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‘Flirt[ing] with Death’ but‘ Still Alive’

The Sexual Dimension of Surplus Time in Hip Hop Fantasy

University of Chicago, USA

This article argues that the tendency in rap music to depict women as accessories and sexual servants is the partial result of a widespread attitude that women have better prospects for earning a legitimate wage than their male counterparts. The effort to devalue women—and, by extension, female labor—leads avowedly heteronormative rappers to displace intimacy onto feminized arenas, like ‘the game’ or ‘the streets’. This is one way of coping with a general sense of disappointedness that inheres in the tortured sense of masculinity whose contours I tentatively sketch here. This article closes by pinpointing one reason for this preoccupation with death, fascination with ‘bling’, and denigration of women: the experience of ‘surplus time’—the sense that, according to perceived life expectancies, these rappers should already be dead. In theorizing this predicament, I explore some social consequences of the belief these rappers have more time available than they had anticipated.

Key Words: hip hop • labor • masculinity • morality • mortality

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