David Diallo, ch 10 "From electro-rap to G-funk: A social history of rap music in Los Angeles and Compton, California", in Mickey Hess, ed., Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide, Volume 1: East Coast and West Coast (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), pp 228–231 on Ice T, particularly p 231, and pp 234–238 on N.W.A, amid backstory on their precursor, contemporary, and evolving rap scene in the Los Angeles area. In more focus on the scene's transition from electro rap to gangsta rap, whereby N.W.A's landmark album, Straight Outta Compton, in 1988, granted West Coast rap its first unique identity, see Loren Kajikawa, "Compton via New York", Sounding Race in Rap Songs, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp 91–93. For more on the album, see Steve Huey, "N.W.A: Straight Outta Compton", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, visited 14 Jun 2020.
Chris Steffen, interviewer, "Ben Folds on repeating mistakes, conjuring characters, and repeating mistakes", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, 23 Aug 2019. Here, piano rock singer Folds discusses his own 2005 cover version of "Bitches Ain't Shit" and clarifies that he took most of the original song's "misogynistic rant" out from his own version. Yet Folds also says, "Dr. Dre is no dummy: there's comedy in it, there's Quentin Tarantino, and then there's also serious stuff in it." In turn, about the Hollywood filmmaker, Bret Easton Ellis, "The gonzo vision of Quentin Tarantino", NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 12 Oct 2015, cannot "imagine an earnest 20-something millennial dreaming up a film as perverse and lurid" as his 1994 film Pulp Fiction or 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, much less "his racially explosive comedy-western Django Unchained." Ellis deems 2015 "obsessed with 'triggering' and 'microaggressions' and the policing of language", whereas Tarantino's films are "relentlessly un-PC."
David Diallo, ch 10 "From electro-rap to G-funk: A social history of rap music in Los Angeles and Compton, California", in Mickey Hess, ed., Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide, Volume 1: East Coast and West Coast (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), pp 228–231 on Ice T, particularly p 231, and pp 234–238 on N.W.A, amid backstory on their precursor, contemporary, and evolving rap scene in the Los Angeles area. In more focus on the scene's transition from electro rap to gangsta rap, whereby N.W.A's landmark album, Straight Outta Compton, in 1988, granted West Coast rap its first unique identity, see Loren Kajikawa, "Compton via New York", Sounding Race in Rap Songs, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp 91–93. For more on the album, see Steve Huey, "N.W.A: Straight Outta Compton", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, visited 14 Jun 2020.
By the July 1998 release of Nate Dogg's repeatedly delayed solo album, the curtain was already closing on the G-funk era [Thomas Erlewine, "Nate Dogg: G Funk Classics, Vols. 1 & 2", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, visited 24 Apr 2020]. Even longer overdue, the eventual studio album from the Long Beach trio 213—formed of Warren G, Snoop Dogg, and Nate Dogg in 1985 [Lola Ogunnaike, "Dogg day afternoon", Vibe, 2001 Dec;9(12):156–160]—was a 2004 release, The Hard Way, competent G-funk for the nostalgic. "Time waits for no man", an album review closes [Rondell Conway, "213: The Hard Way", Vibe, 2004 Sep;12(9):236].
Kate Stone Lombardi, The Mama's Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger (New York: Avery Publishing/Penguin Group, 2012), quotes Michael Kimmel suggesting a usefulness of the college women's video: "What moms can say to their sons is, 'Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric? That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [p 230] Lombardi, likewise, hints that "guys" will perceive their own "moms" in the collegiate young women's clubhouse appearance, genteel manner, and "angelic voices" as an altogether unthinkable target of lewd misogyny [pp 229–230]. For reference, here is the Lombardi book's full treatment of the song: "The Barnard Collegea cappella group posted their rendition of hip-hop superstar Dr. Dre's song 'Bitches Ain't Shit' on YouTube. Dressed in pink, the young women's angelic voices rise in harmony, gently singing the lyrics 'Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks. Lick on these nuts and suck the dick.' Those are actually some of the milder lyrics, and the incongruity of hearing the incredibly misogynistic words coming sweetly out of these college students' mouths makes its point. 'What moms can say to their sons is, "Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric?" ' Michael Kimmel says. 'That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [pp 229–230] Thus, besides Lombardi's syntax that strictly, but trivially, states that the women's voices are dressed in pink, she may overlook that the choir covers only the Ben Folds version, whose most harshly misogynous lyrics she quotes when suggesting that the choir also sings the Dr. Dre song's more harshly misogynous lyrics. At such recurrent mixup, Folds elsewhere clarifies, "That song is like a six-minute-long misogynistic rant that never stops, and I took most of that stuff out" [Chris Steffen, "Ben Folds on repeating mistakes, conjuring characters, and repeating mistakes", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, 23 Aug 2019]. Lombardi is also, in any case, "a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and for seven years wrote a popular regional column that focused on family issues. Her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reader's Digest, Parenting magazine, and other national publications, and she is the winner of six Clarion Awards for journalism from women in communications. She lives in New York with her husband and is the mother of two adult children, a son and a daughter [Contributor webpage, "Kate Stone Lombardi", Ideas.Time.com, Time USA, LLC, visited 16 Dec 2021].
american.edu
Arielle Bernstein, "Girl swagger and blood lust: Rihanna, Taylor Swift and repackaging toxic masculinity for a female audience", Salon.com, LLC, 12 Jul 2015. Bernstein argues that female consumers and female artists have adopted "toxic masculinity" through chronic exposure to such media. "The sexualized violence in 'BBHMM' "—that is, R&B singer Rihanna's music video to her 2015 single "Bitch Better Have My Money"—"is particularly troubling" [Ibid.]. "One of the joyful things about watching 'BBHMM' is seeing a female auteur flex her muscles, building on the themes of successful artists who came before her and owning her power. The painful thing is knowing that this fantasy of power is so easily stripped away. In writing this article I watched 'BBHMM' over and over again; at first the scenes of violence were hard to sit through, but eventually I became inured to it. The shocking things became less shocking; the ordinary things more ordinary. I felt this same way listening to Eminem rap years ago in my teens and early 20s. I felt this way driving around with my college boyfriend, me in the passenger seat, listening to a version of 'Bitches Ain't Shit' by Ben Folds. 'I don't like this,' I said. 'It's ironic. It's funny,' my then boyfriend told me gently: 'It doesn't mean anything.' But it did. And it does. I've sat through so many songs about bitches and whores, and so many shows where cut-up female bodies are just part of the landscape. 'It's not about you,' a girl at a party tells me, when a sexist song begins to play. But it is. It is and it is and it is." [Ibid.] Berstein, perhaps evoking New York gangsta rapper Biggie Smalls's published persona, the Notorious B.I.G., uses the nickname "NotoriousREL" and "teaches writing" at a Washington DC university ["Arielle Bernstein", Salon.com, visited 30 Dec 2021], which calls her a "cultural critic who focuses on film, TV, art, culture, and how social media and digital communications shape human expression, interaction, intimacy, and empathy" [Arts & Sciences, "Arielle Bernstein: Sr professorial lecturer: Literature", American.edu, visited 30 Dec 2021].
