Every Moment Has A Song

A$AP Rocky … ‘I used to be homophobic, but as I got older, I realized that wasn’t the way to do things.’ Photograph: C Flanigan/WireImage

From Frank Ocean coming out to Jay-Z backing gay marriage, hip-hop seemed to be shaking off its homophobic mindset this year. But the genre still has a lot of growing up to do.

(Reprinted from The Guardian)

In November, A$AP Rocky gave an interview in which he somehow managed to be both inane and yet completely illuminating on the state of modern rap. “If you do certain things like snug fashion, high-end fashion, other things that’s not really in the criteria of the small state of mind of the urban community, you’re ‘gay.’ Different is ‘gay.’ Weird is ‘gay'”, he told Hip Hop DX. “That shit ain’t gay. That’s just different. I’m a heterosexual man. I never been gay a day of my life. I used to be homophobic, but as I got older, I realized that wasn’t the way to do things. I don’t discriminate against anybody for their sexual preference, for their skin colour … that’s immature.”

The Purple Swag rapper may have been talking in circles, but his comments did at least offer signs that hip-hop was taking a more open-minded approach to sexuality than we’ve seen in the past. At the same time – thanks to his unnecessary need to remind us that he’s definitely not gay (definitely not, all right?) – he spoke to a wide demographic, a generation born in the 90s, who can’t recall a world before hip-hop existed and who regularly bookend their homophobic epithets with LOLs and smiley faces. It seems hip-hop still has a long way to go before we can say it’s relaxed about homosexuality.

Earlier this year a Twitter experiment tracked the use of words such as faggot and dyke over the course of three months, racking up a depressing 2.6m uses of homophobic language. It’s likely that a great deal of those people make no real connection between active homophobia and calling someone “a total gay”. Like Tyler, the Creator, they’ll probably tell you they have gay friends, and they’ll often be telling the truth. Rappers will say they’re just words, there to shock, the language of a character they have created for the mic. For hip-hop, and for the teenagers who who see no problem in having both Justin Bieber and Ludacris on their iPod, the language of homophobia may have stayed the same but the culture has changed.

It was only natural that as hip-hop grew into a multi-billion dollar industry it would need to align with what was happening in the rest of the America if it wanted to continue its ascent. That has meant an attachment to the process of change as a political statement and, over the last two years, huge social and political movements to advance gay rights, namely the It Gets Better project, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the overturning of Proposition 8 in court. When Barack Obama went on record to say he supported gay marriage in May, his comments were backed by the likes of Jay-Z and even 50 Cent. Once more, though, we were light years from enlightened thought: the latter, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned his “support” into an appeal for organizations that stood up for the rights of heterosexual men to be defended from gay men who want to “grab your little buns”.

Nicki Minaj’s prophecy that there would one day be a gay rapper might have seemed a long way off, but it was only a couple of months later that it (sort of) happened. Frank Ocean is not a rapper, but his affiliation with Odd Future has proved enough to bracket him within a world that had yet to send out an openly gay emissary. And when he did discuss his feelings for another man, it was by writing movingly of what it feels like to experience first love. While people threw themselves at Twitter and Facebook to show their support, the reaction from other rappers has been lukewarm. Despite Snoop Dogg and Russell Simmons offering encouragement, the most common reaction from hip-hop artists has been variations of the “whatever a man does in his own house” or “only God can judge you” line. Once again, Jay-Z was positive about Ocean’s statement without ever going the extra mile to back him with a personal statement. His support came in the form of a (very good) blog that read: “We are all made better by your decision to share publicly,” but the fact that it was written by journalist dream hampton [corr] saved him from having to find his own words about the younger rapper’s sexuality.

Frank Ocean’s letter didn’t quite mark a wave of change in attitude. We probably won’t be seeing a flood of mainstream gay rappers anytime soon, even if the recent swath of psychedelically strange rappers – A$AP Rocky, Lil’ B et al – have perhaps made it easier for “queer” rappers such as Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco and Le1f to find a bigger audience on the more leftfield fringes.

And whereas it’s great to hear someone as high-profile as A$AP distancing himself from homophobia, rap still has a good deal of growing up to do. A$AP himself proved this by saying, later in that same interview “I’m getting bitches” – yet more shorthand for asserting one’s own masculinity that we could all live without hearing ever again. Still, when Lil Wayne substituted No Homo with the words No Frank Ocean on a crappy remix earlier this year, he suddenly sounded like a lonely man. Slowly, things are changing for the better.