Reflection on Project 4

In the end, i’m proud of what we made, of what we achieved. Our piece “Where have all the female rappers gone?” is about the lack of women in Hip Hop and how those that are often have to conform to sexual stereotypes. I’m really happy with our work, it’s probably the best thing I’ve done this semester. Our aim was to make a upbeat and interesting look into how and why female MC’s don’t have the same recognition as their male opposition. There was already plenty of research into this topic and so talking and learning about it was really easy and fascinating. We split the work into three sections so that we could each talk about different areas of the topic. I spoke about the history of Hip Hop, but with the limited time i spoke mainly of the very start of hip hop and nothing really past the 1970’s. Lyreca spoke about The Influence and Power Hip Hop with a Modern Example – Nicki Minaj and Alice on Female Rap and Hip Hop Artists In Today’s Popular Music Culture.

Our group worked really well together. We all found the topic interesting and grew passionate about it, it was nice to get to know Alice and Lyreca better and i hope that over the next 2.5 years we will work together again. I did know more about the technical side of our project, but Alice and Lyreca were really good at the stuff i wasn’t good at, for example i hadn’t ever had to reference something and doing this kind of research was relatively new to me. Also as i perceived, i was far to relaxed about the project and so often when trying to meet deadlines i was scrambling to meet them sufficiently. I should learn how to take theses assignments more seriously and remember that  i don’t have all the time in the world. But everything is in on time (hopefully) so it’s more a personal struggle with time frames.

What would have saved time, would probably be us foreseeing the time limit (7-8 mins) when trying to put all our seperate pieces together. When i first edited it all to gather it was somewhere around 11 minutes. The struggle was that we thought everything we had made and spoken about was relevant to the piece. It was really difficult to go back and cut things we had worked really hard on. To give some perspective if we had used everything we had written and spoken about each of our pieces would be around 7-8 minutes. Another thing was probably the volume of each of our pieces, for some reason Lyreca’s part was very quiet, and Alice’s was very loud. When i was editing them all together it was hard to find a way for each section to match. The ‘Vox Pop’s’ we did where all recored on phone’s, but it gave the piece some nice variation in sound.

When doing my research i found that i already new a lot about the subject. So when it came to referencing i didn’t have much to give apart from a documentary called “Hip Hop: evolution” which went  into lots of detail about my topic. It would have been better if i had found some kind of article with details of Hip Hops history, but i was caught up in the creative side and was having too much fun with it. I tried to find some of the stuff i had watch or read when i was younger about the topic, but in the end it was just that documentary that came out last year. It was interesting to learn that when it hit the 2000’s there was a rapid decline in female MC’s. It as thought is they weren’t being hype sexualised then they weren’t relevant enough.

It comes down to Hip Hop being a male industry, made by and for men. That the mainstream music (of hip hop) is often dominated by very masculine lifestyles. But if you look at any other genre of music it is often that women are equally represented and so we aimed to question why Hip Hop comes with such misogynistic tones. The piece it’s self is a little over the time limit, we tried to cut it down as much as possible, but if you listen to it, i’m sure you’ll enjoy the extra 40 seconds or so on the end. I know it’s not good practice to go over time limits, but personally i feel that 40-ish seconds isn’t too bad even though i know we’ll loose marks over it. We tried our hardest and we are all very proud of our work and it’s such a nice feeling even if other people don’t enjoy it or find it boring. As long as we’re happy with it.

Thanks gals. x

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