On Saturday, June 12, 1993, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, the brutalized and mutilated body of Mollie Mae Frazier, age 81, was found in a field near her home. Victor Brancaccio, 16, once an altar boy, but otherwise troubled, would recall listening on his walkman to The Chronic track "Stranded on Death Row" when the elderly woman, a passerby, unwittingly provoking his attack on her, had criticized him for rapping the coarse lyrics aloud. For details, see Karen Testa, Associated Press, "Man convicted of widow's slaying gets new trial, fashionable defense", Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct 1998, and Erin MacPherson, "Family members plea to judge for grandmother's killer to stay behind bars", CBS 12 News website, 17 Jan 2018. On the American climate of controversies over song lyrics in the early 1990s, see Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First (Wesleyan U P, 2002), p 295.
S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), p 48, or elsewhere.
Jody Miller, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2008), pp 94–95, or elsewhere.
In 2017, prefacing a live performance, Folds explained, "You know, what's interesting, this controversial song, I didn't write it. I wrote the music to it, and Dr. Dre wrote the words." "There's a lot to be offended by in the song; I apologize if there are any bitches in the audience." "But honestly, the thing is that I took what is actually a heartfelt melody—and I spent it on this song. And the reason I did is because I thought that it was interesting to sing in a little, tiny-ass white voice the things that were being said, anyway, that we were consuming" [Sherman Theater, Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, 18 Apr 2017]. For further, see Mark Beaumont, "Remember the '90s fad for 'hidden tracks' on CDs?", § "6: Dr Dre—'Bitches Ain't Shit' ", NME.com, BandLab Technologies, 5 Apr 2019.
"Chart history: Ben Folds—Hot 100", Billboard.com, Billboard Media, LLC, visited 20 Jun 2020. "Bitches Ain't Shit" spent one week on the Hot 100, where it held #71 for the week ending on April 2, 2005. The single's A side, "Landed", in two weeks on it, peaked at #77 on February 26, 2005. Although this webpage's droplist menu, now simply an unsorted list, no longer has subheaders, there once were groupings, relevant in this case to distinguish popular via consumer uptake versus pop via music genre. Whereas the Hot 100 is a "popular" songs chart, there are "pop" songs charts, rather, like the Adult Top 40, where "Landed" peaked at #40 on August 13, 2005, and where "Brick", by his earlier band, Ben Folds Five, peaked at #11 on March 21, 1998 ["—Adult Top 40"]. Meanwhile, on another "pop" songs chart, the Mainstream Top 40, "Brick" reached #17 on March 28, 1998 ["—Mainstream Top 40"]. Yet on Billboard's other "popular" songs chart, Triple A Songs, where "Brick" had placed #9 on February 14, 1998, the Ben Folds song "You Don't Know Me", featuring Regina Spektor, peaked at #28 on November 15, 2008, and "Phone in a Pool" peaked, also at #28, on September 9, 2015 ["—Triple A Songs"]. Outside of "popular" and "pop" but under a "rock" chart is Alternative Airplay, wherein Folds has five songs, the first four as Ben Folds Five and the fifth as Ben Folds: "Battle of Who Could Care Less" for 12 weeks at #22 peak on April 26, 1997; "Brick" for 26 weeks at #6 peak on February 7, 1998; "Song for the Dumped" for 9 weeks at #23 peak on June 13, 1998; "Army" for 11 weeks at #17 peak on May 29, 1999; "Rockin' the Suburbs" for 11 weeks at #28 peak on September 22, 2001 ["Chart History: Ben Folds—Alternative Airplay", Billboard.com, Billboard Media, LLC, visited 14 Aug 2021]. Note that the Billboard 200, rather, is a "popular" albums chart.
During 1995, Tucker and Bennett, codirector of conservative advocacy group Empower America, recently director of US antidrug policy, and once the US secretary of education, appeared in a television commercial against music that allegedly "celebrates the rape, torture, and murder of women". In May, Dole joined the battle against "violent and sexually degrading music". They all targeted Time Warner apparently since its major music company Warner Music Group, as the only publicly traded American music company, was singularly vulnerable to public pressure. But, as foreign companies, like Germany's Bertelsmann Music Group, or BMG—the major label parenting, for instance, Arista Records, offering distribution to Bad Boy Entertainment—were delivering even more gangsta rap, Time Warner alleged itself targeted by political opportunists. Still, while gaining only some 2.5% of its own income from Interscope, Time Warner was in some 40% of households via cable television, and needed congressional approvals to expand in cable. [On the Tucker and Bennett teamwork against Time Warner, see Ken Auletta, "Fighting words", The New Yorker, 12 Jun 1995, p 35. On that and Time Warner's counteraccusation, see Richard S. Dunham & Michael Oneal, "Gunning for the gangstas", Business Week, 1995 Jun 19;3249:41. Toward the BMG tangent, see Christina Saraceno, "Bad Boy and Arista part ways", Rolling Stone, 21 Jun 2002. On Dole joining, and the pressure on Time Warner amid an important congressional bill on cable reform, see Julia Chaplin,"Dogg Fight", Spin, 1995 Oct;11(7):46. On Time Warner's profits and ownerships, which, besides the major label Warner Music Group, included some intermediary labels, too—Atlantic, Elektra, Reprise, and Warner Bros.—and on Warner Music Group dropping Interscope to likely nil consequence for either Time Warner, Interscope, Death Row, or music lyrics, see Julia Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65.]
books.google.com
Wayne Marshall, "Hip-hop's irrepressible refashionability: Phases in the cultural production of black youth", in Orlando Patterson with Ethan Fosse, eds., The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2015), p 184.
James G. Spady, Charles G. Lee & H. Samy Alim, Street Conscious Rap (Philadelphia: Black History Museum, UMUM/LOH Pub., 1999), p 538.
David Diallo, ch 10 "From electro-rap to G-funk: A social history of rap music in Los Angeles and Compton, California", in Mickey Hess, ed., Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide, Volume 1: East Coast and West Coast (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), pp 228–231 on Ice T, particularly p 231, and pp 234–238 on N.W.A, amid backstory on their precursor, contemporary, and evolving rap scene in the Los Angeles area. In more focus on the scene's transition from electro rap to gangsta rap, whereby N.W.A's landmark album, Straight Outta Compton, in 1988, granted West Coast rap its first unique identity, see Loren Kajikawa, "Compton via New York", Sounding Race in Rap Songs, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp 91–93. For more on the album, see Steve Huey, "N.W.A: Straight Outta Compton", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, visited 14 Jun 2020.
Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the 'Hood and Beyond (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), p 75.
Chuck Philips, "The big mack", Spin, 1994 Aug;10(5):48–53,96, p 53.
Sheldon Pearce, Changes: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), pp 173–177.
Ronin Ro, Have Gun, Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records (New York: Main Street Books/Doubleday, 1999), esp.p83.
Sheldon Pearce, Changes: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), p 182.
