Hip Hop music, like many other areas of arts and culture, is predominantly dominated by men. The overwhelming male control of hip hop music is evident in the masculinist characteristics of the music and of hip hop culture as a whole. Virtually since its inception, rap music, like several other music genres, has been characterized by performative masculinity and sexual conquest over women, among other things. Due to these characteristics, hip hop music often spouts violent and misogynistic lyrics that regard women as objects of sexual gratification and male control. …

“And now,” Plato says, “let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened.”

Plato personifies this ‘unenlightenment’ of human nature through his famous “allegory of the cave” — the allegory of prisoners chained in a cave whose entire perception of reality is but shadows cast on a wall in front of them. For Plato, the shadows on the wall are not reality but rather mere reflections of more real objects. 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes similarly hypothesized in the early meditations of his “Meditations on First Philosophy” that all of the human world is but…

Anyone who knows me knows that I am physically incapable of functioning when night falls. At 21 years old, I’m like a sad werewolf who instead of turning into some vicious fur ball of energy when it gets dark, turns into a sleepy old man who can’t keep his eyes open for more than 3 seconds. But on the night of the Black Is King release, I arose from my slumber before my seven alarms could even ring. Here I was at 2:09 am wide awake with nothing on my mind except the words “Beyonce is here.”

And she came…