Just as the American Dollar realized quintessential value by shaking off the distortions of the gold standard, Hip Hop in turn qualified humanness by purifying speech. So now in 2023 Hip Hop is marking its jubilee as such we are reminded that Hip Hop as all other organized human inclinations is patriarchal. I don't want to take much of the reader's attention speaking on the patriarchy save to say it's high time we reminded our better halves, our sistahs, these "curves" on this planet with us that subjugation, subservience, is first and foremost a surrender of agency. If my understanding is correct the emergence of Rappers Delight as accepted Hip Hop's first full feature was due to a woman's agency. There is much women can do to assert agency, but the patriarchy critique in Hip Hop as in all our other human realizations is a way out, not only denying agency but mocking it. The consequence of this mockery is we both suffer. As men our value is comparatively compromised relative to woman's unwillingness to firstly define agency. The patriarchy critique is just another expression, another formulation of that last fetid gasp of Southern enslavers of Black people, that Northern abolitionist were the ones inciting the enslaved to resist and pursue Liberty, implying that the enslaved Black man, woman and child had to be roused to assert agency for Liberty. We constantly encounter the compromise of agency as that ring in the oxen's nose serving another's interest. I express my agency with this quote from The Schizophrenic in Chief Thomas Jefferson: "all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." [unquote The Declaration Of Independence In Congress, July 4,1776,]
By William Thorpe
