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reviewed by pirao5 and mim3 The most outstanding feature of Ashanti's new album Chapter II is its total absence of any meaning. I dutifully listened to it a few times trying to find something, anything that would make sense; the most meaningful part I found was self-promotion. A song is being interrupted, and a male voice suddenly starts explaining to the audience how beautiful and wonderful Ashanti is and how great it is that "she made it." (She ranks 97th in Amazon sales.) As gross as the idea of self-promotion may sound for some people, here, at least, a message about Ashanti's greatness is being clearly delivered to the audience. The rest of the album is an unfortunate combination of endless keywords--"baby," "sweet," "crazy"-- and repetitious, numbing tunes. "Baby" seems to be the most important buzz word. This peculiar "baby" obsession could only be explained by another, more pervasive one: "stupid blond" domination of pop culture. The ubiquitous stupid blond doesn't really have to be blond. She could be a brunette, redhead or black-haired. It doesn't really matter: the same rules apply to everybody. What is most important for pop music success, she has to be stupid. In other words, in order to make money in mainstream pop culture in imperialist countries, female performers have to refrain from expressing any real, humyn emotions or thoughts, other than sex-related ones and pretend to be (or to be) as stupid as possible. We wouldn't call this oppression, because the money that pop performers like Ashanti make is really big. It's just oppressive to the audience and somewhat tasteless. mim3@mim.org adds: With Britney Spears covering for Anglo-Amerikan stupidity, Shakira for Colombia (Latin America) and Mariah Carey for inter-racial mixtures, Ashanti adds an important piece to the overall picture--that of a Black womyn who can make it big selling porno-pop. All we need now is the token Asian ethnic Amerikan and the token First Nation pop tarts. Then the picture will be complete--equal opportunity pornography in "music." It's only thanks to Amerikan-based multinational corporations that we can have such a display of what "multiracialism" means in the world conceived by Amerikans. It's enough to make one wonder if imperialism could do without racial oppression and simply dump all the dirty work on gender relations. At the very least, as MIM has emphasized, gender relations as gender relations, and not the product of nation and class structures, are about dynamics of leisure-time. From looking at porno-pop, we can see how leisure-time can be its own basis for oppression. In pop music, it will not be possible to do without the MIM Thought on this point. If we conceive of oppression as only being national/racial, then we should cease our complaints when the inevitable Asian and First Nation ethnic stars arise going platinum saying "baby" over and over again while making orgasmic sounds. We can be sure that those who are happy that Ashanti "made it" the same stupid way that Britney Spears made it reflect the national bourgeoisie seeking an accommodation with imperialism. Nor do we at MIM think it would be OK to leave music this way if profit from it disappeared; although that would obviously take the wind out of the sails of music production like this. The point is that even if there is equal opportunity porno-pop that lives on after the profit system dies, we still see something called patriarchy that has to be destroyed. We would not want people thinking that Ashanti is an example of "success" in a socialist popular culture. In addition, even further distinguishing the MIM line from the numerically common pseudo-feminism and pseudo-Marxism, we at MIM are not saying that the group of performers typified by Ashanti are "sexploited." Quite the contrary, they are oppressors and exploiters, deriving their success from a gender hierarchy. It's not that Ashanti, Britney, Mariah etc. had to be rich first, but that they had to fit the bill for gender oppressor dynamics which they could then convert into money. To spell out what that gender hierarchy is--partly a certain physical development that comes with age, a certain weight, lack of physical handicaps or disfigurement and youthful looks, including unblemished skin sufficient to spread around in publicity, the more the better. That these material facts of biological life are not part of class or nationality should be obvious. They are part of something in the leisure-time dynamics of today, but they are also very concrete and restricted to a certain age range and able-hierarchys. Also what needs reckoning in any theory of oppression and culture is that for many of these porno-pop divas, the principal customers are not even biological males. They are other young wimmin seeking the privileges of the gender aristocracy. So it is that Britney Spears and future Britney-wannabes get their start in teenage wimmin and move on from there to broaden their appeal while retaining mostly wimmin customers. A simple biological notion of what gender oppression is simply will not work in this context to explain why it is that wimmin buy the most of this kind of pornography anymore than it will explain why the soft-core porn magazines like "Cosmopolitan" dominate magazine stands, far outnumbering the magazines available to male customers. That is why MIM's concept of a gender heirarchy including a gender aristocracy and gender bureaucracy (the leaders of the gender aristocracy ranging from Britney Spears to the local police-funded domestic violence and rape crisis professionals) are necessary and it is also why we cannot just say those with a penis oppress the rest. We have to explain what it is that motivates wimmin in their pornographic consumption, and if we look at it globally we will see that the phenomenon exists disproportionately among those with some kind of gender privilege convertible to money. On the global scale, Britney Spears exerts considerable influence, but the biological female component of her influence exists mostly among the leisure-time oppressors, who happen to be mostly white, imperialist country females. The nature of her Third World male audience would be mostly as something exotically Western and pornographic, but the exploited and oppressed Third World female will relate to the music of the porno-pop divas least of all. All in all, that's why we at MIM say that the enjoyment of porno-pop is a male thing, regardless of biology, because when we say "male," we refer to a social group of people relating to leisure-time (and sex in particular) the same way, as dominators. See our theory magazine on gender oppression
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