Women and Hip-Hop: A Complicated Relationship
I'm not a relationship expert like The Playmaker or some certified doctor. I've most assuredly dated women (an amount that will stay between God and I), but that doesn't make me the best person to talk about relationships, nevertheless extremely complicated and volatile ones. But, in celebration of Valentine's Day, I've been charged with the responsibility of breaking down hip-hop's very strange and somewhat insane relationship with women and try to give some advice to hip-hop in general. While there's a lot of good in this giant mess of a subject, there's a lot of bad, and I will try my very best to be as helpful as I can in this analysis.
So let's start with the good, shall we? Hip-Hop has seen a lot of good in terms of the romance department. There are classics such as I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By by Method Man and Mary J. Blige as well as LL Cool J's I Need Love that enter the mind of most in depth hip-hop heads when asked for good love songs. And boy, do these everyday modern poets turned lover boys deliver on the amount of reality and emotion. But it's with time that rap learned to get deeper in its romantic feelings and even share its insecurities. 50 Cent proved it when he released 21 Questions, which dived deep into the uncertainties that a lot of men in relationships feel, such as if she'll stay, what would happen if us men went broke or if we're even good enough for her. But as deep as women make us feel, it's how we show our love for them that also paints a positive light, and that thanks to my fellow Toronto-native Drake, who released Best I Ever Had, off of his So Far Gone mixtape, which said:
Sweatpants, hair tied, chillin' with no make-up on
That's when you're the prettiest, I hope that you don't take it wrong.
Some rappers are able to exhibit positive attributes about the women that they love. I feel we should therefore give it credit where credit is due.
Now Hip-Hop has been labeled as a genre of music that preys on women, using them as either punching bags or as sexual objects. The outlook that a lot of people in mainstream society have of the Culture, which is of being a club filled with misogynistic pigs that hate women, seems understandable. On the "moderate" side, there's Ja Rule's bread-and-butter in the thugs-need-love-too song. His most famous one, Always on Time, having this particular gem of a line:
B****, you know better, we live M-O-B
Money over b*****, Murder, I-N-C
I got two or three hoes for every V
And I keep 'em drugged up off that ecstasy
I could elaborate with what's wrong with those bars, but I rather not sully my keyboard like that. But, I'll do it anyways. Do not call a woman a b**** if she doesn't want to be called a b****. Side note, don't drug women, or people in general Ja. It ain't cool. But that's the moderate stuff, because Eminem has a full six minute song dedicated to murdering his ex-wife Kim Scott, which is ironically called Kim. Slim Shady went to an extreme level of horror core on this song that I do not know if anyone has tried to be as openly violent and cruel on a track ever since.
To finish this off, having evaluated the good and the bad through the lyrics of some of Hip-Hop's elite - the cream of the crop -, here's my own personal assessment, and the best way to put it is to quote the late-great Tupac Shakur:
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?
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
We've done a lot of wrong in hip-hop, but it's not something we can not correct. Let's follow Pac and treat women, and not just the ones in our lives, with respect. After all of the revelations in 2017 with Harvey Weinstein and the rest of the media industry, couple that with the amount of spotlight on rappers today now that we're the most listened to music genre in America, we've got a responsibility to make things right. One of my life secrets is something that my mom told me when I was young: "respect women the same way that you respect me, your mother, and if you truly do love me, you'll do that." We gotta be better, we don't have a choice. Happy Valentine's day to all.