Something that I found very interesting in Back’s chapter were the gender differences in content and perception of the MCs’ lyrics. For male MCs, it was perfectly acceptable and even regarded as “educated…[and] uplifting” (196) to use culture lyrics to address the problems that are going on in the world for both “black youth in Britain…[but also] a wide variety” (196) of peoples and cultures. Just the fact that these MCs were concerned with not just issues that directly affected them, but brought it out to a white working-class demographic is very interesting to me, as this extension of their music does not de-legitimize them in any way it seems, it does just the opposite.
However, when it comes to the female MCs, I could definitely see that if they were to attempt to address socio-cultural issues that the males were bring up in their lyrics, they would face the fate of not being taken seriously as they are “accused of being ‘slack’” (202) due to their lyrics being twisted so, even when they are trying to talk about a woman’s plight, they have “guys coming up to…[them] laughing” (202) in their faces and taking away the power of their words. While it does not seem as if they are being objectified as much as American female MCs were in our study of hip-hop, it appears that these women faced a similar problem of not being taken seriously, which is equally devastating.
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