When music is called "rapey" — the controversy around feminist criticism

When music is called "rapey"

During early 2013, Ummni Khan — an Associate Professor at Carleton University — received an invitation to join a Facebook group protesting rapper Rick Ross, who was scheduled to perform on that same campus. The anger centered on specific lyrics from his guest verse on Rocko's song "U.O.E.N.O.': "Put molly all in her champagne / She ain't even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed that / She ain't even know it." Critics charged that Ross had produced "a song that glorifies sexual assault" and contributed to rape culture.

Khan decided not to join the protesters. The petition ultimately succeeded; the concert was canceled, with one organizer citing "security concerns." A year later, Khan co-facilitated a workshop on blurring the lines between music, politics, and rape culture. During lively discussion, workshop participants reflected on the Ross petition and on how often the "rapey" label gets applied disproportionately to hip-hop and to men of color.

Here is the surprising part: most protesting students had never examined Ross's lyrics in the context of the complete track — not one had noticed that the song belonged to Rocko, not to Ross. Khan and her co-facilitators pointed out other questionable phrases in "U.O.E.N.O.," for example: "Keep the .45 in my pocket, ain't gon' show it 'til I have to pop it / Then you gon' know it, damn who shot you, they don't even know it" and "I'm 'bout to get you fuck niggas wacked, you ain't even know it." When asked whether those lines "glorify gun violence" and might deserve equal feminist scrutiny, the students fell silent. One participant eventually offered that sexual violence, not gun violence, was the lived concern on the Carleton campus. Among the possible explanations for feminists' fixation on supposed rapey lyrics, Khan proposes one in particular: fetishization.

Blowback at corporations and the rise of a label

Feminist opposition to Ross was not confined to a single Canadian university. In the United States, the activist group UltraViolet successfully pressured Reebok to sever its sponsorship deal with Ross because of those guest lyrics. Around the same period Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" — a Billboard number-one summer hit — was attracting feminist outrage over what critics saw as promotion of date rape. That song, Khan argues, helped catapult the "rapey" concept into the public imagination.

Since then, more and more commentators, scholars, and everyday critics have examined both new and old songs, looking to uncover additional examples of music that perpetrates or normalizes sexual violence. The underlying strategy draws directly from the rape-culture framework: naming and shaming such songs supposedly exposes the social acceptance of sexual aggression, which in turn leads to social change. Consciousness-raising advocacy may also directly pressure institutions or labels to prevent the distribution of certain singles or to somehow discipline the performing artists.

Khan has explored this terrain in a trio of articles. In an earlier essay on the erotics of protest, she interpreted the feminist condemnation of "rapey" songs through Sedgwick's concept of "paranoid reading" — a practice that may become paradoxically caught up in the very transgressive energies it denounces. A second piece explored how labeling hip-hop as rape culture can feed broader moral panic about rap, furnish ammunition for using song lyrics as courtroom evidence, and ultimately contribute to the over-policing and mass incarceration of racialized men. In the third approach, Khan directly defends music branded "rapey" using a kink framework, inviting readers to reframe as kink the allegedly violent lyrics within a non-normative, consensual framework of power and pleasure.

"Rapey" as a negative fetish concept

When Khan first proposed her workshop title for Sexual Assault Awareness Week, organizers voiced concern that the word "rapey" might be offensive. Khan argued that since the concept had already entered feminist discourse, the title should use scare quotes to indicate reluctance rather than remove the word entirely. In that same year, Nora Caplan-Bricker, writing in the New Republic, complained about the term in an article she titled "For the Love of God, Let's Stop Calling Things 'Rapey.' This, That. Enough." Evidently the plea went unheeded: usage of the term grew, and has continued to spread since.

