Woman to Woman: The Root
Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 8:55AM (text skip)
What looks like a classic catfight on wax is actually another example of how soul music continues to tell the social temperature of black America. Just as black women’s fiction in the late 1990s in the Terry McMillan vein gave voice to a post-civil rights era of the successful black professional woman, soul music continues to express our anxieties about the state of the black family. In recent years, songs such as Destiny Child’s “Independent Woman” and “Bills, Bills, Bills,” and Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” have only heightened tensions.
With large numbers of black men continuing to drop out of mainstream life due to drug addiction, incarceration and the general feeling that they couldn’t be the “man of the household” without a job, it shouldn’t be surprising that the pressures black women feel to share available black men would show up in pop culture. These could be real-life issues for Fantasia—the single mom who against all odds became an American Idol—and Hudson—whose hardscrabble come-up from Chicago’s South Side took a tragic turn late last year. more
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