A HIP HOP GIRL GROWN UP AND CONFUSED (PART 1)

I grew up on hip hop. Older cousins played Run DMC and Rakim; mother was bumping Sugar hill gang. Father lived in the Bronx where I stayed every summer and saw breakdancing on cardboard, graffiti murals, rap battles. I rushed home to watch Video Music Box and as I got older stayed up late to hear Stretch and Bobbito. Hip hop is one of my loves, much like Badu’s “Love of my life” song. Yet like love affairs and like Common’s “I used to love H.E.R” there have been some valleys in my love affair with hip hop that have been revisited with the Straight Outta Compton movie.

Rap doesn’t love me. Hip Hop neither. The me of whom I speak is ladies/women. It’s not rap’s fault. It’s a creation within a system/country/world that doesn’t value women so of course it would have those tendencies. However it is only as an adult woman I realize how far the disdain of women really goes.

I grew up singing, “bitches aint shit” and thinking well I’m like the Jeru the Damaja song, so I’m a Queen and not a bitch and position myself in a hierarchical ladder above the so called bitches.

I sang songs that judged a women’s sexuality and said, “Let a hoe be a hoe-and fuck a hoe”, because again I wasn’t a hoe and who cares about those girls/ladies of loose morals?  Well as an adult I do,  because in the mind of many average non rapping brothers on the street there is little difference between the sisters/queens and bitches/hoes. In seconds a woman can go from being thought of as a queen to being that bitch. As an adult I care why a young lady behaves a certain way….you know, “educate a woman educate a nation”.  As women we’ve internalized it as well and pull out our bitch tactics and hoe ways too like its cute.

I’m not as comfortable as I use to be with my lover, Hip Hop. All the years later and we are still trophies, sexual objects, side line participants in a boys/men’s club. The brothers don’t want to listen to us, don’t want to apologize for anything, and don’t want to be called on nothing they donot by us at least. Whenever you critique them you’re a hater or even worse in the hip hop circles you’re a dyke, anti-black man sell out.

Why cause I don’t want to be called out of my name? Why, because I want you to apologize for times you’ve hurt me? We are in the same place as a people in part due to our inability to come together as man and woman. Where are the brothers that stand for the women? Not just on Facebook but in their real lives? I know they are there yet I’m beginning to think they’re like good cops….an illusion, peas in rice, too little too late.

This is not about Dr. Dre, Tupac, or any artist really, it’s about us. We are sick. I am sick. I want to be well.I see the programming. I see the tricks and I want out. I want my brothers out. I do not want the babies to catch our sicknesses.

This is old news, an old conversation that I didn’t join as a youth because Ithought the ladies doing this talking were haters, biter, old, ugly you name it. I wasn’t down with their brand of activism. I wasn’t down with any woman activism, I was for the brothers. Yet I’m not sure the brothers are for me anymore.That hurts. I love Black men. I can’t see myself with anyone but a Black man, however what am I to do when that love is not reciprocated? And listen I’m light skin with the alleged “good hair”…if I don’t feel the love….then damn.

I know there are brothers who are conscious (so called) who do not support this music. Yet in their personal lives many of them don’t support women, don’t love the women in their lives either. So it’s bigger than music, bigger than hip hop. And the hip hop brothers I think who walk the walk and live a certain way in harmony with their women are silent. I know it’s always a few loud ones dominating the conversation and the other voices are there. I just don’t hear them and maybe that speaks more of my circle than anything else. Maybe I listen to the wrong stuff; maybe my collection of underground artists has slacked since the 90s; maybe I have really drunk the Kool-Aide.

It’s hard. I want to bump Future, still how many times can I be a freak hoe? How many bitches does it take to go platinum? How many hoes? Yet I thought bitches weren’t shit but hoes and tricks? I still like that song though. What type of scientific experiment have I been a part of? How has this manifested in my life?

Some will say it’s just music; people make a choice which is true. People were who they were when they got here and many came from toxic environment and I have been empathetic for years.  I’m tired now. I’m a mommy now to a 12 year daughter who also loves Hip Hop. How do we not get hurt by what we love?

Loving Hip Hop as women is like being in an abusive relationship sometimes. You never know when something is going to pop up and trigger an issue. Straight Outta Compton is a trigger yet not the underlying cause of my discomfort with hip hop. It’s been there for years, festering, confused, ignored.

Only us can save us, yet we have to willing to talk, to apologize to do better. I still bump that Future cause I was raised on Luke’s “Doodoo Brown”, I’m West Indian, I like to shake my ass, and I like sex yet I don’t want to feel that that is the totality of how the brothers see us. I don’t want it to be ok to beat us (well I paid you so be quiet). I don’t want it to be how the world sees us (Nicki’s ass touted up on display).

How we gonna win if we aint right within? Calling all healers, mediators, bold thinkers, trap stars, hoes and queens, we all we got, and we need all hands on deck. It aint about the music, again, its about us, the music is just a manifestation of who we be, how we feel, and what the powers that be think we will gravitate to due to our patterns. If you want to change the world Lola, you have to change yourself.

Peace from Soul Force Worker #1 Lola Fulani