The Sunday Story: The unspoken rules of hip-hop
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Hey, it's Rachel. And before we get started, just a heads up that this podcast episode contains explicit language. Tory Lanez is a Canadian hip hop artist. You might have heard his 2016 song Love, which was nominated for a Grammy. Everyone falls in love sometimes.

But lately, instead of talking about his music, people are talking about Lanes in connection with something he did. In December 2022, Lanes was found guilty of three felonies for shooting another rapper, Megan Thee Stallion, in both feet. When the trial began last December, plenty of fans came out to share their opinions. Some sided with Megan. I'm feeling very emotional right now. I'm just...

Wishing the best for Megan, and I love her so much. We just wanted to be here to show moral support to Megan and to any other woman that has been harmed. And if you do speak up...

that there's a community of women and gender expansive folks who believe you, that love you, that care for you, and that are here for you. Although plenty of people felt it was Tori who was getting a raw deal. Not guilty. Not guilty. He's a real spiritual dude, man. He has God with him. And the truth will come out and he'll be not guilty. If she's lying about being in an affair with him,

If she's lying about different things, then obviously, what else would she lie about? As soon as they found out that he allegedly shot Megan, allegedly, let me get that clear, allegedly, that he lost everything. Hell no, this ain't no Me Too case. And this ain't no attack on black women either. We like protect black women, but protect both parties, protect black men too. What do you think the verdict is going to be, one at a time? Shit, I don't know. That brother is innocent.

We got a theme song. This case and how fans talked about it, how people in the industry talked about it, even how the media covered it, it all tells us a lot about how Black women are viewed and treated in hip-hop. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. And today on the show, we're talking about misogyny in hip-hop.

Sydney Madden and Rodney Carmichael are the co-hosts of the podcast Louder Than a Riot from NPR Music. And they've been reporting on hip hop for years. For their latest season, they've been going deep into how stereotypes and sexism are entrenched in the industry. Rodney and Sydney are here now. Thank you so much for talking with me. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, Rachel.

Okay, you guys, so the first season of Louder Than a Riot focused on a very complicated issue, untangling the intersection of hip-hop and mass incarceration. The tagline for this season is the following, how the double standard became hip-hop's standard.

So I need to understand what that's about. Talk to me. Yeah, I mean, we spent the entire season trying to figure out what it's about too. So for the first season of Louder, as you said, it was all about the relationship between mass incarceration and hip hop. And the tagline for that season was the intersection between rhyme and punishment. But going into the second season, we wanted to expand that definition and kind of look inwardly at the way hip

Yeah.

And so this entire season, we're breaking down specific examples where misogyny, namely misogynoir, has reared its head in hip hop and shown this imbalance. Misogynoir. So explain more about that term. Misogynoir is the sociological term that was coined by Professor Moya Bailey almost 15 years ago now that depicts the specific compounded sexes

and racial prejudice that falls on the shoulders of black women or anyone read as a black woman in society. It pops up everywhere in media. It popped up in the case of Tory Lanez with Megan Thee Stallion being vilified in the courtroom and in pop culture circles. And it's really the undercurrent that employs all of this prejudice that we see. And

And for Moya and her creation of this term, it kind of really came together for her in college. I mean, she's somebody who grew up a hip hop fan, you know, was kind of introduced to hip hop by her dad and grew up loving it. But in college, she started to have an awareness for the way women, specifically Black women, were being talked about in songs.

And there was one song in particular that she told us about where it really started to make her question her relationship with the music and the way that it related to her, you know? Okay, let's listen. Little Chris had a song. And that was very much.

Something that was dominating our party spaces. And initially, I think people felt very empowered, like, use a ho, not me. That luda joint raised a hell of red flags for Moya. She started to hear a pattern.

So that was the initial way that people were taking it up. But having a critical moment in that time and being like, wait a second, you know, like this is not equal. It's so interesting to hear her reflect on that. So did you notice that theme, the idea of how misogyny against Black women and its entrenchment in hip hop, how did you see it come out in the Tory Lanez trial?

