Fly-Girls, Bitches, and Hoes: Notes of a Hip-Hop Feminist

You know Boo, it's been six years since I've been writing about hip hop on the Joan Morgan womanist tip and I'm still getting asked the same questions. At work, the intelligentsia types want to know if, "Given the undeniably high content of sexism and misogyny in rap music, isn't a declared commitment to both, well, incongruous?" And my girls they just come right out, "You still wit that nigga?" So I tell them how good you do that thing you do. Laugh and say I'm just a slave to your rhythms. Then I wax poetic about your artistic brilliance and the voice (albeit predominantly male) you gave an embattled, in pain, nation. And then I assure them that I call you out on all of your sexism on the regular. That works, until someone, usually a sista-friend, calls me out and says that while all of that was valid that none of it explained why I stayed in an obviously abusive relationship. And I can't lie Boo, that would stress me. 'Cuz my answers would start sounding like those battered women I write about. Sure, I say, all defensive. It's easy to judge-to wonder what any woman in her right mind would be doing with that wack motherfucka if you're entering now, before the sweet times. But the sweetness was there in the beginning of this on-again off-again love affair. It started almost sixteen years ago, around the time when Tony Boyd all mocked-neck and fine gave me my first tongue kiss in the back of L.S. 148 and the South Bronx gave birth to a culture. Those old school deejays and M. C.'s performed community service at schoolyard jams. Intoxicating the crowd with beats and rhymes, they were shamans sent to provide us with temporary relief from the ghetto's blues. As for sisters, we donned our flare-leg Lee's and medallions, became fly-girls, and gave up the love. Nobody even talked about sexism in hip hop back in those days. All an M. C. wanted then was to be the baddest in battle, have a fly-girl, and take rides in his fresh O.J. If we were being objectified (and I guess we were), nobody cared. At the time, there seemed to be greater sins than being called "ladies," as in, "All the ladies in the house, say 'Oww!"' Or "fly-girls," as in, "What you gonna do?" Perhaps it was because we were being acknowledged as a complementary part of a whole. But girlfriend's got a point, Boo. We haven't been fly-girls for a very long time. And all the love in the world does not erase the stinging impact of the new invectives and brutal imagery-ugly imprints left on cheeks that have turned the other way too many times. The abuse is undeniable. Dre, Short, Snoop, Scarface-I give them all their due, but the new school's increasing use of violence, straight-up selfish individualism, and woman-hating (half of them act like it wasn't a woman who clothed and fed their black asses-and I don't care if mama was Crackhead Annie, then there was probably a grandmother who kept them alive) masks even from my own eyes the essence of what Ifell in love with.