Marcus Reeves, Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2008), p 142. Besides the "pop-crafted ingenuity" of Chronic singles "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" and "Let Me Ride", Dre's gangstas in these songs and music videoes, not fleeing the police on grim streets, were cruising sunny boulevards in modified 1964 Chevy Impalas, showcasing them at street rallies, mingling at barbecues, and, after nightfall, drinking malt liquor at parties, at any moment puffing weed, altogether, at that time, "a glamorous brand of gangsta rap" [p 143].
Bryan J. McCann, The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), p 70–, for several pages, McCann swiftly unveils and deciphers the cultural subtexts of the G-funk aesthetic.
Travis L. Gosa, "The fifth element: Knowledge", in Justin A. Williams, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p 56.
Kevin L. Ferguson, Pop Goes the Decade: The Nineties (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2019), p 130.
In Calabasas, on the hills west of the San Fernando Valley, Dre had bought, in perhaps 1989, "a lavish troubadour-style home", and put a recording studio in an upstairs bedroom [Gerrick D. Kennedy, Parental Discretion Is Advised: The Rise of N.W.A and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap (New York: Atria Books, 2017), pp 123 & 132].
Nelson George, "Rhythm & blues", Billboard, 1986 Mar 29;98(13):27, identifies Galaxy Sound's owner as Dick Griffey. Viewable in 2021, a tribute website places the SOLAR building at 1635 North Cahuenga Boulevard, Hollywood, CA, 90028, "right between Hollywood Blvd and West Sunset Blvd, and just a few blocks from the legendary Capitol Records Tower. The building included office space and his Galaxy Sound Studio where most of his acts had recorded their hits" ["This is a Tribute to.... SOLAR (Sound Of Los Angeles Records)", Disco-Disco.com, visited 21 Aug 2021].
Felicia Angeja Viator, To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), p 234 skims the March 3, 1991, beating of Los Angeles resident Rodney King by city police officers; pp 242–242 skim the nation's reaction to the April 29–May 4, 1992, rioting that was triggered by the police officers' acquittal at criminal trial; pp 252–254 skim the riots influence on The Chronic and the album's setting for the rap genre a new national standard; Kurupt is quoted, about the riots' influence upon the album, on p 253.
Mitchell S. Jackson, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family (New York: Scribner, 2019), p 125.
Mitchell Ohriner, Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p 16, note #17, discussing no particular song, separates two meanings of the word beat, one in music theory versus one to rap listeners: "Here, I use the term 'instrumental stream' in place of what is usually called 'the beat.' I wish to distinguish between 'beat' in the sense of an abstract time point within the metre of the music from 'beat' in the sense of the instrumental sounds of a rap verse, minus the rapping." (Both meanings thus differ, also, from a third meaning of beat, solely the drum pattern.)
As the sound recording opens, Snoop's first word, bitches, starts on beat #1, shit lands on beat #2, hos on beat #3, and tricks finishes on beat #4. Completing the first bar, then, is silence till the next beat—the second bar's beat #1. Snoop's hook recital will always align this way with the present bar's beat count. Among the instruments, rather, beat #1 is distinct by a cymbal strike, exclusively on the #1 count. For general elucidation of bars as elemental pattern, beats as timepoints, notes as spans of play, and rests as spans of silence, see Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–24, esp p 23. (Note that when 1/2 beat's symbol, termed quaver, whose top has a projection resembling a flag, is repeated, the multiple symbols are bridged by one horizontal line replacing their "flags".) For simple definitions of beat types, see John W. Wright, Matt Fisher & Lisette Cheresson, eds., The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind, 3rd edn. (New York: St Martin's Press, 2011), p 195.
"At its core, a Western popular music drum pattern usually consists of three rhythmic layers: "The downbeat layer normally features the bass drum. In many cases, the primary and/or secondary downbeats (first and third beats of the common-time bar) are played as part of the rhythm in this layer. "The backbeat layer is often played on the snare drum, and it frequently plays one or both of the backbeats (beats two and four of the bar). "The pulse layer is usually played on the hi-hatcymbals or the ride cymbal. It often presents a (more or less regular) sequence or pulsation of notes. In most patterns, the pulsation is faster than the quarter-note beat." [Senn O, Kilchenmann L, Bechtold T & Hoesl F, "Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners' attitudes", PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0199604] Here, note indicates not a pitch but instead a span: a whole note, lasting four beats, spans the whole bar, and so a quarter note, lasting one beat, spans from any beat until the next beat. (On the relation between note duration and beat fraction, see Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–23.) A cymbal's pulsing faster than four beats per bar is viewable in portions of a drum cover of the Chainsmokers, "Don't Let Me Down (Illenium Remix)" [Matt McGuire "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 5 Jun 2016]. (The first cymbal strike is on beat #1, stranded vocal starts on beat #2, and reaching vocal starts on beat #4.) Although Dr. Dre's cymbal, struck every four beats, namely, once per bar, pulses four times slower than the native pulse, the same principle of attack on a 1/2 beat or a 1/4 beat, and so on, is how Dr. Dre's bass drum syncopates offbeat and how the bass riff grooves.
"Humans' ability to perceive regularity in rhythm, even when the rhythm itself is not uniformly regular, relies on the mechanism of metre perception. Involving the perception of regularly alternating strong and weak accents, metre in music forms nested levels of isochronous pulses that can be hierarchically differentiated based on their accentual salience." [Witek MAG, Clarke EF, Wallentin M, Kringelbach ML & Vuust P, "Syncopation, body-movement and pleasure in groove music", PLoS One, 2014;9(4):e94446] In other words, metre is uniformly spaced "beats" as timepoints altogether manifesting a regularly recurring pattern of silence, attack, and strength, while a music piece manifests multiple of such patterns overlapping. Metaphorically, then, metre is "an abstract grid" as the "scaffolding for rhythm" and yet, thereby, is "an aspect of rhythm" such that, expounding flexibly upon the metre, "rhythm is flowing metre, and metre is bonded rhythm." [Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London & New York: Continuum, 2007), p 136, quoting others]. "Syncopation is one of the most studied forms of rhythmic complexity in music. It can be defined as a rhythmic event that violates listeners' metric expectations" [Witek et al., PLoS One, 2014;9(4):e94446]. Metre's most basic level is the bar, while popular music's bar structure is denoted 4/4, a span of four beats [Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–23]. By a 4/4 bar's traditional metre, beat #1 is strongest or the primary stress, thus the downbeat, while beat #3, also strong, is the secondary stress or the other downbeat, whereas beats #2 and #4, weak or unstressed, are the backbeats [Senn O, Kilchenmann L, Bechtold T & Hoesl F, "Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners' attitudes", PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0199604, sec "Materials and methods: Pattern category"]. The downbeats tend to get kick/bass drum attack, yet the backbeats usually get attack by an accenting instrument, standardly snare drum [Ibid., Wyatt et al., Ear Training, 2005, p 23]. Whereas the kick's thump is bassy, the snare's tap is sharper [Trevor de Clercq, "Rhythmic influence in the rock revelation", in Russell Hartenberger & Ryan McClelland, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp 190–191]. "As a result, beats 2 and 4 are arguably more accented in rock on a regular basis than beats 1 and 3", which, despite their "structural importance", premise "the familiar joke among popular musicians that 'friends don't let friends clap on beats 1 and 3.' " [Ibid.] Yet besides a metric downbeat's contrast from a backbeat, an instead rhythmic downbeat contrasts from an upbeat. For instead an orchestra, led by the conductor's wand movement, beat #4 is the upbeat, weak, setting up the forthcoming downbeat, beat #1, strongest [John W. Wright, Matt Fisher & Lisette Cheresson, eds., The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind, 3rd edn. (New York: St Martin's Press, 2011), p 195]. Yet in popular music, upbeat often implies not metric structure but instead rhythmic structure, which varies both stress and timing, whereby both metric downbeats, #1 and #3, as well as both backbeats, #2 and #4, are in fact downbeats, simply beats or, more specifically, whole beats, whereas an upbeat is any midpoint between beats, thus a 1/2 beat, positioned where the word and occurs when counting a whole bar, "One and two and three and four and." [Ibid.] Meanwhile, given genre conventions, a music theorist explains, "It is not quite right to say that syncopation is the stress of a normally unstressed beat—often stress will be expected on such beats—but rather, it is stress that is not placed on the metrical downbeat." "For instance, funk has stress on '4'—the 'backbeat'—and tango on '2 and.' " [Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London & New York: Continuum, 2007), p 138].