Collins English Dictionary currently weighs whether to formally include "rapey," which it defines as "acting or appearing in a sexually aggressive manner." In many ways this mainstream adoption can be counted as a feminist victory — it acknowledges that the danger of sexual violence extends far beyond stranger rape, infusing daily texts including entertainment. Yet the approach also makes a strong leap of faith in what Sedgwick called the "tracing-and-exposure" project: the assumption that revealing hidden incidents of , say, rapey content in pop culture leads viewers directly toward insights about consent and violence.

Suspicions without evidence

That leap of faith becomes questionable given a look at the actual analytics performed by critics. Take, for instance, a list published by Buzzfeed titled "Songs Perhaps Just As 'Singy-Voice' As 'Til the Evening': Very Late Karaoke." The post took note of Cab's 2013 song "La La." The chorus strings along disarming admissions of insincerity: "What would you do if I told you that I la, la, la, la, loved you? / Cause you know I la, la, la, lie." To the Buzzfeed writer, a singer willing to prevaricate to lure a date then abandon commitment fuels a kind of far-fetched connection between lying and encouraging sexual coercion.

In 2015 Justin Bieber's single "What Do You Mean?" also caught the critical eye. Many online reactions detected something sinister under seemingly earnest yet polite questions such as "What do you mean?" and the push-pull of "making love all night." Feminist celebrity Lena Dunham tweeted her dislike — but never deployed the word "rapey." After one chain of articles, the heading made that angle explicit: "Lena Dunham Condemns New Justin Bieber Song As Too Rapey." The accusation has demanded a critical bend; rape-detecting readings lean increasingly into fantasy territory rather than literal readings.

Race and the fetishization underlying condemnation

Khan's analysis also uncovers an uneven application of the rapey label across race. Although many different people appearing within different musical traditions get named in diverse lists, particularly on social-media commentaries — from white singer-songwriters of older decades to contemporary pop-rock bands — Khan catalogues a point of consistency. The few activist and business-callout campaigns that produce sustained public and structural scrutiny dwell specifically on performers who identify as men of color, and particularly prominent Black men. This quantitative reality lends disturbing power to existing cultural worries about hypersexual Black masculinity.

Racialized distortions escalate backlash

Ideas that the music bears some invincible influence on biological violence channel discrimination toward society while impeding truthful matters. The harm isn't just limited to expressive discourse like viral bullying of mistaken lines producing disciplinary policy cancellations; in legals arenas the moral panic implicates lyrics as straightforward expert material in criminal accusations, reducing diverse subtle positions of artists to unreflectivity committing pathological aggression against communities. As increased traffic within rap–causality linkages structures court involvement it unwittingly lends force to prisons-industry violence – harm compounded despite regardless for mental premises. By any true a complete attention, Khan explains, seeks distance these per racism fix-persuasions: In sum aspects a concept negative bleeply-fetish constructing threat and as structural as using folk-defing physical force among bodies normal precisely what cultural for of—any piece strong "voluptuously contemplizes" images damaging safety the persons and peoples "end" violence full stopping states.

Black male artists have been singled out. For the few white men subject to activist protest, it is invariably because of music associated with Black culture, primarily rap and R&B, as seen with Eminem, Robin Thicke, and Action Bronson. Scholarly research in media effects and feminist media theory also tends to focus on rap as a particularly problematic form of music (Armstrong; Adams & Fuller). In the next section, I challenge the interpretation of such songs as harmful, but here I consider the semiotic significance of the activist focus on Black men as sexual threats within the social imaginary.

A couple of examples will set the stage. As mentioned in the introduction, Rick Ross became a lightning rod for controversy due to guest lyrics implying he spiked a woman’s drink with “molly” (ecstasy) and proceeded to have sex with her. This line prompted numerous petitions, including one suggesting the words might be confessional, in which case Ross should be “investigated and prosecuted” (Etomi). The feminist activist group UltraViolet, whose petition garnered almost 100,000 signatures, also implied Ross was bragging about personal experience: “His lyrics aren’t vague … he’s clearly and proudly saying that he drugged and raped a woman who was not capable of consent.” Soon after UltraViolet organized a protest outside Reebok’s New York flagship store in April 2013, the activists achieved their goal. Ross apologized for the lyrics, and Reebok dropped him (Cubarubbia).

