a pimp named slickback

rap in the 90s...it's creative, it's candid, it's controversial; but how much does the music dictate real life? and how much does real life dictate the music? today on the show...

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Rap in the ‘90s seemingly had a whole lot of pimpin’ in it; slick-talking, smooth-walking, the new New York City mafiosos held the reins of the city’s radio stations, dominated new releases, and explored the city’s raunchy underbelly. Nas wore a pink suit and toted Tecs; Jaÿ-Z donned a scarf and hard-bottoms, conversing with Clark Kent as his alter ego Cashmere Jones about the proper way to treat their hoes. Memphis Bleek’s first name stood for Making Easy Money Pimpin’ Hoes in Style. None of them were in any actuality purveyors of pussy, nor were they mobsters. Nas was the lyrical ‘chosen one’, appearing on records at the age of 16; Bleek was Jaÿ’s little man from Marcy Projects; and Jaÿ was a pusher who had stopped hustling drugs to start hucking CD’s (despite his numerous proclamations that he was not a rapper). Yet Jaÿ, alongside Harlem’s Big L and Lefrak City Queens’ Akinyele (as well as Yonkers’ Sporty Thieves on the parody tip) all were speaking to their prowess and ability with women while not providing for them, loving them, or even having a relationship with them. They were all simultaneously doing more and less than the conventional dirty mackers (see: Ill All Skratch and Bryan McKnight, LL Cool J, and the like) who had more money than you, were better-looking than you, and were more well loved by your girl than you. On the contrary, these new rappers seemed to be telling us that all that shit didn’t matter, because they were so ill they didn’t have to be anything to a woman but their genitalia.

Can I kick a rap to you? Breakin’ one off for the ladies, of course: Would you fuck me for free? But don’t worry baby, I’m not no scrub, riding passenger side of my best friend’s ride: so can I get some love from you? Even though we could never be a couple hun, cus fuck love all I got for ho’s is hard dick and bubblegum. Y’all chicks ain’t gettin nada, ya p*ssy ain’t even worth the Ramada; is Big L slow? Hell no, bitches get fucked on the roof when I ain’t got no hotel dough. Bottom line: life’s short so I play hard and stick hard, even though I might only love you when my dick hard.

What many have attributed to a generalized ‘culture of misogyny’ in rap, I’d like to examine a little deeper; a little more materially. Those smooth girl-stealers and the pimps who followed shared a common political economy, and this environment could explain their particular anxieties regarding money and their relationships with women. There is a transparent transactionality to intimate relationships according to these men (i.e. Big describing a woman who did him wrong despite his ‘trickin’ on Get Money, implying that the conditions of her loyalty lay on his ability to provide gifts for her), one that they are refusing by only offering women their sexual prowess and nothing more. What we commonly know as perhaps now outdated monetary dating practices (men paying for dates, treating their women with gifts, paying their rent, etc) arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as ‘treating’ culture. A rapidly urbanizing and industrializing United States created new avenues for men and women to encounter each other outside of the home. The more widespread employment of women in the workplace, and the creation of public spaces like amusement and public parks (as well as open-admittance clubs and bars) allowed people to intermingle and ‘date’ one another. Men were encouraged to provide economically for women in exchange for their company and, at times, for sexual favors. A new economy surrounded these new cultural practices, and sexuality attended the ability of a man to provide for his partner.

Sexuality’s relationship with income becomes important when listening to Black men who were already super-exploited by the cities they lived in and labored for. To be more precise, cities constructed upon their backs an economy which incarcerated and robbed them, especially towards the end of the 20th century. The same economy availed them of illicit products to sell as a result of government dealings (and prevented them from investing their accrued wealth via conventional avenues, by refusing them loans for property and draining the wealth from their cultural output: music sales, via the ultimate perversion of good intentions that is the record industry). So, is it so confusing that rappers became a media and music-producing class preoccupied with conspicuous consumption and flaunting money via cars, clothes, and hoes; simultaneously bragging about procuring attention and favors from the opposite sex without economic involvement, while professing an underlying anxiety regarding still receiving this attention should they be returned to their impoverished state? Black rappers’ precarity in their own industry, and their maleness’ precarity in the state of the world, produced rap which obsessed itself with being capable of supporting a woman, but with not providing for this woman because of their own insecurity and anxieties vis a vis providing for themselves. 

The particularity of money in the references, and the expression of love not for women but for money (even at times in place of women) leads me to ponder the misogyny cast over the entire genre. The lyrics often quoted in arguments broaching this question (i.e. fuck bitches, get money) are mistranslated; Biggie wasn’t objectifying women, but rather describing pitfalls in a relationship with a woman who did him wrong. Uncle Luke and the 2 Live Crew were describing sexual acts, sure, but did not even insinuate violence towards sexual partners nor was it obscene, contrary to the insinuations of Broward County’s Sheriff and DA. Jeru the Damaja describes how he felt used by the women he dated in ‘Da Bichez’, pursuing him for the material shit; he later amends his statement in ‘Me or The Papez’ to recognize more directly that his ill will is not a male-oriented dig at their female counterparts, but rather a product of how ‘the paper’ had contorted dating into transactions, and Jeru wouldn’t have it. 

The idea that rap as a whole is misogynistic as a genre is not necessarily rooted in a close reading of lyrics or in avid listenership and critical fandom. The portrayal of black men as sexually aggressive has existed as long as modern media in the United States (the first American movie, WD Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, fits the bill), and the twisting of sexual expressiveness into criminality and violence is but a stepping stone in the path of white supremacy; even the macks and pimps of hip hop, supposedly the worst of the worst, were just telling street stories, creating an image of a man who was secure to hide their material insecurity. The man most responsible for introducing violence against women into the music was none other than Marshall Mathers, a frustrated white man; while rap, and black musicians within it, may have been guilty of coarseness, are they charged too with structural sexism? Should we blame rappers for being transparent about the monetary and sometimes capitalized nature of dating? Faced with exploitation in business, and violence from the state, when black men making music felt like their intimate partners were getting over on them too and dating them for access to cash, judging their masculinity by their money? When dating culture twisted itself into johning and simping… ‘90s rap niggas decided to get on their pimping.