third party, we’re not spreading lies — we’re doing analysis. What do we think of this person? Are our judgments just? Why does he behave in a certain way? How should he behave?
 
In a sense, exchanging ideas about a person is the way we determine whether our personal conceptions about him or her hold up to scrutiny. It makes me think of a wonderful Louise Glück poem called “Birthday.” The key stanza reads:

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one’s ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

When we don’t share our ideas about people with others, when we keep our conceptions and judgments to ourselves, they are untested — we have to gossip to know whether or not to revise our opinions and to reach better ones.
 
Think of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Gossip is instrumental in Elizabeth’s learning more about why Darcy behaves with such stoic coldness, and in her discovering why Wickham’s ostensible charm is not proof of an unblemished character.
 
Think also of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Habermas argues that the public sphere — where we discuss ideas and challenge each other’s ethical and political views — is essential to the maintenance of a successful society, because the testing of one paradigm against others (through communication) is how those paradigms are refined and brought closer to the truth.
 
If I have one opinion about X based on my interactions with her, and my friends A, B, an C have other opinions about X — each, of course, influenced by A, B, and C’s own prejudices and epistemological immodesties — coming together around a coffee shop table and talking about X is how we realize that our individual opinions are not monolithic.
 
Discussing this question earlier today with my good friend Kara, I was struck by a good point she made: usually, when we’re talking about X, we’re not just talking about X — we’re talking about our relationships with X. Whether X is a friend, family member, or significant other, we are implicated in this relationship ourselves. Isn’t it unreasonable to expect us not to openly discuss relationships of which we are a part? Are we violating X’s right to privacy in doing so?

And this begs the question, is talking about X a violation of his or her right to privacy? Or some other right? Let’s say John is talking to his friend Tom about his other friend Mary. Mary overhears and becomes offended — does she have grounding to be? Yes, Mary is being discussed behind her back, but in essence John is seeking advice from Tom about his own life, and naturally his life is bound up in his relationships with people like Mary.
 

 Gossip and Etiquette
 
Let’s step back from ethics. Is it rude to talk about someone, i.e. Mary, behind her back?
 
Etiquette, like religion, is more inclusive of wrongdoing than is a humanist ethics. It’s rude to ask an acquaintance his salary, but it’s not a moral wrong. It might be rude not to send a thank-you note after receiving a gift, but it’s not grounds for sanction.
 
The function of etiquette is indeed to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable. Though we lack a moral obligation to prevent discomfort — such an obligation would be impossible to uphold and would be unfairly contingent on each person’s idiosyncrasies of sensitivity — it’s nice and socially lubricating to prevent discomfort and to show each other respect, thus not asking about salaries and sending thank-you notes.
 
Indeed, etiquette is not about what forks to use — it’s Hippocratic: First do no harm. A gentleman, as Cardinal Newman said, is one who never inflicts pain. And, as Slate’s review of Laura Claridge’s new Emily Post biography reminds us said, Emily Post “often said etiquette had much more to do with ‘instinctive considerations for the feelings of others’ than with using the right fork, and she herself was famous for putting her elbows on the table.”
  
But talking about a friend behind her back doesn’t inflict pain or hurt anyone’s feelings. Indeed, the problem with John being overheard by Mary is not the speech — it’s the being heard. Being aware of being talked about makes Mary uncomfortable. It’s not ungentlemanly to talk about someone behind her back; it’s ungentlemanly to get caught.
 
Yes, it’s unpleasant to think of your friends or girlfriends/boyfriends talking about you behind your back, but can you blame them? Do you want them to leave their own lives unexamined? The unexamined life, we know, is not worth living.
 
Still, it’s a foggy question that leaves us ambivalent. Kathy Griffin says she’s uncomfortable when the subjects of her comedy tell her to say it to their faces. “I was raised right,” she says. “I talk about people behind their back. It’s called manners.” We laugh because we think she’s copping out, but a deeper analysis suggests that maybe she was raised right after all.

Imagine you have ten friends. They all have interesting lives, go on adventures, think deep thoughts. You love to get together with each one and hear everything they have to say.

But then the friends slowly start to change. They realize that it’s expensive and tiring to go on adventures and think deep thoughts.