Another victory for Ross’s detractors includes, as noted, Carleton University students petitioning successfully to have his concert canceled. In recent years, university students have commonly protested school-sponsored concerts perceived to promote rape culture. In 2013, Harvard students protested Tyga as the headliner for the annual Yardfest concert over songs such as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Ready to Fuck” (Romano). In 2015, Princeton students petitioned against Big Sean’s invitation to play at the university, identifying the lyric “if she look good, she pay me in sex” as a particularly apt example of misogyny and rape culture — though it escapes me why this line, even if read literally, is considered offensive, but that’s beside the point (Kitroeff).

While campus protests may generate headlines and impact one venue, the protests against Tyler the Creator had much more substantive effects. The Australian feminist group Collective Shout mobilized against Tyler, claiming his music incites violence against women and demanding the immigration minister deny him entry. The action seems to have sufficiently disrupted his visa processing that Tyler canceled his September 2015 concert. New Zealand forbade Tyler’s group Odd Future to enter in 2014 because his lyrics purportedly posed “a threat to the public order and the public interest” (Blistein). Tyler was also detained at the border and then banned from entering the United Kingdom in 2015. British immigration authorities justified their decision using a terrorism policy, explaining that the music is “based on the premise of [Tyler] adopting a mentally unstable alter ego who describes violent physical abuse, rape, and murder in graphic terms which appears to glamourise this behaviour” (Shepherd). Notably, the performer Odd Future was scheduled to open for in New Zealand was white rapper Eminem, whose lyrics have been reviled for violent misogyny referencing raping, torturing, and killing women, including specific people like his mother and ex-wife. But Eminem had no trouble entering the country despite a catalog of songs containing lyrics like “Put your hands down, bitch, I ain’t gon’ shoot you / I’m a pull you to this bullet and put it through you / Shut up, slut, you’re causing too much chaos / Just bend over and take it like a slut, okay, Ma?” (See Fitzgerald for more “shocking” Eminem lyrics.) Furthermore, although British people have protested Eminem’s concerts, he has never been constructed as a terrorist by the state or banned from entering the United Kingdom.

For an astute blog analysis of the racist selectivity of protests, see Janet Bloomfield, “Attention Black Men: You Are Not Allowed to Sing Songs about Rape. White Men, Feel Free to Carry On. La Dee Da Da Rapey Rape La La La!” from JudgyBitch.

So why do Black artists incite more feminist and mainstream activist outrage and provoke more intense State action than their white counterparts? One obvious answer is racist selectivity. As Kimberlé Crenshaw observed of the 1990 obscenity prosecution of 2 Live Crew in Florida, “it may have been the background of Black male sexual violence that rendered 2 Live Crew an acceptable target for obscenity in a lineup that included many stronger contenders” (p. 257). bell hooks has also addressed the racist double standard applied to Black and white cultural products, suggesting that rap music’s misogynist and violent themes are not unique but reflect dominant white majority values. She explains that “a central motivation for highlighting gangsta rap continues to be the sensationalist drama of demonizing black youth culture in general and the contributions of young black men in particular.” She then compares gangsta rap with the Oscar-winning film The Piano, finding the story celebrates misogyny, sexism, and white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, yet it was widely praised in the press and by her peers.

