Pamela Segura, NY, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
When I was younger, I delighted in music videos. I enjoyed how fantastical and formulaic they seemed. Pop music videos featured a series of dancers, many of whom were female and often displayed a great deal of coordination and agility. Hip-hop videos were equally as methodical: men delivered rhymes with fervent hand motions while women pranced about.
Many of these videos sent a complicated, deeply fraught message to me: girls were spectacles to be admired and assessed in a particular setting.
The hip-hop videos, however, engaged me because they frequently contained women in a decidedly urban space.
Of course, I didn’t understand the notion of “urban space” when I was eight. To me, every child knew the same images and sensations I did while growing up on East 198th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx: stairs leading to the B and D trains, fading streetlights, blaring music and shouts from passersby, greens trees sporadically playing with the grayness of concrete. I felt comfortable in this environment, in this home that would only later become an “urban space.”
I gravitated to hip-hop music and videos because they felt like an extension of that home. I heard rap tracks swimming through my building’s hallways, or down by the corner of the street during mixing with the ice cream truck’s refrain. And I saw those buildings in the same videos. My younger self was engaging in an affirmation of her identity: there’s me, there’s my home, and there’s my music.
This changed when I was eleven. My sister and I were making our way home from our school, a quaint parochial school that sat on the left side of Grand Concourse right before Bedford Park Blvd. We were in uniform: skirts, knee-high socks, heavy black shoes. I noticed a group of teenage boys walking towards us, one of whom carried a radio playing Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.” One boy said something quite loudly to his friends: “I love Catholic school girls. They give the best head.”
Even now, at the age of 22, the vulgarity of that statement shocks and shames me. It strikes within me a strange mixture of anger and frustration, sadness and confusion. These teenagers perhaps didn’t possibly understand what they were indirectly doing: fetishizing girls and their Catholic school uniforms. These teenagers perhaps didn’t realize that they limited my ability to feel safe, to feel empowered and healthy in my own space. These teenagers perhaps didn’t realize how young my sister and I were.
As a young girl, however, I just knew that it was…not right. I obsessed about the comment—and the uniform and music that contextualized the comment—for several days. I wrote about it in my diary and slowly began to interpret Nelly’s lyrics and video. There isn’t much of an urban space in this video. Much of the video’s narrative consists of men and women packed tightly into a nightclub; the women eventually take off their clothing because it’s “hot in herre.” The lyrics dictate the visuals: Nelly eyes women in the club and clothes slide off bodies.
But I heard the song in my urban space. And the specific attention to women’s clothing in Nelly’s song altered something in me. The connections were too vivid, too coincidental to ignore. My sister and I were walking, enjoying our time on Grand Concourse, chatting away the day and passing the train station. A comment from some other place, a far different and darkly mature place, penetrated that naïveté.
As I got older, the streets that shaped my childhood perspective became an “urban space,” a locale to be probed, theorized, considered, and written about. I developed a fear of the train when I was entering my teenage years. The train system in New York City seemed the ultimate irony. It gets you everywhere, opens up your world to the most famed and most hidden corners of the city, grants you that liberty with limited economic commitment. Yet, it’s all about cramped spaces; it removes the idea of privacy. Certain stops, moreover, had—and still, unfortunately, have—no lighting.
While my awareness of the “urban space” grew, my experiences with street harassment increased. And so did those of my other female friends.
Now that I’ve graduated from college, the Bronx still seems like a geographical puzzle, one that is shaped and reshaped by so many different factors. Hip-hop is a culture that sprang from there, and its nuances—musical sampling, lyrical realism and sensationalism, awareness of social ills—highlight just how beautiful and complex the Bronx will always be. But this music also reveals the strangeness “urban space” and, most important, how that space makes the body seem open, public, ready to be expressed.
Pam recently graduated from Manhattan College and she writes for SciArt in America. You can follow her on Instagram or Twitter @pamlivinlovin.
