That title is a bit misleading for this is not about the brilliant Flight of The Conchords song. However, today’s post is about hip hop – and art.

London-born, New York-based artist Zoe Buckman is a longtime fan of the music genre and since I was mentioning Yeezy a few weeks ago, I thought her work – vintage lingerie that she hand embroiders with (often misogynistic) quotes from the music genre – would make a nice counterpoint to it.

Buckman’s ongoing Every Curve project explores various themes – female objectification, feminism, hip hop and violence among them – and is partly about the artist working through her feminist values and the obviously conflicting lyrics of the music she loves. She expresses the words of Biggie and Tupac specifically, stitching some positive excerpts from their music and some blatantly more sexist writings, all of it on vintage underwear from various periods. The lingerie itself highlights something about the path of female liberation – moving from restricting corsets to free-flowing 1920s slips then on to (backwards to) rigid shape-squeezing pieces from the 1950s.

It’s worth reading her own eloquent description of the work here, which ends with a question that I feel hasn’t been hugely unpicked before. At least not when the subject of misogyny in hip hop is raised in the (high brow obvs) media I read:

“The work uses both the sexist and misogynistic language as well as the positive language of the different song lyrics. Buckman is not shunning the violent content, but rather exploring the dialogue between the two and finding a way to flip the negativity — to create something beautiful, and hopefully thought provoking, as a way of working through the struggle. Because, in a country where young black men are born to believe there is something intrinsically deviant about them, how can one shun the music for expressing the violence that they have been told they possess?”