I was sitting in the passenger side of the car, singing along to the chorus of some rappers’ latest hit song. A friend of mine, a black man, had been driving me around that day, but at this particular moment the car was parked. I can’t recall what we had been doing that day or why we were sitting there in a parked car. I think it was during the daytime, but my memory is a bit hazy so I can’t say for sure. The one thing I do remember is what came next.

My guy friend asked me a simple question, “Why do you like this song?”

I thought for a moment. “I don’t know. It has a nice beat. It’s a party song.”

“All this song is talking about is how the guy wants some girl to [insert slang terminology for the act of fellatio here]. I don’t understand how you girls can even listen to this kind of music. It’s really degrading to women.”

In that moment, something changed in the way that I thought. I came to realize that I had not been consciously listening to the lyrics of the music I sang along to. Yeah, I heard the lyrics; heck, I had memorized the lyrics, but I was not critically examining what I was hearing or what I was repeating.

I don’t think I was alone in my lack of critical evaluation of the lyrics I sang to. All around me I see black women dancing and singing to music that’s caustic enough to clean car engines. Young black women, really, any woman who regularly consumes mainstream rap music cannot be critically listening to the music. If female fans truly understood what they were hearing, then they would connect the degradation in the music they hear on the radio to the way that they get treated at rap concerts.

Do you listen to mainstream rap music? And if you don’t still listen to this music, what made you finally stop?