During my last summer as a teenager in 1987, I got a cassette of Too $hort's Born to Mack and was excited by the first rapper I'd ever heard, using obscene language. Not only were the swear words shocking, but the way $hort talked to women also surprised my sensitive nature. On “Freaky Tales,” he brags about some filthy adventures. On the next song on the album, “Dope Fiend Beat,” he prefaces the first verse with his now-signature derogatory, a sing-song Biiiiiiiiiitch!: “Bitches on my mind/I can't take it, now's the time/All the nagging bitches talk too much/Bitches that tease dicks don't get laid.”
My mother confiscated the tape but never threw it away. I quickly tracked it down and began listening to it secretly. Born to Mack not only used language to describe girls/women that the two most important women in my life, my mother and my great-grandmother, had forbidden, but its lyrics offered a kind of manual on how to treat women, working to indoctrinate me with the value, or lack thereof, of girls/women. NWA released Straight Outta Compton the following year, an album that became the standard for gangsta rap. On “Dopeman,” Ice Cube raps, “Strawberry, strawberry, the neighborhood whore,” characterizing a woman who has sex for crack in a slum. While $hort and NWA were laying the foundations of patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism, it took me at least a decade to learn what those words meant, much less to consider them with any informed acuity. Just a few years later, I was head-banging to Dr. Dre's “Bitches Ain't Shit” from The Chronic before college basketball games. “Bitches ain't nothing but bitches and whores/Lick these nuts and suck these dicks,” goes the hook. “When you're done, get out/Then I'll hop in the coupe and go for a ride.”
Misogyny comes from the Greek words meaning hatred and women. Dre's lyrics epitomized that hatred. Moreover, unlike Born to Mack's regional success, The Chronic became a cultural phenomenon. It sold over five million copies, was ranked 40th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, and was described as “landscape-changing.”
Between these two albums (and more), overt misogyny went mainstream. Meanwhile, in my personal life, my mother began a decades-long struggle with cocaine addiction that affected how I listened to the music I heard and normalized a sense of disappointment and distrust for her. By the time The Chronic came out, I had been selling cocaine, sold it once or twice as a teenager, and watched as skinny, unkempt-haired women stumbled into drug dens, said they had no money, and offered to trade cocaine for sex. So my relationship with rap music is inseparable from the fact that it was once more real than some otherworldly hyperreality.
It wasn’t just sitting at a drug stand. It was watching some of my peers look out the window of my high school classroom at the drug stand (it was across the street) and quickly take a drag when a smoker approached. It was my father, a pimp, trying to instill his values in me. It was being raised by uncles who were pimps and drug dealers. It was my beloved aunt who was killed while working as a prostitute for one of my uncles (not her brother). It was having classmates who started pimping themselves before we were old enough to buy alcohol. It was watching girls we went to school with work as prostitutes or strippers or get pregnant or addicted to drugs. It was having some classmates who worked hard for their own group. It was hearing that my high school was always criticized for its poor academic performance. That was my world from the time I was a little kid with Jheri curls until I left home in my mid-twenties.
My experience is neither the norm nor the exception in black life, but these lyrics were nearly impossible to ignore, and even harder to condemn, even knowing they were harmful. Only a fool would claim that misogyny isn't rampant in today's most popular rap music. Common sense: ignoring women as inferior rappers. Common sense: characterizing women solely as sex objects. Common sense: rappers bragging about passing women around to have sex with their men. Common sense: rappers degrading women as unfaithful or gold-digging. Common sense: calling women bitches, whores, cheats, and sluts.
No one should underestimate the harm that misogyny does to all women. It morphs into the acceptance of rigid gender norms; it creates anxiety, erodes self-esteem, and fosters distrust of other women; it bashes women and encourages them to objectify themselves; and it manifests eating disorders and self-harm. But while all women are exposed to the traumas of rap music, misogynoir, which feminist theorist Moya Bailey defines as anti-black misogyny, is the beating heart of hip hop.
Who's “Bitch”?
Watch the video, look at the album cover. The overwhelming majority are black or brown women, leaving little doubt as to who we should associate with the word bitch. And who is a bitch matters because black and brown women already suffer many disadvantages compared to white women. Black women have shorter life spans and are more likely to die during childbirth. They have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and anemia. They earn less but are more likely to be heads of households, live in segregated areas, and have lower property values if they own property at all. Insulting black women as bitches, whores, prostitutes, and prostitutes is like kicking someone who is hurting. Someone who is oppressed by the ills of society because of the intersection of gender and race. Who is a bitch matters because our culture does not have enough to mitigate the harm inflicted on black women.
Moreover, if the bitches, whores, prostitutes and hookers are our women, the kin of the black men who dominate hip hop, what does that say about our self-worth? Is our hatred for the same women who gave birth to us and raised us also a form of self-hatred? If they lack humanity, then why shouldn't we?
This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Esquire.
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A few weeks ago, I downloaded Future and Metro Boomin's collaborative album, We Don't Trust You, and listened to their song “Like That” (which just shot to the top of the Billboard Global 200 chart) on repeat. The rap world was in an uproar over Kendrick's anti-Drake verse, but what's really striking is that I've never heard any critical feedback about Future's lyrics.
“True to the rules, all the girls in town / I stick it up their noses and they leak” … “All my girls on mushrooms, niggas, all my girls on cocaine” … “She thinks she's an exotic bitch, hot / And she'll get you run out of the district” … “You know these girls starving, fuck for the name / I put her in the gang, fuck for the chains”
Is it a good thing that misogynistic rap is the most popular? No, absolutely not. I’m sure that the fact that I stream it is part of the problem. But as a critical person, I can’t ignore the fact that rap music is part of a culture that was born in response to institutional oppression and is still shaped by that institution. What kid wants to live across from, or even inside, a drug house? What kid wants to have their sleep disturbed by the din of ghetto birds? What kid wants to sit in an apartment with no refrigerator, worrying about where their mother is? What kid wants their dreams of going to college dashed as far as living on the moon? Surely a major change in the culture of rap music demands a major change in the conditions of the people who are both its primary producers and subjects? Misogyny in rap is terrible, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine anything worse. I know it reflects the norms of “me vs. the world” and “survival of the fittest” that permeate the realm of the oppressed, rules that are also always a battle between the sexes.
Why do I still listen to rap? For better or worse, I feel like rap music still represents my culture and shows the experiences that shaped me. I often fool myself into thinking I can only listen to rap as entertainment. My critical ear is wary. Rap needs an informed listener who can appreciate it. But believe me 100%, the older I get, the less I can relate to rap, and the more it weighs on my psyche. At this age, it's hard to listen without feeling sad. Behind rap's bravado, its glorified violence, its accentuated materialism, I feel pain, and I know that much of the music comes from a place of brokenness. It's a place I know well. And because I refuse to believe and believe that I'm better than where I come from, entertaining the idea of not listening anymore feels like a throwaway of my culture, like proof that I've degenerated into someone I despise: an Uncle Tom who looks down on his most damaged compatriots.
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