booboobear Hooks

bell hook in Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance that "Mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgement and the enjoyment of racial difference"

As I began to think about this comment I couldn’t really think of an example of this, until I realized the music that most high school and college students listen to is from the Other. Rap music is from (or at least perceived from) lower class urban individuals. But the astonishing thing is the statistics show the majority of album sales are to upper class suburban white kids. All rap songs are about shootings, drugs or sex. Because most rappers are black, we have come to associate rap music with black people. These black rappers have become the Other that bell hooks is talking about. Most of the consumers of this music look at rappers and the subjects they sing about as primitive and not relative to there lives. But they seek pleasure from this music because the topics are taboo for their upper class lifestyles. This is a perfect example of how people are seeking pleasure from the Other.

For some reason I couldn’t get the picture on here, I couldn’t figure it out. But the picture I was going to use is a rap music advertisement. The advertisement has a picture of the rapper 50 cent. In this picture the rapper 50 cent is holding a gun, pointing the gun right at the camera acting like he is about to shoot the camera. 50 cent appears very primitive and urban in this picture because he is standing with a mean look on his face with his shirt off. His body is covered in tattoos and gun shot wounds.