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Research Gap
Research Gap
The gap in question that my research will be filling regards the history of themes that were present within the industry. While there had been a multitude of studies done regarding the themes of rap overall, or the beginning years of female rap music in the 90s, there was a large disconnect between the past and the present.
I began to search in regards to the themes within female hip hop, but primarily rap, to see where I could find the best historical evidence of the topic, and go from there. I found that I mostly wanted to focus on women’s impact on the industry through their music due to the impact that it has had on me personally, as well as acknowledge how female rappers have been able to change their value within the rap industry, especially in recent years.
Nicki Minaj, a repeated artist in my research, Performs at the 2022 VMAs
Photo by: Arturo Holmes/Getty
"Black Magic," the First Album Researched, Album Cover
Photo by: Salt N Pepa
Context
Context
Today, recent studies from 2005 to 2015 find that “52% of women rappers’ lyrics include bravado, 31% 11 reference violent imagery, and 52% are misogynistic or sexist.” In regards to the overall impact of rap music, one study found that exposure to misogynistic messages in rap/hip-hop music has also been shown to “increase hostile and aggressive thoughts,” which may correlate to “more permanent hostility toward women.” Within recent years, a sample study studying 2000 to 2010 found messages communicating themes of power over, objectification of and violence against women to be prevalent across the different sample selections, which was shocking to the creator due to the day and age at which the music is being produced.
Overall, there have been a wide variety of identified themes, which will be further discussed, but none that have been conducted over the course of the whole genre’s popularity.
Process
Process
The positive themes that I will look for will be body positivity, sexual expression, independence, and the encouragement of others. The negative themes I will code for will be violence, misogyny/sexism, braggadocio, and self objectification. Finally the neutral themes that I will find will be family, religion, wealth/fame, and emotional expression. I have also found three themes that were common in all categories of positive, negative and neutral; confidence, race, and discouraging / attacking others.
In regards to explaining certain themes, I believe that for the positive themes, the positivity category is less questionable. For the negative themes however, misogyny and sexism fit into one theme rather than two. The two tend to go together regardless of who is actually saying the lyrics, therefore rather than creating two very similar themes, it makes sense to pair them together. While some may say that wealth and fame can either fit into both positive and negative, it requires more context, and because of how it is looked at, they fit more into the neutral. If a lyric is about one’s own personal success that supersedes another, it fits into the braggadocio category. However, if it encourages the audience to find their own wealth and fame, it would fit into the encouragement of others. The theme itself is simply the mentioning of money or recognition in a non-specific fashion. While emotional expression could be either positive or negative, it fits more into the neutral theme because of how versatile it actually is.
To find these themes, I will use full sentences to allow for complete thoughts and expression of ideas. While I could look at stanzas or how it is separated by the music itself, I will look at the lyrics and seek to find clear differentiators within the words to find a complete sentence and thought. If there is any confusion on what any of the words may mean, I will look at the consulted rep dictionary for better clarity which will help to analyze the words and their intentions.
Based on each sentence, each song will then be given a percent value based on the lines that hold the themes. For example, a song could be 15% violent, 45% independent, and so forth. A potential limitation of this methodology is the potential for bias in the theme interpretation. I will attempt to avoid this issue by taking a direct denotation approach of these words, and going from there. Rather than using my initial idea of having 3 to 5 major themes based upon the songs for each year, I will just compile all themes from each song to make a total percentage for each year. Similar to the initial songs, each year will be given a percentage value based on the song's themes.
Beyond that, a timeline of each major theme will be created to see a change over the past 32 years. Analysis will then be done on the changes over this time. To see the biggest differences and shifts within the themes themselves.
Progress
Progress
My initial plan to purchase a Billboard subscription and base my research off of the top songs from each year went bad, and I mean really bad.
When I was ready to actually start researching, I had paid $155 for a Billboard subscription to get all the individual song charts to then analyze. When I gained full access however, I found out the charts didn’t actually exist, and the charts that did exist only dated back to 2012. Essentially, the majority of how I was going to conduct my research needed to be restarted and recreated.
My solution to the problem was using the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a whole lot more research to find the most successful albums by comparing and contrasting the success of different albums from each year. From there, I picked the most successful album from each year and randomly selected 5 songs to analyze.
This caused me to get way behind, but I was able to catch up at a pretty reasonable time. Right now, I should be finishing data collection by Feb. 27 and analyzing the data further in the following week.
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