The hook of "Bitches Ain't Shit" has four lines: | Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks | Lick on these nuts and suck the dick | Gets the fuck out after you're done–. Then I | hops in my coupé to make a quick run– | [Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020]. Written sources may slightly depart, e.g., Mitchell Jackson, Survival Math (New York: Scribner, 2019), p 125, in the final line: | . . . . | . . . . | . . . . And I | hops in my ride to make a quick run |. MetroLyrics, licensed to share lyrics online, matches Jackson ["Dr. Dre—'Bitches Ain't Shit' lyrics", MetroLyrics.com, CBS Interactive Inc., 2020]. In the parlance, a quick run generally means a "quick trip" for more intoxicant, as in Kurupt's verse, which appends to the hook a trip to the store for a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor.
Vlad Lyubovny, interviewer, "The D.O.C. on co-writing Dr. Dre's 'The Chronic' & paperwork not being right", VladTV/DJVlad "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 10 Jan 2016. Near 02:33 mark, the D.O.C. affirms he wrote Dre's sole "Bitches Ain't Shit" verse. Near 00:24 mark, he comments, rather, on imparting to Snoop "the formula". Groping a moment for an apt word, he apparently invokes the theme of his own single "The Formula", released in 1989 by Ruthless Records before a car accident, injuring his vocal cords, ended his own rap career. On some principles he imparted, see Soren Baker, "Doing numbers with the D.O.C.", History of Gangster Rap (New York: Abrams Image, 2018), p119.
The music trio 213 originally formed in Long Beach, California, in 1985, and reunited a few months after Nate Dogg, after three years in the Marines, returned in 1991 [Lola Ogunnaike, "Dogg day afternoon"[permanent dead link], Vibe, 2001 Dec;9(12):156–160Archived 2022-04-19 at the Wayback Machine]. In the studio at the back of the V.I.P. record store in Long Beach, the trio made a demo tape. Rebuffing Warren G's requests, Dr. Dre refused to listen. But at a bachelor party for Dre's buddy, another producer, LA Dre, Warren gave the tape to LA Dre, who forwarded it to Dr. Dre, whose own listen had him summoning 213 to his home studio, where he immediately recorded Snoop. On that and more on Warren, see P.R., "Warren G", in Nathan Brackett with Christian Hoard, eds., The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p 859. For Warren's own telling, see Ebro Darden & Laura Stylez, interviewers, "Warren G talks growing up as Dr. Dre's brother, Snoop's early rap battles and his new album", Hot 97 "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 10 Aug 2015. On the V.I.P. record store, see Andrea Domanick, "World famous V.I.P. Records to close", LAWeekly.com, LA Weekly, 5 Jan 2012.
Interviewed in 1998, Snoop explained his January departure from the label. "When I first got with Death Row, it was for Dre", says Snoop. "I wanted to be down with him, help him, and that's why I wrote so many tight records with him. That's why I was there. His departure took away my heart and soul. But I stayed down, did what I had to do. And then Tupac got killed, and it was like, Damn, and then Suge went to jail, and it was like, I can't handle this by myself, 'cause I don't have control. When the company's structure broke up, I was just an artist, a player with no coach. So I had to find a team that knew how to coach me" [Cheo Hodari Coker, "The treacherous two", Vibe, 1998 Sep;6(7):151,159[permanent dead link]].
David Diallo, ch 10 "From electro-rap to G-funk: A social history of rap music in Los Angeles and Compton, California", in Mickey Hess, ed., Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide, Volume 1: East Coast and West Coast (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), pp 228–231 on Ice T, particularly p 231, and pp 234–238 on N.W.A, amid backstory on their precursor, contemporary, and evolving rap scene in the Los Angeles area. In more focus on the scene's transition from electro rap to gangsta rap, whereby N.W.A's landmark album, Straight Outta Compton, in 1988, granted West Coast rap its first unique identity, see Loren Kajikawa, "Compton via New York", Sounding Race in Rap Songs, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp 91–93. For more on the album, see Steve Huey, "N.W.A: Straight Outta Compton", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, visited 14 Jun 2020.
"In fact, the first 'bitch' referred to in the song is Eazy-E. This does not decrease the misogyny so much as increase the 'heat' thrown at Eazy-E, who is cast as nothing but a ho and a trick" [Amy Cook, Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), p 166, note #61].
Gerrick D. Kennedy, Parental Discretion Is Advised: The Rise of N.W.A and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap (New York: Atria Books, 2017), p 204.
Jim Irvin & Colin McLear, eds., The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion, 4th edn. (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007), p 587.
Soren Baker, The History of Gangster Rap (New York: Abams Image, 2018), indexing "October 1992".
Interscope agreed to pay Ruthless a "huge" cash payout and publishing royalties on Dre's Death Row earnings: 10% on production and 15% on solo performance [Gerrick Kennedy, Parental Discretion Is Advised (Atria, 2017), p 156]. By some estimates, Eazy's royalty payments were up to some $1.5 million before his 1995 death: 25 to 50 cents per copy on some three million sold [Al Shipley, "Dr. Dre's The Chronic: 10 things you didn't know", Rolling Stone, online, 15 Dec 2017].
The term loc, in California gang culture, meaning "insane, irrational, or mentally unbalanced", particularly as to violent tendencies, is short for the Spanish term loco, meaning "crazy" [Maciej Widawski, African American Slang (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2015), p 218; S. Ivan Riley Jr & Jayne Batts, "Youth and gang violence", in Ralph Riviello, ed., Manual of Forensic Emergency Medicine (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2010), p 197].
Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Jeff "Chairman" Mao, Gabriel Alvarez & Brent Rollins, "16 memorable misogynist rap music moments", Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists (New York: St. Martin's Griffin Press, 1999), p 40. Ten of them postdate the #2, Dr. Dre et al., "Bitches Ain't Shit" (Death Row, 1992). Of the five that instead predate it, two are by, alike Dre, a recent N.W.A member, #15, Ice Cube, "Can't Fade Me" (Priority, 1990), or by the group itself, with Dre in it, #8, N.W.A, "One Less Bitch" (Ruthless, 1991). The remaining three, predating "Bitches Ain't Shit" but not connected to N.W.A, are #3, Too Short, "The Bitch Sucks Dick" (75 Girls, 1985), #12, 2 Live Crew, "We Want Some Pussy!!" (Luke Skywalker, 1986), and #11, Kool G Rap & DJ Polo, "Talk Like Sex" (Cold Chillin', 1990).
Nathan Rabin, The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture (New York: Scribner, 2009), p 91.
William L. Van Deburg, Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp 209 & 269.
Marcus Reeves, Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2008), p 148.
Kyra D. Gaunt, "African American women between hopscotch & hip hop: 'Must be the music (that's turnin' me on)' ", in Angharad N. Valdivia, ed., Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities (Thousand Oaks, CA, London & New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1995), pp 285–287, esp. p 286.
Amanda Seales, Small Doses: Potent Truths for Everyday Use (New York: Abrams Image, 2019), p 20.
In 1985, Tipper Gore, wife of Democratic senator and later US Vice President Al Gore, bought Prince's album Purple Rain, which spurred her to cofound the Parents Music Resource Center, or the PMRC, which instigated laws requiring some albums to bear parental advisories. In 1990, the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA, standardized the Parental Advisory sticker, soon most common on rap albums, sometimes for reasons unclear. For discussion, see Jessica Elliott, "Hip hop and censorship", in Mickey Hess, ed., Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, Volume 2 (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 2007), pp 398–399.
Jessica Elliott, "Hip hop and censorship", in Mickey Hess, ed., Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, Volume 2 (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 2007), pp 398–399.
L.S., "Dr. Dre", in Nathan Brackett & Christian Hoard, eds., The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, 4th edn. (New York: Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 2004), p 249.
Jeff Weiss, journalist, writes that Dre, then age 27, "was nearly destitute". Besides his Calabasas house, bought with money from N.W.A's 1988 or debut album, the "former N.W.A. sound architect was flat broke and fighting legal turmoil on multiple fronts. In the year leading up to The Chronic, disturbing headlines overshadowed his music: a punch by Dre shattered another producer's jaw; MTV News reported on a shooting that left four bullets in his leg; he totaled his car; and his house burned down. In May 1992, Dre left a music industry convention in New Orleans in handcuffs after allegedly participating in a brawl that left a 15-year-old stabbed and four police officers wounded. None of this even accounts for his attack on rapper and Pump it Up! host Dee Barnes—a brutal assault that indelibly stains his legacy" [J Weiss, "25 years later, Dr. Dre's 'The Chronic' remains rap's world-building masterpiece", ChicagoTribune.com, Chicago Tribune & The Washington Post, 15 Dec 2017]. The July 1992 shooting was in South Central L.A. at a party, where, Dre claimed, he was among a group calling someone's girlfriend ugly, whereas the assaulted producer was Damon Thomas, soon prompting Eazy-E to comment, "He had the Dee Barnes thing, breaking that kid's jaw, driving his car off the cliff, getting shot, New Orleans. None of that ever happened when he was down with us" [Gerrick Kennedy, Parental Discretion Is Advised (New York: Atria, 2017), p 201].
Gerrick D. Kennedy, Parental Discretion Is Advised: The Rise of N.W.A and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap (New York: Atria Books, 2017), p 204, quotes a line from the song's hook as going, "Mister Officer, Mister Officer, I wanna see you lying in a coffin, sir".
In this duet, whereas Snoop raps the role of an undercover detective's killer, Dre actually raps the role of that undercover detective, in line with the theme of the 1991 film Deep Cover, whose director wanted such for the soundtrack [Soren Baker, The History of Gangster Rap, NY: Abams Image, 2018, "Deep Cover" indexing].
In June 1992, a presidential election year, US vice president Dan Quayle called the "Cop Killer" song "obscene", whereupon US president George H. W. Bush, the elder President Bush, called such lyrics "sick", and the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, or CLEAT, urged boycott of Time Warner. Time Warner's CEO, Gerald M. Levin, publicly defended the song's release. But in July, at a shareholders meeting, eminent Hollywood actor Charlton Heston read "Cop Killer" lyrics and condemned company officials. By August, the Body Count album was certified gold—over 500 000 copies shipped—but over 1 000 stores pulled the album from sale. For the timeline and context, see Soren Baker, The History of Gangster Rap (New York: Abams Image, 2018). For more "Cop Killer" and public opposition to it, see Barry Shank, "From Rice to Ice: The face of race in rock and pop", in Simon Frith, Will Straw & John Street, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp 268–269.
Earlier, in 1990, the 2 Live Crew controversy was mainly over lyrical obscenity. And although other rap acts with lyrical misogyny predating 1993, like N.W.A and the Geto Boys, became targets for it in 1993—year of The Chronic and Snoop Dogg—it was here that misogynous lyrics overtook murderous lyrics in the cries against gangsta rap. For a broad view, see Carlos D. Morrison & Celnisha L. Dangerfield, "Tupac Shakur", p 398, and Jessica Elliott, "Hip hop and censorship", p 399, in Mickey Hess, ed., Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, Volume 2 (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 2007).
Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2019), p 11.
Carlos D. Morrison & Celnisha L. Dangerfield, "Tupac Shakur", in Mickey Hess, ed., Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, Volume 2 (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 2007), p 398.
Kyra Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (New York & London: New York University Press, 2006), p 119, although Gaunt misidentifies Tucker as a "Congresswoman"; Tucker instead was the chair and 1984 founder of the National Political Congress of Black Women, a lobbying group in Washington, DC.
Serial No. 103–112, Music Lyrics and Commerce: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer Protection, and Competitiveness of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives,103rd Congress, Second Session, February 11 and May 5, 1994 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994), pp 4–7.
During 1995, Tucker and Bennett, codirector of conservative advocacy group Empower America, recently director of US antidrug policy, and once the US secretary of education, appeared in a television commercial against music that allegedly "celebrates the rape, torture, and murder of women". In May, Dole joined the battle against "violent and sexually degrading music". They all targeted Time Warner apparently since its major music company Warner Music Group, as the only publicly traded American music company, was singularly vulnerable to public pressure. But, as foreign companies, like Germany's Bertelsmann Music Group, or BMG—the major label parenting, for instance, Arista Records, offering distribution to Bad Boy Entertainment—were delivering even more gangsta rap, Time Warner alleged itself targeted by political opportunists. Still, while gaining only some 2.5% of its own income from Interscope, Time Warner was in some 40% of households via cable television, and needed congressional approvals to expand in cable. [On the Tucker and Bennett teamwork against Time Warner, see Ken Auletta, "Fighting words", The New Yorker, 12 Jun 1995, p 35. On that and Time Warner's counteraccusation, see Richard S. Dunham & Michael Oneal, "Gunning for the gangstas", Business Week, 1995 Jun 19;3249:41. Toward the BMG tangent, see Christina Saraceno, "Bad Boy and Arista part ways", Rolling Stone, 21 Jun 2002. On Dole joining, and the pressure on Time Warner amid an important congressional bill on cable reform, see Julia Chaplin,"Dogg Fight", Spin, 1995 Oct;11(7):46. On Time Warner's profits and ownerships, which, besides the major label Warner Music Group, included some intermediary labels, too—Atlantic, Elektra, Reprise, and Warner Bros.—and on Warner Music Group dropping Interscope to likely nil consequence for either Time Warner, Interscope, Death Row, or music lyrics, see Julia Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65.]
