Money over bitches. (really?)

With almost the same voracity an unattended child might attack the contents in a cookie jar; furtively, with the same sense of urgency and insatiability, I’ve found myself overtaken by boundless greed to consume copious amounts of what – to the uninitiated – must sound like some genre of advanced nursery rhymes (with the requisite pinch of inner-city lingo, of course) – rap.

It’s partly the gun-totting advocacy, the blatant misogyny, the shamelessly celebrated chauvinism and the cleverly arranged vituperation that makes me want to altogether abandon the “music” (to be so presumptuous as to label it such) that I’ve come to love. It’s partly that, yes, but that doesn’t come close to what might be the last straw on this camel’s back. As a man – granted, an effeminate, epicene and at time sensitive man, but a man nonetheless – feminism is a study I didn’t expect to cross paths with and a class on feminism, seeking to edify the world at large on the plight of women, motherhood and femininity in general is one I didn’t anticipate I’d be enrolled in much less enjoy. As the only male among opinionated and quite convincing females and as the semester went on, short of desiring to be a woman, I began to feel I should daily wield placards supporting whatever agenda my fellow women had. Alas, as much as women are demeaned in rap music, and in rap videos reduced to nothing but jiggling breasts and bouncing buttocks, they are the lesser victims in this pandemic for the rappers themselves – enslaved by their vices – are the biggest victims of their own devices.

Lil' Wayne

Without unnecessary prodding from Vibe, The Source, Rolling Stone or whatever other publication one is supposed to read before making the informed decision on what CD to purchase; without that and without heeding the annoyingly pervasive NPR/PRI-esque pretentious commentary by social gadflies and pop-culture pundits at VH-1 and MTV (and rarely at BET), I went out and on a whim (emphasis on “on a whim”) purchased a CD by a certain rapper. Lil’ Wayne is his name but you can call him ‘The Baby’ but if you can’t say ‘The Baby’, you mustn’t say it at all. Anyway, I digress. more