We launched Tidal & were dragged.- Nicki Minaj July 21, 2015 Taylor took her music off spotify and was applauded. I'm so glad u guys get to see how this stuff works. It seems that we are far from triumphing over body shaming when the popular figurehead for the body positive movement is a conventionally attractive, thin woman.
However, if you look past the lip service Trainor pays to alternative body types, you’ll realise that Trainor is by no means overweight. Many think that this is now turning around, what with the prevalence of body reaffirming posts going viral on social media, and the popularity of singers like Meghan Trainor, who glorifies curvaceous women. I hardly need to explain that thin bodies have been historically glorified while alternative body types have always been shamed. Minaj’s complaint referred to slim women being celebrated. This issue has more than just a racial component. Black women influence pop culture so much but are rarely rewarded for it. In light of all that, Minaj’s whining seems a little less trite, doesn’t it? Of course Minaj is going to be highly sensitive about a snub, when it is part of a huge trend of black erasure and marginalisation. Whitewashed rap is more palatable to the mainstream Western audience, making it uncomfortably obvious that beneath all our lip service and good intentions, we are still internally racist. Despite critics widely recognising that her lyricism is mediocre at best, she has vastly outsold her black peers. These awards fall in Azalea’s lap while more talented black artists go unrecognised, and despite the fact that Azalea’s work is a heavily watered-down pop knock-up of rap music.Īzalea is living proof that our society values black culture, but value it more when we don’t have to associate it with actual black people. For example, Iggy Azalea has won a host of rap and hip-hop awards from MTV, AMA, Billboard, People’s Choice and more. This is how we find ourselves in a world where some of the most awarded and recognised rappers are white. They began to imitate the culture and place themselves at its helm, thus disempowering its black originators and refusing to recognise them for what they had created. White people wanted the originality and identity of black culture for themselves, but instead of simply consuming the culture from its source, they re-appropriated it. While this seems like a positive development that contributed to the liberation of black people, it was actually cultural neo-colonialism. From dreadlocks to rap music, white people want to get on board. In a world where everyone is afraid of being generic, people latch on to forms of expression that are attached to a distinct identity, and black culture fits the bill perfectly. In recent decades, black culture has evolved from something niche to something cool and desirable. It was produced and consumed almost exclusively by the black community, and was an artistic form of rebellion and assertion of identity in a world where it was incredibly hard to be black. It was the complaint of a black woman who has had to sit back and watch all her life while her culture has been marginalised, dismissed and then later appropriated.īack in the days when being black wasn’t “cool”, rap music was a niche and underground genre. Minaj’s complaint was not the tantrum of an entitled diva throwing her toys out of the pram.
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