Death Row actually counterattacked, in August 1995 suing Tucker [Cynthia Littleton, "Time Warner, rap foe sued by Death Row", UPI, 18 Aug 1995], and in March 1996 publicizing alleged dirt that its hired private investigators, Palladino & Sutherland, found on her [Chuck Philips, "Anti-rap crusader under fire", Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar 1996]. The lawsuit was later withdrawn [Elaine Woo, "C. DeLores Tucker, 78; civil rights pioneer led a spirited campaign against gangsta rap", Los Angeles Times, 14 Oct 2005]. But soon, Death Row imploded, by troubles in house, signaled and spurred by Dre's departure to form Aftermath Entertainment in March 1996, by Tupac Shakur's shooting death amid Death Row posturing in September 1996, by CEO Suge Knight's imprisonment for parole violation in March 1997, and basically completed by Snoop's departure, going to Master P's No Limit Records, in January 1998 [Neil Strauss, "Rap empire unraveling as stars flee", The New York Times, 1998 Jan 26, § D, p 1]. Cf., Thomas Harrison, Music of the 1990s (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), p 51. Harris notes that Tha Dogg Pound saw its October 1995 or debut album, Dogg Food, "delayed, as sharesholders of their parent record company, Interscope/Time Warner, had decided that they would protest the lyrical content of the album". Harris claims that, "coupled with the shareholder's protest, Suge Knight's incarceration, Snoop Dogg's exit, and Tupac Shakur's death ended the label's hold on the hip-hop scene". As Harris concedes, "the album did enjoy high sales". But in Harris's estimation, "this was the last high-selling album released on Death Row in the 1990s". On the contrary, released months later, in February 1996, 2Pac's All Eyez on Me was a juggernaut. Merely, by February 1998, Tha Dogg Pound's Daz was the last high-selling artist still with Death Row [Strauss, NYT, 1998]. And in 1995, Interscope, not having shareholders, had sided against Warner, a quagmire resolved by their splitting, as Warner was the only major label with American shareholding [J Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65]. And even without Interscope and its next major label, MCA/Universal, there was the giant independent label Priority Records, unfettered in distributing gangsta rap, like N.W.A and the Geto Boys, ready to pick up Death Row's distribution [Strauss, NYT, 1998 & Randall Sullivan, Labyrinth: The True Story (Grove Press, 2007)]. In fact, it was Priority that had distributed Tha Dogg Pound's album Dogg Food [Chapman, Spin, 1996].
By the July 1998 release of Nate Dogg's repeatedly delayed solo album, the curtain was already closing on the G-funk era [Thomas Erlewine, "Nate Dogg: G Funk Classics, Vols. 1 & 2", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, visited 24 Apr 2020]. Even longer overdue, the eventual studio album from the Long Beach trio 213—formed of Warren G, Snoop Dogg, and Nate Dogg in 1985 [Lola Ogunnaike, "Dogg day afternoon", Vibe, 2001 Dec;9(12):156–160]—was a 2004 release, The Hard Way, competent G-funk for the nostalgic. "Time waits for no man", an album review closes [Rondell Conway, "213: The Hard Way", Vibe, 2004 Sep;12(9):236].
S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), p 48, or elsewhere.
Aine McGlynn, "Lil' Kim", in Mickey Hess, ed., Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, Volume 2 (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 2007), pp 454–455 on women reappropriating the word bitch, which in "Bitches Ain't Shit" is synonymous with the word woman, and on Lil' Kim touting herself "Queen Bitch". Yet pp 453–454 skim feud between Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown while slurring each other as sorts of "bitch".
Jody Miller, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2008), pp 94–95, or elsewhere.
Alix Olson, ed., Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), pp 4–5 discuss Sarah Jones's success litigating the Federal Communications Commission, whereas pp 8–10 republish her poem "Your Revolution", which invokes Gil Scott Heron's 1971 performance poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". Jones's poem rejects, one after another, a rapper's sexually motivated lyric. Once she performed the poem on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, it drew wider acclaim, and, with DJ Vadim, she made a 2000 version more musical. In May 2001, Portland, Oregon, radio station KBOO played it, whereupon a listener reported it to the FCC, which then fined the station $7 000, prompting other stations to cease playing it [Dustin Kidd, Pop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass Media, and Society (New York: Westview Press, 2014), indexing "Your Revolution"]. For more details, see Brenda Cossman, Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp 48–55, or pp 49–50 skimming the FCC action and Jones's legal counteraction.
Dream Hampton, "Confessions of a hip-hop critic", in Evelyn McDonnell & Ann Powers, eds., Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap (New York: Delta, 1995), pp 456–457. Hampton recalls, "As a nineteen-year-old intern from NYU's film school hired to organize The Source's photo collection, I was always offering unsolicited opinions. . . ."
Kellie D. Hay & Rebekah Farrugia, Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), pp ix–xi & pp 25–27. Hay & Farrugia, both professors in the communications department at Oakland University, located in Michigan, discuss at length Piper Carter, author of a foreword in the book. Carter had grown up living in Detroit and New York, and attended college both at Howard University, located in Washington, DC, and at the State University of New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, located in New York City. After several years as a fashion photographer in New York, Carter returned to Detroit, but found Detroit's rap scene stultifying, especially for women, and sought to form a rap club for women. Carter's effort led to a "no-misogyny open mic" named the Foundation for Women in Hip Hop, active from 2009 to 2015, which drew local, national, and international media coverage. In 2012, after several weeks of attending the open mic, which was held each Tuesday night, Hay & Farrugia began interviewing and shadowing Carter. Carter recalls initially having gone throughout the community while expressing her wish to "build a hip-hop community where women can get on", but Carter found that "no one cared" and that they felt it "a dumb and horrible idea". Still, two local rappers who were already established—Invincible as well as Miz Korona—lent support, stimulating more support. Carter then "went back to the collective body" and suggestting "calling the women and hip-hop group the Foundation and the first thing—and I thought everyone would think it's genius—and the first thing I heard was, 'That's the dumbest name. Why don't you call it Bitches Ain't Shit?' " "They were like, 'You should have girls in bikinis with Jello shots.' I was like blown back. These were coming from women!" which "younger women were upset" and "actually wanted to do the misogyny and they preferred that. Not only did they suggest it, they were actually fighting me and pissed off because I didn't want to do that stuff. Now this proves the need; I'm definitely calling it this. If it's upsetting them that much, it's going to be called that." [pp 26–27]
Amy Cook, Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), p 166. Note #60 identifies a URL for the Dr. Dre "Bitches Ain't Shit" sound recording listened to, but lacks an access date, though related notes on this page, especially #69 for the Ben Folds version, indicate 17 Aug 2015 access date.
