![]() Published in the same year as Rose’s germinal analysis, Whitney Peoples (2008) concurs, adding that mainstream rap’s predilection for images of consumption, partying, and sex, buttressed with masculine violence is commercially successful “only because it works hand-in-hand with long established ideas about the sexual, social, and moral nature of Black people” (24).Ĭonversely, Aisha Durham, Brittney C. Asserting that the sexually explicit identity performances of female rappers are a key part of the culture’s hegemonic commercialism, Rose insists that hip hop’s prevailing portrayal of “the gangsta figure, bitch, ho, thug or pimp is negatively affecting the music and the very people whose generational sound is represented by hip hop” (28-9). In The Hip Hop Wars (2008) Rose argues that the “gangsta-pimp-ho trinity” (241) makes up the grist of commercial hip hop’s promotional mill and functions as the movement’s most rampant metaphor due to the corporate consolidation of the media industry and mainstream consumer appetite for racially stereotyped entertainment. Tricia Rose takes up the foundational perspective of bell hooks that the prevalence of representations of sexism, misogyny, and violence in popular hip hop is not the invention of Black culture, but “a reflection of the prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 1994). However, some scholars have been deeply critical of female rappers who appropriate essentializing and reductionist discourses to assert their own “Freak Like Me” identity. Keyes further asserts that these personas are not mutually exclusive, so that female rappers, like Lil’ Kim or Foxy Brown, can adopt and adapt these personas to create strong, sexually dominant and dominating identities that run counter to masculine hegemony (204). In “La Di Da Di,” the mother chases after the MC, grabs hold of him and laments, “Ricky, Ricky, Ricky, can’t you see/Somehow your words just hypnotize me.” With a backdrop of Barry White’s homage to women, N.W.A.’s track creates a nexus of the pimp-ho dyad, characterizing the gangsta rap moment of the 1990s and early 2000s and uncovering the thematic as it appears in a less virulent form of misogyny in hip hop’s early days.Ĭheryl Keyes (2002) proposes four main categories of female rapper identities, constructed in opposition to the male hegemony they experience in hip-hop (and the broader) culture: the “Queen Mother,” the “Fly Girl,” the “Sista With Attitude,” and the “Lesbian” (189-207). ![]() In this anecdote, Dre introduces another woman, Vicky, by repeating her name three times, with a slow drawl that harks back to MC Rick’s own anecdotal rap track in which an unworthy mother attacks her daughter in order to seduce the MC, the latter’s ex-boyfriend. Fresh track “La Di Da Di” ( The Show, 1985). Dre relates: “I told her I’ll take care of you, you take care of me/You’ve got a P-I-M-P and all I want is the money.” Conversely, the second anecdote reaches back to the foundational MC Rick and Doug E. Dre narrates three of the four anecdotes that make up “One Less Bitch.” In each, the female protagonist reveals herself to be untrustworthy, money-hungry, and degenerate in the rapper’s eyes, thereby demonstrating an early example of the pimp-ho trope in a particularly violent fashion, and providing a rap trope directly cited in 50 Cent’s track “P.I.M.P.” (in which this rapper also spells it out for his women-adversaries Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, 2003). ![]() The song can be considered a nexus point transforming early, less contentious images of women into blatant “hos.” Ironically, the track samples Barry White’s R&B love theme “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby” ( I’ve Got So Much Love to Give, 1973), but flips the original theme of lavish adoration to one of suspicion, contempt, and retributive murder of “morally bereft” and “weaker” women by “powerful,” “smarter” rapper-pimps. For example, N.W.A.’s “One Less Bitch” ( Niggaz4Life, 1991) is a poignant example of misogynist currents that have evolved and run through some rap. However, this has not always taken positive forms women have been the preferred subject of patriarchal, misogynist, or moralizing tracks since the beginning of the movement. Women have been central to hip-hop culture since August 1973, when DJ Cool Herc inaugurated the movement with two turntables at a dance party for his sister’s sixteenth birthday.
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