The Cattery

The Cattery

A Grey Day

25 February 2004
Filed under Language, Music, Politics, Text, The Interweb

While applauding the idea of Grey Tuesday, which seeks to free a pretty fantastic musical project from constraints imposed by the notoriously litigious EMI, I have one small, niggling concern: bitches.

Me and my beautiful beeeeeeeitch in the back of that 'Bach
- Dirt Off Your Shoulder

If you havin girl problems I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
- 99 Problems

I feel that word like a slap every time I hear it. I think I find it even harder to take when it's used in a generally positive sense – as in "beautiful beeeeeeeitch" – because it seems to me like an attempt to justify blatant misogyny.

I love the sounds and feel of hip-hop and rap, but its language is often so defiantly angry and male that I feel excluded by it. In fact, I have a very clear memory of my first experience of this: I was eleven, and the boys I hung around with were right into NWA. One night at a party, they played a song - I've got no idea of the name of the song, or of the real lyrics - about gang-raping a woman and then killing her. These little boys were cheering, and it made me feel sick.

In a sense, it's okay that I feel left out: I'm a white woman, and rap's not really talking to me. But as it gains currency in the mainstream, I get a twinge of fear that some people - like my old grade six classmates - will take up the violence it implies and run with it, without understanding whatever ironies and cultural associations rap has defended itself with in the past.

Views from the Floor

BJ says:

I agree Virginia. I like the beats of that Jay Z "brush your shoulders off song", those twangy beats with the beh, beh, beh, beeh bah.

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