Megan was in the courtroom for one day to testify and her cross examination by Tory Lanez defense attorney was,

It felt like, man, it was really just a playbook of misogynoir. I mean, a lot of the ways that he talked to her, a lot of the language that he used, including the N-word. He was not a black man. Sorry, Rodney, he directed the N-word at Megan Thee Stallion on the stand? Well, he was quoting her, but misquoting her, I should say, when she first came out and said that Tory Lanez was the one that shot her.

It was via Instagram video. So he was using these Instagram videos, misquoting them, mischaracterizing her in order to attack her character on the stand. And...

And again, this is a lot of what was going on in social media at the time. I mean, it was a direct copy and paste in a lot of ways. A lot of the ways that people were targeting and attacking Megan's character online, on Twitter, on Instagram, were directly reflected in his cross-examination.

And we talked to our senior producer, Gabby Bogarelli, who was present in the courtroom that day about her testimony. He said, Miss Pete, you testified earlier today that this all happened, this altercation happened during a breakout moment in your career.

She says, yes. He says, now it's safe to say you're one of the biggest artists, right? Biggest artist in the world. She says, yes. He says, so this actually helped your career, not hindered it. She said, me being shot helped my career? He said, I'm saying that in that time since, your career has been bigger. She says, because I got shot? Is that why? It had nothing to do with the shooting. He says, so when you got shot with

And let's remember, Rachel, the trial wasn't even about arguing out whether or not she was shot. It was about who shot her. Right.

Yeah, there was plenty of evidence, too. We saw it there in the courtroom ourselves, the x-rays of her feet with bullet fragments, the sound of shots from neighborhood security camera, and even body cam footage of Meg bleeding from her feet. You know, Rachel, you asked how misogynoir played out in this trial, and I want to go back to Moya Bailey again, the scholar that Sidney mentioned earlier.

As she said, Moya had basically coined this term, misogynoir, almost 15 years ago. And that's 15 years before the Tory Lanez trial. I so appreciate you saying Tory Lanez trial, because so many times people have talked to me about it and they said Meg's trial. And that shift is subtle. But to me, that's a manifestation of misogynoir. This is

People are thinking that this is about whether Megan is telling the truth and the fact that she had to prove that she was in fact being honest about what happened to her. That is a manifestation of misogynoir. Were you shocked to see...

the way it was spinning out in terms of the misogynoir manifesting in the way that it did? Or was it just like, yeah, I predicted this. I saw this coming. I have to say I was a little surprised. I was a little surprised because Meg is a rapper first. You know, like you cannot deny her skill. And normally there's an assumption that, you know,

Skill is what matters. Skill is the thing. But it's very clear that skill is not enough when these narratives are part of

How Black women are viewed generally. And from Megan being the target of this shooting in the summer of 2020 to this case being argued out in 2022, late last year, Massage Noir had never been more amplified or openly expressed in hip hop in this way. So we knew this was going to be a

a bellwether for talking about how implicit it is in hip hop.

This season has 10 episodes. Half of them are out now. And the episodes are each formatted as different rules. So the first episode, the one about Megan Thee Stallion, is called Rule Number One. Being exceptional doesn't make you the exception. So explain that in Megan's case. Yeah, this is a rule that particularly applies to Megan because, you know, the truth is she's running hip-hop right now. She's at the top of the game.

And she has been for the last several years. She has number one collaborations with the likes of Cardi B. And Beyonce to show for it.

And despite all that, despite her being exceptional, it did not make her the exception in this case in terms of being able to dodge the misogynoir that came at her for two years straight from the time that she was shot by Tori to the time of this trial and even now after the trial. Rule number three, beauty is in the eye of the male gaze, Sidney.

