The worst part of hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail last summer wasn’t the blisters, the muddied shoes, or even the racoons who stole the food one night. By far, it was the car rides, where I sat almost losing my mind from frustration at the songs put on by the seven guys also on the trip. We worked at a Maine summer camp, where workers had three days off to take a break from the endless pains of scrubbing toilets and spraying dishes.
The crux of the issue lay not in the company, but rather in the music that propagated a vile atmosphere inside the van during the four-hour journey to the first ascent. For some reason, everyone refused to play anything except Kanye West—now legally known as Ye—whose music I detest not only for its awful rhythm, but more importantly, for its recurring themes of antisemitism, misogyny, and racism. Because these themes insult their targets and infect their listeners with harmful sentiments, we must refrain from listening to songs imbued with these messages.
West has clouded himself in a multitude of morally unacceptable actions like writing a 2025 song titled “Heil Hitler” available on YouTube and posting a variety of antisemitic, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+ tweets. Many have argued to me that we must separate the art and the artist when deciding the morality of listening to particular songs, but in almost all cases of morally decrepit singers, their vile ideas leak easily into their music. For example, West’s antisemitism crosses the boundary from tweets to art in “Heil Hitler,” where he remarks that he “became a Nazi.” While opening the comment section to the music video, I hoped that the almost 100,000 people who watched it had simply stumbled upon the abomination and had sat appalled through the ordeal. Sadly, comments like “Ok why does this version high key slap,” “Kanye the truthful genius,” “This song was promised 3000 years ago,” and “I’m listening to this on my gramophone whilst reading Mein Kampf… What a night” rebounded with fervor.
The attempt at humorous sentiment with these antisemitic statements, along with a few misogynistically degrading jokes I heard in that Appalachian Trail van, clearly aim towards social bonds through these twisted status symbols of antisemitism or misogyny. Although “Heil Hitler” is an extreme example and I’ve never heard anyone around me listening to it, songs that sexually degrade women run rampant in too many social circles. A frequent favorite is “Gold Digger,” where West critiques a woman who accepts money for sex before ordering her to “Get down girl, go ‘head, get down.” He also critiques child support and her receiving “half” the money when she divorces her husband, singing, “she got one of your kids, got you for eighteen years.” The song’s popularity spans such vast regions that even I, an outspoken opponent of West, hear the haunting rhythm whenever I read the lyrics; in fact, “Gold Digger” enjoyed fame as the ninth best-selling and ninth most-played hit from 2000 to 2009 according to People magazine.
Indeed, themes like the sexual objectification of women and reduction of female roles to male-dominated frameworks appear so frequently in music that avoiding them seems out of the question. As Bretthauer et al. found in a 2007 study on the top 100 songs of the year, 18.3% objectified women, 16.7% portrayed sexual violence, and 10.8% defined women by their romantic male counterparts.
The same problem manifests in racist lyrics, which appear less frequently but still significantly in West’s music. His song “I’m In It,” for example, which I have regrettably heard in social settings, exhibits a worrying racial fetishization of Asian women; West describes an Asian woman as a dish of “sweet and sour sauce.”
West expands his vaguely racist misogyny in “New Slaves,” where he presents a female “Hampton spouse” as an object over which to exhibit sexual dominance in service of subordinating her wealthy husband. Besides the implied prejudice that women can’t build wealth themselves, his degradation even leaps past the boundaries of common lyrics, arguably pushing past sexual objectification into sexual violence; the lyrics contain too much profanity to fully represent here in the school newspaper, but West’s proposed actions are non-consensual and violently derogatory. According to a critical analysis of “New Slaves” by Graysen Stille and a New York University article by Grace Ross, West even frames this violent objectification of wealthy women as a racialized class struggle by painting the endeavor as a weapon of revenge against powerful, racially oppressive people “in the Hamptons.”
Most of the listeners to these songs don’t begin with misogynistic intentions, but through listening to the music’s content, they could develop the sentiments the music expresses; according to Janet St. Lawrence and Doris Joyner’s 1991 study, men’s sexual violence and negativity towards women spike after listening to sexually violent music.
The choice of listening to degrading songs like “Gold Digger” might stem from the catchy beat or lyrical genius, but the allure of these songs often pulls these listeners into cycles of misogyny, antisemitism, and racism. To end these harmful loops and protect the dignity of their targets, we must prioritize the integrity of targeted groups over our personal pleasure of music.
At the end of the day, I find myself reminiscing about the more gentle era of rap, when the genre could boast Tupac’s proclamation in “Keep Ya Head Up”: “And since we all came from a woman / Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman / I wonder why we take from our women / Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?”