A spoken word poet on the modern-day music industry.
“So I heard a song the other day / that objectified women in every way. / That doesn’t narrow it down much, but it was pretty depraved / The feminists are still probably rolling in their graves.”
Thus begins the rhymes of Madiha Bhatti, a spoken word poet, against the trend of objectifying women in popular music. To her, words are used with impunity, and the careless epithets dished out by contemporary artists have the power to hurt young women by polluting the minds of boys and men.
“Does anyone even know that Beyonce is smart? ‘Cause if she was a boy even just for a day, she wouldn’t have to crawl on all fours to crawl up the charts.” If this isn’t an indictment of the music industry, what is?
Watch this brilliant young woman’s attempt to regain respect in today’s popular culture.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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Lillygol Sedaghat
August 17, 2014
Her words speak the truth. Music is a form of cultural propaganda; it teaches values, ideas, and beliefs to people without them even realizing it. Words become implanted in the subconscious through one of the few portals that cannot be blocked-- the ears. Many answers to seemingly simply, albeit fundamentally complex, social questions like, "What does it mean to love? And how do I pursue it?", "What and how do men/women, boys/girls think?", "How do I act in the presence of someone different from me?", or even, "How should I treat this person?" are lifelong journeys to figure out mildly decent answers. But kids and teens often need folks to help guide them to the right answers by establishing a basic framework from which they can grow from, and many times, the socially acceptable and culturally respectable figures in the community, from whom they can receive these answers, are not present. Often times, it is the words and values taught by external, omnipresent actors that people internalize the most. People naturally seek answers, and when they cannot find them in close proximity, or do not know who to turn to, or are uncomfortable asking them to accredited sources in their periphery, they turn to the most easily accessible and seemingly know-it-all figures-- the media. Violence against women is a big issue. It's a terrible issue. And it's not going away soon. If anything, it's being more and more engrained in the minds of the youth, and so we, as a collective community, must work even harder to fight against this anathema and restore the values of respect, tolerance, equality, and even friendship back into the discourse of gender equality, awareness, and understanding.