Blood Brothers: Male Chauvinism, Feminism and Hip-Hop

For several other websites, I have written about the world of the "alternative right" and their xenophobia and sexism. It gets a bit tired and boring after a while, as for the most part these guys are rehashing stuff that is older than the earth itself. Building off of Will Pierce's post about jihad MCs, I thought it would be worth examining the strange world of guys like Jack Donovan, a gay male ritual advocate.

Here is a taste of a review by John Safran, writing for Vice magazine, of Donovan's book Blood Brotherhood:

Blood Brotherhood is a survey through history, mythology, and literature, uncovering these bloody rites of male alliance. The bulk of the anthropological research comes from his co-writer – and fellow gay against gay culture – Nathan F. Miller.

The introduction tells gay couples to use this book as a “toolbox for the imagination.” Choose one of the rites or mix and match your own!

There are fairly simple ones. Shaolin monks in 17th century China “pricked their fingers, and mixing blood with wine, drank it and swore an oath of brotherhood.”

For something more flamboyant, perhaps plan your big day around the initiation rite of the Mala Vita, an Italian criminal organisation: “the leader of the band and the novitiate both made wounds in their chests, and then they sucked and drank each other’s blood.”

If you’re a right wing homosexual environmentalist you are catered for too. The Timorese drank blood from a bamboo container, then hung it on a freshly planted tree, vowing “If I be false, and not a true friend, may blood issue from my mouth, ears, and nose as it does from this bamboo.”

The European and Asian rites were to prove courage and devotion; to say this bond is serious; we are kindred spirits in a conspiracy.

The African rites are all this, plus divine threat. Break the oath and there will be voodoo retribution. In Uganda men cut their stomachs and roll coffee beans in the wounds. They then feed each other the beans. Sleep with your blood brother’s wife and the bean will swell up and kill you.

Blood Brotherhood makes a pretty convincing case that men are instinctual cutters. Throughout history everyone was doing it, unaware everyone else was doing it too. The blood chugging enemies of Alexander II King of the Scots weren’t to know the nomads in Borneo had been smoking blood across the equator for an eon before them.

Read the rest at Vice Magazine: JOHN SAFRAN’S CONTROVERSIAL BOOK REVIEW - Viceland Today

Never mind the contradiction of Donovan being affiliated with white supremacists but nevertheless citing the rituals of Timor, Africa and Asia to back up his thesis. Both him and Safran are making epic and honest analysis of male behavior - something that has been bizarrely missing from cultural thought for several decades.

This is completely relevant to a website that focuses on hip-hop for many reasons. With massive entourages of other men, often battling other massive entourages of men, hip-hop is in many ways a musical representation of the core male need to have male identity and company. I've often said that it is not coincidence at all that a large degree of rappers are men who were raised with no fathers. The rappers who have no father - ranging from Tupac to Eminem to 50 Cent - also happen to be the most aggressive and overtly masculine while those that knew both of their parents - Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar - are way more emotionally well balanced and even in touch with their feminine side. The latter had the yin yang balance of both genders in their childhood while the former were deprived of the guidance of their fathers.

In forming this website, Will said to me that we both share a "concern" for the upbringing of today's young men. We both breathed fumes of fire when reading an article by feminist Pamela Paul who argued that fathers "weren't necessary" based on statistics she scrapped together. (I have actually lived an entire life without knowing my father and can tell you what that is actually like in the real world.) Both Will and I seem to "get" this essential undercurrent of hip-hop as a genre and we intend to focus on it as much as possible, in order to demonstrate the impact of gender and parenthood on society at large.

Nas, arguably one of the greatest rappers also got this and was greatful for having had a present father:

"Bridging the Gap" featuring Olu Dara, from Street's Disciple

"I got to know [my father] more in that whole period, I got to learn more about him and his life and his career and why he made certain decisions, things that I never asked before. It brought me closer to him, and also just made me look at life different, just watching him and how he'd come up, and the musical decisions that he chose to be where he is. Most kids in the 'hood don't have their fathers around or didn't have their fathers around. The ones I grew up with had dope fiend fathers and shit like that, crackhead fathers, convict fathers that stayed in jail, like the story goes. Treach had this rap, 'Never knew my dad / motherfuck the fag.' If you played that in the club back in the days, all you had to do was turn down the music from 'Never knew my dad,' and the whole crowd would scream, 'Motherfuck the fag,' because everybody can relate to that, even me. Not with my father, but with my friends. I thought it was important to put a record with my pops is just, out there. It was just important to me."

"It was Steve Stoute's idea [to sample Alabama 3's 'Woke Up This Morning,' The Sopranos' theme music]. When he told me, I thought it was the craziest thing ever. What's more gangster than The Sopranos? At the time, that was the shit, and for us to have that hook, and then find out it was some black choir who came up with the song, that whole thing worked out great."