The hypocritical and racist targeting of rap music and Black men identified by Crenshaw and hooks can be understood through what Duru identifies as “the myth of the Bestial Black Man: a myth deeply imbedded in American culture, that black men are animalistic, sexually unrestrained, inherently criminal, and ultimately bent on rape” (p. 1320). Such imagery has served political ends, from justifying slavery in the past to exonerating police shootings today (White; Lawson). It should be noted that feminist anti-rape discourse has also, at times, been complicit in perpetuating this racist construction (Davis). For example, Angela Davis carefully analyzes how Brownmiller’s groundbreaking book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape effectively participates in the “resuscitation of the old racist myth of the Black rapist” (p. 178). But the racist trope not only delivers white supremacist utilitarian value; there is also an erotic appeal. As bell hooks explores in her iconic essay “Eating the Other,” racial difference offers “a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling” (p. 21). We see evidence of this racialized desire’s sexual dimensions in Nancy Friday’s book My Secret Garden, which catalogues women’s sexual fantasies. In a chapter titled “Big Black Men,” Friday explains why Black men hold such taboo appeal for white women: “The black man is cut out for sexual fantasy. Everything about him, real and imagined, throws fuel on the fire. He’s forbidden because of his color; his cock has been endowed with mythic proportions; and the story’s been around for years that his expertise at fucking comes close to black magic. All black people are promiscuous … white people think. They’re always fucking or they’re about to. They reek of sexuality” (p. 181). Friday’s eroticized and dehumanizing “Big Black Man” character is the flip side to Duru’s demonized “Bestial Black Man.” Both are products of a white supremacist imaginary that both fears and desires Blackness. What is particularly striking is that both are also premised on linking Black masculinity to sexual violence. As Friday explains, “The first thing a woman does in the black-man fantasy is to remove the guilt by making it a rape. Being raped allows her to throw her (helpless) self more wholeheartedly into the act, so that every determined thrust can be read as one of struggling protest” (p. 181). I am going to suggest that the continual and disproportionate targeting of Black artists by feminist critics and state actors fits within Friday’s sexual fantasy taxonomy. In claims that people like Rick Ross, Big Sean, Tyga, and Tyler the Creator perpetuate rape culture, represent a threat to women, or are themselves terrorists, they rely on the image of the eroticized “Bestial Black Man.” It is a racialized rape fantasy that allows detractors to continually imagine, talk about, and take pleasure in this deviant caricature while safeguarding their own purity. It is also a fetishization of Black masculinity, both because of its obsessive qualities and its erotic flavor. As Farley suggests in his article “The Black Body as Fetish Object,” “Whiteness is not a color; it is a way of feeling pleasure in and about one’s body. The black body is needed to fulfill this desire for race-pleasure” (p. 458). I contend that the disproportionate targeting of Black men in feminist activism and state regulation is both racist and a form of fetishized race-pleasure.

Rapey music as a kinky fetish

Thus far I have considered how fetishization operates problematically through the language of “rape culture” and the hegemonic hypersexualized image of the Black male figure. Now it’s time to consider the bright side of fetishization — because I don’t want to simply critique condemnation; I want to directly defend the music on its own terms. I suggest that characterizing rapey songs as essentially misogynist, promoting sexual violence, and being a dangerous influence is premised on reading lyrics literally and confessionally. But if we see the songs as art and fantasy, then we can rethink the music as a site of fetish play within a kink framework. I will continue using the “rapey” label to reference songs that include sexual aggression and violence, but as my analysis shows, I don’t see this characterization as necessarily bad.

Kink is not just a subculture or erotic practice; it can also help us theorize new forms of non-normative pleasure. As Foucault says of sadomasochism: “It’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously … [BDSM practitioners are] inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body — through the eroticization of the body. I think it is a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. The idea that all bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our possible pleasure — I think that’s something quite wrong. These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so on” (Gallagher and Wilson, p. 165). From this perspective, the advent of “hard-core hip-hop” created a new fetish through its staging of violence, excess, and exaggerated gendered difference. In analyzing this complexity, Miller-Young suggests that hard-core hip-hop practitioners “both challenge and are constituted by the racialized, gendered, and sexualized terms of representation in pornography and hip-hop, as they negotiate ways to strategically represent themselves as subjects of fetishistic desire” (p. 266). She further argues that “this self-fashioning produces new spaces for desire and pleasure through counter-fetishization” (p. 275). As Foucault’s perspective indicates, although sexual subject matter may appear in many songs, the pleasure is not “sexual” in the conventional sense. Rather, it involves using “strange parts of our bodies” — our sense of hearing — to foster a hip-hop aural erogenous zone (Gallagher and Wilson, p. 165).