Amy Cook, Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), p 94.
Mike Barnes, "Invisible jukebox: Ice T", The Wire, 1996 Jul;(149)40–44, snippet view of pp 41 & 42, while p 42 contains, if unseen, quote of Ice T saying, "All men are dogs: how many times have you heard women say that?" [p 42].
Courtney Long, Love Awaits: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love and Life (New York: Bantam Books/Doubleday, 1996), cites that 1985 movie The Color Purple and 1989 book Disappearing Acts, wherein female characters apparently triumph over male characters, drew accolades, but adds that black men retaliated with rapsongs including "Bitches Ain't Shit". Long suggests that black women then coined the Niggas ain't shit as well as the All men are dogs "clichés" as "defensive and reactionary comebacks" [pxiii]. Whereas the Purple movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and nominated 14 times for an Oscar, was of 1985, the Disappearing book, by Terry McMillan, was of 1989, when Publishers Weekly reported its "flash and energy" but lag in "depth and breadth", while the narrative carries "her politics" via some dialogue effecting "a position paper" or "an old-fashioned kind of novel, the kind with a Message" ["Disappearing Acts: Terry McMillan, author, Viking Books", PublishersWeekly.com, PWxyz, LLC., 1 Aug 1989]. A Hollywood movie was released in 2000. Yet as to Courtney Long, author of the 1996 suggestion that women "coined" All men are dogs once "Bitches Ain't Shit" lyrics "punched back" at reports of "outstanding artistic works" elevating women over men, Long's prior book is a 1995 and, per Google Books, "the nonfiction equivalent to the bestselling Waiting to Exhale" [Courtney Long, Dearest Brothers, Love Awaits, Much Peace, Your Sisters: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love, and Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1995)]. In 1992, before "Bitches Ain't Shit" release in December, the novel Waiting to Exhale, "by any standard an astonishing success", Terry McMillan's book after Disappearing Acts and likewise published by Viking Press, was a New York Times bestseller for 11 weeks by August 9 [Daniel Max, "McMillan's millions", The New York Times, 9 Aug 1992, §6, p 20]. Its paperback rights drew $2.64 million, among the highest ever for a reprint, and Hollywood studio sought rights [Ibid.] The movie adaptation, starring an ensemble cast, in 1995, was the first American black "chick flick" and "was heavily criticized for its male-bashing and materialism" [Deborah Barker, "The Southern-fried chick flick: Postfeminism goes to the movies", in Suzanne Ferriss & Mallory Young, eds., Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008), p 112]. Further, "it presents a liberal interpretation of the heterosexual feminist complaint that 'all men are dogs.' " [Carla Freccero, Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York & London: NYU Press, 1999), p 94]. Allegedly, the movie's subtitle may as well be All Men Are Dogs [Paul Willistein, "Men may hold breath watching 'Waiting to Exhale' ", MCall.com, The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 22 Dec 1995]. Also in 1995, the 1992 book itself, Waiting to Exhale, was associated with All men are dogs griping as a longstanding convention while "brothers are no better" via rap songs that call women "bitches" and degrade them as sex objects [Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. & Colleen Birchett, Africans Who Shaped Our Faith (Chicago: Urban Ministries, Inc., 1995), p 41]. A dozen years later, one Ronnell "Chewy" Coombs depicts the rap lyric as men's whining, and such pimp talk as pretense, somewhat independent of the All men are dogs phrase, which itself is attributed to women's own tendencies preexisting [What Real Niggaz Want from a Woman (Brooklyn, NY: Hip-Hop Fever Promotions, L.L.C., 2008), p 27]. All men are dogs doctrine had long been conventional by American black women, allegedly thus fostering a mirroring by their sons to manifest a "Dog Syndrome" [Kimberly Springer, "Strongblackwomen and black feminism: A next generation?", in Jo Reger, ed., Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp 17–18]. In 1981, some researchers drew recollections from a sample of American young women black and found that their most commonly recalled teachings by their mothers about men were declarations like "no good" and "dogs" [Gloria I. Joseph & Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black & White Feminist Perspectives (New York: Anchor Press, 1981 / Boston: South End Press, 1986), pp 112–113 or –115]. All men are dogs was present [p 114]. Aside from specifically black women, a 2004 article in a popular women's magazine criticized the prevailing pop feminism as "Bad Dog" feminism, allegedly dehumanizing and denigrating men, as by All men are dogs mantra, an "astonishingly" old tactic of female bonding [Emily Nussbaum, "Is this girl power? Men are dogs, men are babies, men are stupid. Come on! Man-bashing may be good for a laugh, but it's no good for women", Glamour (Condé Nast), 2004 Jun;102(6):120–131, p 122].
Ira A. Robbins, The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock, 5th edn. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p 217.
Tom Hutchison, Amy Macy & Paul Allen, Record Label Marketing (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2006), wherein pp 280–281 review the process and theories of record labels' consolidation, while p 282 reveals the global marketshare of the newly four major labels in 2003: Sony BMG with 25.1%, Universal with 23.5%, EMI with 13.4%, Warner with 12.7%, and indies collectively with 25.3%. In 1993, the majors were instead the big six, as Sony and BMG were separate, and there was also PolyGram. Universal, which had been MCA before 1996, acquired PolyGram in 1998. Sony subsumed BMG in 2008.
Craig Seymour, "The re-energizers", Vibe, 2002 Feb;10(2):68–73, wherein p 69 glosses traditional R&B's struggle amid rap's influence on R&B in the prior decade, p 70 skims the recent emergence of "neo-soul" in R&B, and p 73 contrasts this from "Bitches Ain't Shit".
Note that on "Bitches Ain't Shit" and, the following year, also on "Ain't No Fun"—Snoop's other reputedly misogynist anthem [Jenkins et al., Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999, p 40]—whereas Kurupt scorns any love ever for a "bitch", and so does Nate Dogg on the latter song, Snoop uniquely suggests having loved a "bitch", if both times incurring his present regret. In "Ain't No Fun", Snoop raps, "| Hoes recognize. Niggas do, too, 'cause when | bitches get scandalous and pull a voodoo, | what you gon' do? You really don't know. So | I'd advise you not to trust that ho. | Silly of me to fall in love with a bitch, | knowing damn well I'm too caught up with my grip |" ["Ain't No Fun (If the Homies Can't Have None) (feat. Nate Dogg, Warren G & Kurupt)", SnoopDoggTV "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 8 Nov 2014, timemark 02:32 for Snoop's verse, or timemark 01:20 for Nate Dogg closing the first verse, followed by Kurupt's verse]. (By contrast, on Tha Dogg Pound song "Big Pimpin' ", on the soundtrack of the March 1994 movie Above the Rim, a Death Row Records release, Snoop's verse opens (with female backup singers), | . . . Now do I | love them hos? (Hell no.) And why is | that? (Because you're Snoop Doggy Dogg. And | you never gave a fuck about a bitch, 'cause to | you, bitches ain't shit but hos and | tricks.) Ha, ha, ha. Dee, dee, dah, dee, dah. |).