Let’s say two become story filters. They’ve heard everything that the remaining eight friends are doing, and they tell you the coolest stories and deepest thoughts. You don’t have to talk to those eight people anymore — you can just talk to these two!

But then three more convert. They become commentators. There are five people left still doing stuff; the commentators look at the stories the filters are talking about and reflect on them — snidely or thoughtfully. It’s easier for them to talk about what the OTHER friends are doing than to actually DO stuff themselves.

Indeed, filtering and commentating is so easy that more and more of your friends convert. Five, four, three… now only a fraction of your friends are doing or thinking anything! But, the few things left being done and thought are getting a lot more organization and dissection.

What’ll happen? Eventually, perhaps, there won’t be ANY original adventures or thoughts.

Of course, this is what’s happening with online media.

This week saw the launch of The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new web venture. (Which, incidentally, is already having some problems.) The site’s tag-line is “Read This Skip That,” and it’s premise is that it “curates” the web into what is “provocative and essential,” according to managing editor Edward Felsenthal.

The Beast has very little original content, instead offering a “cheat sheet,” which highlights the big stories on the web each day, and a “big fat story” section, which attempts to illuminate all angles of the day’s biggest story with links to a dozen or so links from different sources.

The Daily Beast is just more evidence that, increasingly, the A’s and B’s of the web are outweighing the C’s. Here’s what I mean.

A is for Aggregators:
Aggregators like The Daily Beast or Digg or Real Clear Politics just compile and “curate” the articles on the web and/or organize them in new ways. For instance, Digg is all user-based: readers vote articles up or down, and so the most popular articles are at the top. Real Clear Politics is all editor-based: the website presents the most interesting (in their eyes) political stories of the day. The Daily Beast does a little of both: its cheat sheet sums up the biggest stories of the day, then lets readers vote them up or down on the cheat sheet page. These are your filter friends.

B is for Blogs
Blogs are all about linking to other stories, and so they are in a way aggregators themselves. But they produce more original content. This content, though, is just reflection on, jokes about, judgments of, etc., other sources’ original reportage or rumination. Paradigmatic example: Gawker links to a New York Times article and then says something snarky about it. These are your commentator friends.

C is for Content
Original content. Like a New York Times article. Or a conventional-wisdom-challenging opinion piece on Slate. These outlets require paying reporters or writers and then editing their work. Much harder than aggregating or commentating. These are your remaining doers and thinkers.

So, the apparent trend of C’s to A’s and B’s: Good or Bad thing?

The Slate article about The Beast’s launch said, in response to Brown’s claim that the site isn’t just an aggregator:

Brown protests too much. Aggregating carries no shame: Sites that exist primarily to link to other sites embody the Web in its purest form. Linking is the soul of the Web, and the companies that recognized this early have seen enormous success. (Yahoo was a thriving Web directory before it was a corporate tragedy.) The online-news business came to prominence on the back of outbound links—you may have first visited Matt Drudge’s page for unsourced Clinton administration gossip, but if you kept coming back, it was for his irresistible tabloid eye. …

Brown is correct that all aggregators are as much about what they omit as what they include. Omission, indeed, is their primary feature—you go to the Daily Beast or BuzzFeed or HuffPo because they’ve already scanned through the news, gossip, funny videos, games, and assorted ephemera that hits the Internet each day and will presumably give you just the good stuff. In this light, “Does the world need another aggregator?” is as silly a question as “Does the world need another map?” The answer is always yes—different people need different guides for different purposes. And as the Web expands, with more people posting ever-stupider stuff each day, we’re only going to need more, and better, aggregators.

So this view of web media says that you’re not losing your doing and thinking friends to aggregation; you’re just making NEW friends who are commenting on the adventures and meditations of your original ten. And since The Daily Beast is a brand new site, it does seem that we’re just making a new friend, getting a new map, or [insert your metaphor of choice].

But this optimism ignores our sneaking suspicion that there is only a finite amount of media out there to be distributed amongst aggregation, professional blogging, and content creation — there are only so many readers, so there is only so much money with which to pay a finite amount of writers, editors, etc. Put simply: you only have ten friends.

Instead, the conversion hypothesis is supported by other recent events. Take this story from Gawker about a prominent group of Alt Weeklies switching from doing original criticism to blogging and aggregation:

Eason wants his alt-weekly writers to spend all week writing for the web—being bloggers, in essence—and then, at the end of the week, somebody pulls the best bits from the website and puts them together to create the print edition.