Music has been endowed with seductive power since ancient civilizations. Think of the beguiling pleasure of the Sirens in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or more recently, the Jackson 5’s “Blame it on the Boogie.” Researchers have begun studying how music can induce pleasurable bodily sensations known as chills, thrills, frisson, or — sometimes — skin orgasms (Harrison and Loui). Music psychology researchers Harrison and Loui discuss the “skin orgasm” concept: “The term implies a pleasurable sensation that is paradoxically both universal and variable. It affects different parts of the body depending on the person and circumstances of induction, and retains similar sensory, evaluative, and affective biological and psychological components to sexual orgasm. Furthermore, transcendent, psychophysiological moments of musical experience have been shown to incorporate the same neural reward pathways as such visceral pleasures as food and sex” (p. 2). The pleasure of “skin orgasms” is both akin to genital orgasms and also a deterritorialization of sensation — a kinky diffusion of pleasure including tinglings, tears, lump-in-the-throat sensations, and muscle tension or relaxation. My own experience with skin orgasms is what drew me to this topic and inspired me to challenge reductionist, literal, and abstract readings of lyrics outside their musical and physiological context.

Kink also provides a way to analyze the violent and demeaning fetishized scenarios in some songs through the lens of role play. In BDSM, role play can be integral, often staging hierarchy, humiliation, and violent abuse for the pleasure of participants. Similarly, in sexually hard-core or violent songs, artists can assume an exaggerated “top”

position, portraying themselves as fantastical lovers or ruthless rapists. Meanwhile, the listening fan can identify with the singing artist, with the “bottom” in the described scenario, or with both. Although many critics assume that songs sung by men lead male listeners to identify with the singer and female listeners with the recipient addressed as “ho” or “bitch,” this presumes an essentialist, stable, binary identity in both body and imagination. Instead, we can consider the fluidity of identification, as Clover observed regarding cross-gender and bisexual identification possible with another kinky medium: horror movies. Songs are even more likely to encourage cross-gender identification because we often sing or rap along, uttering the words as if we are the narrator. (I cannot count how often I have uttered “My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns hun…” [Sir Mix-a-Lot] despite not having an “anaconda,” i.e., a penis.) The beauty of experiencing your kink through a rap song is how easy it is to switch roles and identifications — no need for costume changes like in a live BDSM session. Furthermore, you don’t need a “safe word” to end things if they suddenly feel wrong; just turn off the listening device. While anti-BDSM and anti-rapey song critics accuse these practices of replicating existing power relations or perpetuating demeaning imagery, this ignores their conventions. As McClintock notes of BDSM: “As theater, S/M borrows its decor, props, and costumery (bonds, chains, ropes, blindfolds) and its scenes (bedrooms, kitchens, dungeons, convents, prisons, empires) from the everyday cultures of power. At first glance, then, S/M seems a servant to orthodox power. Yet, on the contrary, with its exaggerated emphasis on costume and scene, S/M performs social power as scripted, and hence as permanently subject to change” (p. 89). Similarly, Gates says of 2 Live Crew’s criminalized music: “These young artists are acting out, to lively dance music, a parodic exaggeration of the age-old stereotypes of the oversexed black female and male. Their exuberant use of hyperbole (phantasmagoric sexual organs, for example) undermines — for anyone fluent in black cultural codes — a too literal-minded hearing of the lyrics” (p. 514). Rapey songs can thus be interpreted as BDSM fetishized performances, where pleasure is cultivated through exaggerated roles and violent motifs.

