Sean Zhang, Edward Kim
Professor Robert Cummiskey
IAH 208 Music and Culture (I)
November 10, 2024
Proposal for Final Project
Throughout the class, we’ve learned how hip-hop was not only just a new rise of music
for the industry, but a method to cope with the harsh and poor life in the Bronx, and later, a way
to speak up as a minority against the silencing authority. Consequently, hip-hop brought a lot of
power to minorities and specifically women too, in which women used this platform to speak
out about themselves for the first time instead of being treated as mere bravado for rap groups
and marketing tools for album covers. It was more than a way of music, and it became a way of
expression. Furthermore, in such time, early female rappers like Queen Latifah or Roxanne
Shanté changed the treatment of female rappers by proving that they belonged and that they
had just as much of a place in rap. However, such progress from early feminist hip-hop artists
seems to be disparaged by modern hip-hop artists with songs like WAP by Cardi B. In this
proposal, we’ll be discussing our plans for our final project of how Cardi B’s WAP is degrading
the movement of earlier feminist hip-hop artists.
Our final project is planned to be a five to eight-minute debate podcast discussing
whether or not Cardi B’s WAP is degrading the movement of earlier feminist hip-hop artists. We
plan to have such a debate by debating with Cardi B’s interview and other pro-WAP articles. By
using sources such as feminist readings and feminist reviews, and comparing values from early
female hip-hop artists that inspired Cardi B. We’re doing this podcast to not only better
ourselves with more knowledge about such activists, but also to spotlight some contributions of
early female hip-hop artists and to raise awareness of how such efforts are still fought for today.
With such intentions, our podcast is geared toward an audience of people interested in gender
studies, feminism, or hip-hop history in general.
Such sources that we plan to use are “Dirty South Feminism: The Girlies Got Somethin’
to Say Too! Southern Hip-Hop Women, Fighting Respectability, Talking Mess, and Twerking Up
the Dirty South” by Adeerya Johnson, an episode of Hip-Hop Evolution documentary on Netflix,
and news articles and reviews that relate to this topic. Yet, it is our concern that such sources
out there on the internet will be biased towards both ends, so it’d be a challenge for us to
maintain an objective and standard viewpoint. We predict it isn’t going to be easy to find such
sources as reviews and articles or documentaries are most likely going to be biased and
probably provocative for viewership and marketing purposes. Another worry is finding
interviews of Cardi B so we can find what her inspiration was, and thus find her inspirational
hip-hop artist in the first place.
Furthermore, as this is a debate podcast, we worry that we won’t be able to even form a
debate as we might lack evidence and sources to back up our own argument. However, a
solution we may come up with for when this happens is to just have a discussion podcast
instead.
To conclude with high hopes, we hope that this project will go well and we could
furthermore discuss other topics outside of feminism from this podcast by reaching out towards
the importance of representation, barriers to success as individuals, empowerment, and also
how good WAP is in general as music. The key is to discuss how hip-hop continues to evolve not
only as music but as a platform for social change and to urge our listeners to think deeper about
just how big of a role hip-hop plays in our society today.