Problem: These cities don’t need any more bloggers. There are already too many of us! What they need is more original content. Otherwise the bloggers just end up talking about each other, which is the most boring thing in the world. Shit, how much original content is left in Atlanta, anyhow? In DC, the City Paper has already stopped running cover story features. Is it raining pigs? I believe it is.

Again: we don’t need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!

Which is it? Will we, someday soon, lose our original content altogether?

Blogging and aggregation are obviously the dominant strategy for new and existing publications. They’re cheaper, easier, and very popular. Original reportage and criticism are harder and more expensive.

But I’d argue that it’s impossible for this trend to continue to its logical conclusion. Instead, there will have to be an equilibrium. If there’s nothing to blog about and aggregate, it will become worthwhile to shift (back) to original content creation, to fill the vacuum.

Still, this equilibrium might leave us with many fewer content creators than would be optimal for how collectively informed and thoughtful we are.

But we need content: it wouldn’t make sense just to have the “AB’s of Web Media,” would it?

A train is barreling down the tracks at full speed, having lost control of its breaks. It will crash, killing all aboard, unless you, an onlooker, decide to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks. Defying physics, and perhaps political correctness, the fat man will stop the train in its path: only he will die, and the passengers will survive. Do you push him?

How about this: you are a pregnant movie star. The public demands the details of your baby’s delivery, naming, and appearance. They’ll hound you like hyenas till they have his or her image, which they’ll auction to the highest-bidding glossy. Do you beat them to punch, performing the auction yourself and donating the proceeds to charity, perhaps commodifying your child (thrusting them into, rather than protecting them from, the piranha-like public) but perhaps making some sort of good come out of the insatiable appetite for famous flesh?

The July 28 Slate cover story analyzed the optimal sales strategies of celebrities looking to sell snapshots of their infants, delving into the economics of celebrity baby photo deals. But what about the ethics of these deals?

There is an unexplored tension beneath the surface of the press about Shiloh and Suri, Knox and Vivienne: the ethical quandary of selling baby photos, even when giving the proceeds to charity.

The conundrum is reminiscent of most introductory ethics class thought experiments about pushing a fat man in front of a train to save the passengers on board. On the one hand is the Kantian view that some things — like selling photos of your child or pushing a man in front of a train — are simply wrong in themselves, and should not be done no matter the upside. On the other is the utilitarian view that what matters is the net good done by an action — saving a trainload of people with the loss of just one man, saving African children with the loss of just one child’s privacy.

Views about celebrity baby photo deals line up along these lines:

The utilitarian side gets support from the Freakanomics blog on the New York Times website, which called the Jolie-Pitts’ approach to Shiloh’s photos a “creative application in incentives” in their “distributing the pictures themselves and donating the proceeds to charity, thereby thwarting the paparazzi free market and potentially setting a new model for future celebrity photo ops.”

On the Kantian side, there are the reports from the Syndney Morning Herald that Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban said, after the July birth of their baby Sunday Rose, “They don’t think it’s appropriate to make deals. They are still deciding how they feel about [it] — if and when they will release a photo at all.”

And, Gawker compiled a list in praise of the “Sort of Heroes” who “wouldn’t sell pictures of their kids”:

Babies! Famous people have been having them! And then they also sell photographs of the babies because, in some twisted Dina Lohanian world of logic, selling the photos of the babies somehow mitigates the other paparazzi attention the little squirming things would inevitably receive. It’s a highwire act of faux inferential reasoning, but it seems to be popular.

What stands out most, though, is the lack of certainty in the voices that — like students taking sides in Ethics 101 — frame their points of view with qualifications like “still deciding” and “sort of.” Is selling celebrity baby photos and giving the money to charity a praiseworthy way to turn paparazzi photolust into a moral good? Or is it an unethical commodification of one’s baby, inexcusable no matter the good ends that come out of it? The answer’s as muddy as the question of pushing the fat man in front of the train.

Meanwhile, these questions offer a clear path to punching up Ethics 101: instead of asking students to place themselves in the bodies of bystanders to a runaway train, let’s ask them to imagine themselves in the bodies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.