Rap City & the LGBT Community
Gregory Mason
Cultural • Feb 7th, 13
After just recently reading a few articles about LGBT rap artists, one comment struck my eye, and the commenter basically expressed that they would take LGBT rap seriously when an LGBT artist wins a Grammy. This struck me as a very powerful statement, because as a listener of rap/hip-hop music, I have always seen LGBT rap as a “forever underground” territory of music. I don’t think the mainstream media or entertainment world have seen LGBT rap artist as appealing to mainstream audiences, because there has yet to be a big mainstream rap/hip-hop artist who openly identified as LGBT.
Throughout the last decade rap has openly and successfully embraced our white rappers and hip-hop artist with the success of internationally known Eminem as well as Asher Roth, YelaWolf, Mac Miller, MGK, and even artist of other cultures and races, but when it comes to LGBT, there seems to be a bigger issue of fully accepting a LGBT artist in the mainstream world of hip-hop.
There have been rap & hip-hop artist that have mentioned their acceptance of the LGBT community as a whole, but actions speak louder than words and the only mainstream artist to ever appreciate their LGBT fans have been female MC’s. Trina, Nicki Minaj, & Lil Kim have always performed and shown support at LGBT pride events and other LGBT celebrations, while male hip-hop artist have yet to show true support of a group that whole heartedly supports their music and buys their albums and downloads.
Since the hip-hop world is mainly represented with hardcore masculinity and male dominated, it comes as no surprise why there continues to be a struggle for LGBT artists to gain more open support. With the way that the LGBT community, especially gay men, have been stereotyped to be in the hip-hop world as feminine, weak, and free to target in lyrics with the continuous use of Faggot so openly to express just these characteristics, it makes perfect sense.
While the rap/hip-hop world has exploded and Mixtapes are everywhere for artists to openly express their artistic ability through music, it still has major room for improvement and to be more accepting of the audience that accepts, supports, and appreciates the music. After all, it should be about the music and about artists supporting their fans, and giving opportunities to great artist no matter their gender or sexuality.
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