That rule is really a meditation on body policing in hip hop, specifically tackling how everything that women and femmes entering the game, entering the industry of hip hop are subjected to by way of their image, just in order to fit the mold of what a

successful female rapper has to look like. We talk about plastic surgery, like BBLs. We talk about body shaming on the internet. And we talk about the ways that even institutions like YouTube censor black women who are trying to own their own body and own their sexuality. The Sunday story from Up First continues after this break. Stay with us.

I'm Rachel Martin, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. And I'm talking with Sydney Madden and Rodney Carmichael. They're co-hosts of NPR's Louder Than a Riot, a podcast about hip-hop, but also so much more than that. So there's another rule I wanted to talk to the two of you about. You use these rules as like an ordering principle for the whole podcast. But this rule in particular, see something, say nothing. And I'm going to talk to you about that.

This is pegged to an episode about why the Me Too movement didn't affect the rap industry, right? Despite the fact that it completely upended Hollywood.

Yeah, absolutely. From 2017, even arguably till right now, the hip hop industry was very much insulated from the reckoning and the fallout associated with the Me Too movement. And we really look at it as a moment that could have been a culture shifting conversation changing moment in hip hop when it comes to abuses of power by men in this patriarchal space. But it didn't end up being that. Yeah.

All right. So I understand you also spend some time this season looking at how ideas of hyper black masculinity actually ends up contributing to misogynoir. And in particular, Rodney, this opened up some personal introspection on your part. You started looking at your own relationship with hip hop and how that's changed as you've become a father. Yeah, definitely. I mean, hyper masculinity is...

It's a part of our culture, no matter what corner of the culture you call yours. Right. But in hip hop specifically, it's so deeply rooted in the ways that we as men shape ourselves and see ourselves. There's a lot of heroic mythology built into hip hop in terms of how men carry themselves. And a lot of this has to do with

making everybody else feel smaller than Black men. And for me, becoming a father, I have a son who's three now. I had a daughter last year who's not quite one yet.

The more I thought about my love of hip hop, which is something that you naturally want to pass on to your kids. It gave me the chance to kind of really think about what elements of hip hop I actually want to pass on and what elements I don't want to replicate in him. And one of those big things for me is making sure that he doesn't perpetuate his

a lot of the misogynoir that is so thoroughly entrenched in the culture.

He's three now. It's really hard to have these conversations at three years old. But it's really easy to push play in Spotify and share music that I love. So at some point, there has to be a reckoning. And for me, that reckoning is more so internal right now. It's just really caused me to do a lot of reflection about the ways that I have been complicit myself in misogynoir within the culture, how I have been complicit in misogynoir

furthering a lot of hyper-masculine ideals that in some ways feel very self-serving, but in other ways are damaging not only to women, but to us as men, you know? So that's kind of what I'm going to be doing in that episode. So does the fact that we even now have a word for

signal some kind of progress here. I mean, misogynoir has been around, as we've been talking about, for a long time, right? Since the inception of hip hop in the 70s, even if we didn't have the word at that point. But from your reporting on how Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez, that case, and the misogynoir that was so present there,

Have you been able to discern even a subtle shift in awareness of the issue and as a result of that, perhaps consciousness of it, any signs of light that it might be changing in the culture?

Well, I think the idea that there's a new consciousness of it rings a little untrue because as long as it's been there, people have tried to call it out and take this imbalance to task, take the people in power to task.