Rapey songs particularly resonate with the common kinky practice of “dirty talk.” This is the naughty sexual speech uttered between partners to heighten pleasure. Songs can similarly engage in dirty talk for taboo excitement. Consider a line rapped by T.I.: “I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two” (Freedman; Westmarland). Taken literally, this scenario is unappealing. But as fantasy and dirty talk, it’s hot. I can easily imagine someone saying this to a lover during sex and the words enhancing the experience. An online magazine article on the “science of dirty talk” offers five reasons this practice arouses (Borreli), each applicable to rapey music: (a) “You’re less self-conscious in the moment” — when singing and grooving, we can assume and explore alternate personas through a socially sanctioned medium; (b) “It allows you to take control … or to relinquish it” — as discussed, you can sing and identify with the sexual stud or imagine being ravished; (c) “It increases arousal” — the success of songs with such lines suggests the dirty lyrics enhance pleasure and popularity; I certainly fell for songs both for their music and their seductive macho lyrics; (d) “Overcoming the ‘Good Girl’ complex” — nice girls should not engage in dirty language, but when delivered as a song, we can claim we “love the tune” or “never listen to the actual words”; and (e) “It allows you to live out a taboo fantasy” — seduction, rape, torture, rage, arousal against your will, killing the father, fucking the mother — the lyrics create narratives we can safely occupy for the song’s duration.

Perhaps one reason rapey music’s dirty talk is censured while bedroom dirty talk is tolerated or even encouraged (Mehalic; Triffin; Alptraum) is that in song form, it transgresses the public/private divide. In my view, this makes it all the kinkier. As Califia states in Public Sex, public sexual displays and practices are constructed

Finally, both BDSM play and rapey music can deliver a sense of healing and catharsis. Kink scholarship has explored the therapeutic potential of role-playing, including a recent study suggesting that BDSM “rape play” may offer therapeutic benefit to survivors of sexual assault drawn to kink. Rape play involves a scripted, consensual enactment of sexual violation. The fact that some desire this activity, particularly survivors of sexual assault, challenges the kink-phobic assumption that BDSM is a space only for those untouched by “real” oppression. No equivalent studies have examined the potential healing offered by rapey music, but given its appeal across genders and the widespread prevalence of unwanted sexual experiences, I argue there is something about singing or moving to sexually violent lyrics that may help some of us cope with a messy world. Similarly, Drew Daniel explains how Meatmen’s explicitly anti-gay music had a surprisingly affirming effect on his queer youth precisely because of its hatefulness: “The violent threat within ‘Tooling for Anus’ is a textbook example of what Judith Butler has termed the ‘unexpectedly enabling response’ through which the language of abuse and hatred can suddenly reveal ‘a certain possibility of social existence.’” In my own experience, rapey lyrics have helped sublimate fear of sexual violence and diminish the sting of unpleasant memories.

This article addressed rapey music through three prongs of fetishism. First, it engaged with critiques of rapey music by showing how condemnation relies on a fetishized process. Reviewing proliferating feminist lists of problematized music and the paranoid ways rape is read into lyrics, it borrowed from Eco to suggest that “rapey” and “rape culture” serve as fetish concepts. The zealous pursuit of traces of sexual coercion reveals an erotic fascination within the language of censure. Second, it analyzed the disproportionate targeting of Black performers in social activism against rape culture and the influence these complaints have had on universities, corporations, and the State. The positioning of Black male rappers as sexual threats relies on the myth of the "Bestial Black Man” and invokes a racialized rape fantasy that allows condemners to revel in taboo eroticism while claiming to be in danger. Finally, it suggested that rapey music can be enjoyed as a fetish experience, creating a space for non-normative pleasure, allowing shifts between top and bottom roles, setting dirty talk against a musical backdrop, transgressing the public/private divide, enabling multiple identities, and fostering catharsis. While not true for everyone, there is epistemological and ethical value in taking seriously those who derive pleasure and empowerment from this paradoxically marginalized and flourishing genre.

The article acknowledges excellent workshopping venues and thanks participants of a workshop at Carleton University, the Faculty Workshop Series at Pace Law School, Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, the 16th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law, and other conferences for challenging feedback.