Undergraduate student Deyana Atanasova had an essay published in the 2019 issue of Creating Knowledge. Titled “Rap: Remixed & Reloaded,” she discusses remix and feminism within contemporary rap, specifically homing in on the social media feud between mainstream artists Cardi B and Nicki Minaj of last year. Deyana’s essay points to the strategy of remixing traditionally masculine rap pieces and analyzes how female rappers have appropriated them for themselves.
We got the chance to talk to Deyana not only about her essay itself but also her experience in publishing it.
Tell us a little about your research interests. How did you come to write about remix and parody in rap music?
The first thing I want to address right away is that I’m a white woman, and a lot of these issues come up in particularly black and brown communities. I’m actually working on a proposal right now for the Writing Center at the Peer Tutor Mentor Summit about this one thing that Tyler the Creator mentioned during the Grammys. He recently won for his album, Igor, and it was thrown into the rap category. I feel like this idea of categorization is coming up a lot, and when I started out thinking about this research essay in WRD 263 (Reading Between the Grooves: The Rhetorical Power of Popular Music), I had no idea what to write about.
One thing that struck me for some reason was the question of…“female rapper.” Why isn’t it just rapper? Then, I thought about feminism and prominent female rappers right now and some of the elements that they use in their music. Cardi B was all over the charts at the time – I mean, I’m sure she still is, but definitely then. The feud between Cardi B and Nicki Minaj was a very interesting sort of event that was going on, and I thought, “What’s up with this? What’s going on?” Part of me wanted to explore the language in the music, which we had been doing a little bit in class, and see how I could construct an argument around that.
What made you pick Creating Knowledge for publication? What was the process for writing and submitting?
I knew of Creating Knowledge. I’d see it when I’d go to advising sessions and on those little coffee tables and always feel like, “Oh, that’s so cool.” It was actually my professor, Jason Schneider, who mentioned it to me and said I should consider submitting.. It didn’t have to be an essay from the class. It could be anything. I thought, “Why not?”
I had recently submitted something for the first time to the New York Times for the “Modern Love” column because I had went to a book club meeting with Marina Shiffrin who wrote 30 Before 30. I really got into that mindset of wanting to submit and see what happens. I submitted my essay to Creating Knowledge very close to the deadline, but Dr. Elliott got back to me soon enough and was like, “We’d love to work with you,” which made me super excited. Throughout the summer, it was going back and forth emailing each other, the committee and Dr. Elliott would leave comments on the draft, then I’d revise it again and again. This happened like least three or four times.
Talk a little about the paradox you explore in the article. What’s going on with this “cross section of the hypermasculine feminist paradox” in hip-hop and rap?
I tend to do this in every essay, but I just got feedback on one this morning, saying, “You seem to be arguing too many things here.” I was like, “That’s literally the story of my life.” I feel definitely choosing a paradox in this case makes it even harder to write about, which is why all that feedback was so helpful in terms of making it clearer. Something that I thought was interesting – especially in feminist pedagogy and development – is that [the female rapper’s] anti-feminine qualities aren’t feminist, yet they’re embracing all of it. I thought it was interesting to see women who are rappers engaging in this hyper-masculine rhetoric with violence and guns and these things that were associated previously with masculine qualities, how they bring that to their music and are still emboldened by it, to now see them harnessing it, then topping the charts – even though originally those things were working against them. I was examining how that language works. The idea of remix comes in because there’s so much sampling going on in music, like with Nicki Minaj’ use of a B.I.G.’s sample and my writing about the different versions of “Barbie Dreams.”
Why is pursuing publication something that other WRD students should maybe look into? What do you see as its benefits, both professionally and personally?
I think in terms of those taking classes in WRD and any discipline really… just submit it. It’s taking a chance. I literally threw an article to the “New York Times” into the void, and nothing happened. I never got a response. But it felt nice to write and to actually send it out there and say this is something that I did. Of course, it looks great on a resume or whatever, but if you don’t have any actual value in that, if you’re just doing it to put it in a little bullet point, what does that say about you? You have to have this passion about what you’re talking about, because it’s hard to write about something you don’t care about in even a page, let alone nine pages or 15 pages or a hundred pages. For WRD students and anyone, just submit and try, and getting that feedback from a committee and a professor is very beneficial It will not only help the endeavor in that specific project itself, but the feedback that I got I have applied to all domains in my writing.
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