But what we say in this season is not only that these are rules that have held the entire culture back, but they're rules that a new generation of rap refuses to stand for. So every episode, we're not only giving you all the points, all the laundry lists of the ways that, let's say, Megan has been marginalized during this case from making

major media outlets clearly siding with Tory to Drake even name dropping a subliminal in one of his songs about Meghan and showing his siding of Tory. We're also showing you the ways that an entire generation of artists who are Black women or Black femmes completely refute and push aside and push back on these rules that have for so long felt like they're cemented

You can hear that in episodes where we feature Rico Nasty. You can hear that in episodes where we talk in depth to Saucy Santana. You can hear that in episodes where we speak to Trina and Lado and the lineage of sexual agency in hip hop. Every time there's been a rule that has attempted to

sideline or silence somebody, there's always been someone to push back and rebel against it. And that's how the progress has been made to the point where we're at now, where there is an ecosystem and space and market share for more women and femmes in hip hop than there ever has been before. So I guess I'd close by asking the two of you, if you don't mind, to talk a little bit about

What your very specific beat tells us about the world that we live in, really, and the society that we live in here in the U.S. I mean, it's not that you guys are just music reporters, you know? Hip-hop is its own important cornerstone of the musical culture of this country. What do we learn as Americans by taking some time to really sit and interrogate

this particular industry? Yeah, that's definitely a very insightful question. And you know, the truth is when we started this podcast, we started it on the strength that hip hop

was finally being acknowledged as the most consumed genre in America, which is another way of saying the most popular genre in metrics that we can all identify with. You know, everybody was spending more money to listen to, consume, engage with hip hop than any other music genre. And that's because hip hop speaks to American ideals and reflects American ideals, the good, the bad, the

the ugly, the beautiful, whatever, in ways that other genres just don't. It's a lifestyle genre in so many ways. It's not cliche when people say that it is a culture because it goes beyond so much more than the music. So when we talk about a season like this, where we're talking about misogynoir and sexism and how deeply rooted it is,

you could substitute hip hop for America. You know, when we talk about the carceral state and racism and why there are more black folks in jail and disproportionate amounts, you know, we're talking about America too. So for that very reason, louder than a riot has been a podcast that enables us to really go much deeper than music and our reporting to

To be able to look at any sociological or socioeconomic issue or condition and probe it further through the music and through the culture and through something that a lot of people claim to love, but don't always understand the ways in which marginalization is being expressed through the music. Sydney, I'll give you the last word. I mean, how could I top that? Honestly. Yeah, I mean...

We always go back to the music in and of itself. And there are songs that reflect reality. There are songs that speak to where we're at as black people, as Americans all the time. And

I believe as popular as it's become, a lot of people have stopped listening to the real intent of this music, to the real intent of this cultural export that's arguably one of the biggest global exports America has ever created. And what we're doing here is reading between the lines and sometimes the lies to give you the essential context that no one else can. Yeah.

Sydney Madden and Rodney Carmichael. They are the co-hosts of NPR's Louder Than a Riot podcast. Season two is out now. New episodes come out every Thursday. You can find the episodes in the Louder Than a Riot feed and wherever you get your podcasts. Sydney and Rodney, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you, Rachel. Thanks for having us, Rachel. We appreciate it.

Okay, so I don't get to talk to all the cool kids over NPR Music all the time. So while I have you two, and because I'm lazy and I need other people to direct me to the best Tiny Desk concerts online, where should I look? What's the best one in your opinion that's happened recently?

It's funny you should ask, Rachel, because we actually have a tiny desk tied to this season. One of our protagonists this season is Trina, the 305 queen, also known as the Diamond Princess, also known as the Baddest Bitch. She took over the tiny desk, and she's going to be doing an exclusive tiny desk tied to Louder Than a Riot, and it's out now.

Now, I want to introduce you guys to the baddest bitch. Oh, okay, cool. That is some bonus content that I was not expecting. No doubt. There you go. This episode was produced by Audrey Nguyen and edited by Jenny Schmidt. We've gotten engineering support this week from Joby Tansako. The reporting for this episode was brought to us by NPR Music and the Louder Than a Riot staff.

They are Gabby Bulgarelli, Sam J. Leeds, Soraya Shockley, Mano Sundaresan, Cher Vincent, and Raina Cohen. The Sunday Story from Up First is also produced by Justine Nguyen. Our supervising producer is Leanna Simstrom, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Rachel Martin. Up First will be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.