Peter Shapiro, The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop, 2nd edn. (London: Rough Guides, 2005). Trina's song opens, "| Niggas ain't shit but hoes and tricks | Lick the pearl tongue, nigga, keep your dick | Get the fuck out after I cum, so I can | hop in my coupé and make a quick run |" ["Trina—'Niggas Ain't Shit' lyrics", MetroLyrics, CBS Interactive Inc., 2020].
Frank Hoffmann, Rhythm and Blues, Rap, and Hip-hop (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006), p 166, remarks that Lil' Kim's debut or 1996 album, Hard Core, "which entered the pop charts at number 11 due in large part to its effervescent dance arrangements, represented something of a challenge to the misogynistic posturing of male gangsta rappers".
Angus Whitehead, " ' Stick it to the pimp': Peaches' penetration of postmodern America's mainstream", in Tristanne Connolly & Tomoyuki Iino, eds., Canadian Music and American Culture: Get Away From Me (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2017), wherein pp 259–260 skim the Canadian singer/rapper Peaches' shtick of chronically trying to offend men by vulgar sexual objectification of men when she is not issuing political judgments, yet the next page alleges a different reason that American music fans have not widely embraced her despite her "strong US following". At her American concerts in 2003, "crowds yelled, 'fuck you, bitch', 'get off the stage, gay man'." Peaches, however, viewed this as her success antagonizing patriarchal views. Americana's vexation at Peaches allegedly revealed "enduring inequality" since Dr. Dre can glorify pimps over hos in "Bitches Ain't Shit", but "even in 2016, an American mainstream has a problem with women intelligently articulating, parodying, and playing with the hitherto male preserve of graphic, macho sexual attitudes", as in the "nuanced, witty pedagogy" of Peaches, who is quoted, "The music must first be good. Then I can offend, make people think, and make them dance" [p 261]. On the other hand, Matt Lemay ["Peaches: Fatherfucker", Pitchfork.com, Condé Nast, 29 Oct 2003], scorns her 2003 album, Fatherfucker, as mostly mindless and numbing, despite Lemay praising her prior or 2000 album, The Teaches of Peaches, as disarmingly direct and instinctive [Sound recording, "Peaches—F*** the Pain Away", XL Recordings "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 11 Aug 2014].
In the Lil' Kim song "Suck My Dick", the hook is performed with a man barking at her (in parentheses): | . . . ('Ey, yo, come here, | bitch.) Nigga, fuck you. (No, fuck you, | bitch.) Who you talking to? (Why you acting like a | bitch?) 'Cause y'all niggas ain't shit. And— | if I was dude, I'd tell y'all to suck my | dick . . .| By contrast, the third and final verse's last four bars musically interpolate but lyrically revise: | Niggas ain't shit, but they still can trick. All | they can do for me is suck my clit. I'm | jumping the fuck up after I cum–. Thinking | they gon' get some pussy, but they gets none–. ('Ey, yo, come here, |. (Compare with the "Bitches Ain't Shit" hook: | Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks | Lick on these nuts and suck the dick | Gets the fuck out after you're done–. then I | hops in my coupé to make a quick run |.) According to Greg Thomas [Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp 52–53], despite written lyrics saying "clit", Lil' Kim vocalizes "click" [Sound recording, "Suck My Dick", Lil Kim "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 8 Nov 2014]. In Thomas's reading of this song, whereby Lil' Kim has already posed, "Imagine if I was a dude, hitting niggas from the back", her saying "click" not only rhymes with the prior line's word trick, but also joins the word dick, which the elder hook employs, with the word clit, which one expects Lil' Kim to employ, and invokes the click or C-L-I-C-K homophone clique or C-L-I-Q-U-E, indicating an exclusive group of associating persons.
Stephane Dunn, "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p 27, cites the feminist Jo Freeman's "The Bitch Manifesto" of 1971, which "critically configured 'Bitch' as a call to sisterhood and liberation struggle, declaring that the 'true bitch' was self-determined, militant, and beautiful." Dunn then exmaines the "Bad Bitch" persona of the 21st century.
Debbie Clare Olson, "Films, exploitation", in Melissa Hope Ditmore, ed., Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Volume 1 (Greenwood Press, 2006), pp 165–166 calls blaxploitation "exploitation films". They are usually set in "exaggerated" areas, either the Deep South or the inner city, with characters that exaggerate the vices and ills of sex, drugs, and violence. Blaxploitation films were produced for only about five years, but depicted stereotypes of pimps and prostitutes remained prevalent in popular media even in 2005, since the films allegedly had the "ability to create and then naturalize certain stereotypes, particularly for those marginalized groups". Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown, based on 1974 film Foxy Brown, was tribute to blaxploitation films. Another allegation is of blaxploitation films is "gratuitous violence and nudity" as "ever-lingering misogynistic barriers", although " 'Foxy Brown' introduced blaxploitation film audiences to strong, sexy, and outspoken women for the first time" [Sari Rosenberg, "April 5, 1974: 'Foxy Brown' starring Pam Grier was released", MyLifetime.com, A&E Television Networks, 5 Apr 2018]. In 1994, cultural critic Nelson George described the lead actor, Pam Grier, as a cult figure liked even by many feminists. Grier was a rare nonwhite woman who had star vehicles developed for her physical beauty and ability to punish men who challenged her [Greg Braxton, "She's back and badder than ever: Pam Grier's '70s blaxploitation films are a big kick again, making the star a hot retro hero", Los Angeles Times, 27 Aug 1995]. And by August 1995, or 20 years after her film career's pinnacle, Grier was in high demand by young fans [Ibid.].
In the 1974 film Foxy Brown, heavy in sexuality and violence, its protagonist, played by Pam Grier, is a supersexy vigilante who hunts down a murderous drug ring by posing as a prostitute. Grier cameos in the 1994 music video for Snoop's Doggystyle album's song "Doggy Dogg World", as does Rudy Ray Moore, who played the 1975 film Dolemite's protagonist, a pimp and nightclub owner [Cheryl L. Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p 217]. (In the biggest Chronic single, "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang", Snoop raps, "Showing much flex when it's time to wreck a mic / Pimping hos and clocking a grip like my name was Dolemite".) For more on the music video, see Eithne Quinn, Nuthin' But a "G" Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p 146. In gist, the video is mainly Snoop, then Kurupt, then Daz, accompanied by classic R&B group The Dramatics, on a nightclub stage for an audience featuring vintage celebrities, Grier playing the date of Dr. Dre, who with Ricky Harris directed the music video [Preezy Brown, "9 music videos that bridged the gap between blaxploitation and hip-hop", Revolt.tv, 15 Jun 2018].
Yvonne D. Sims, Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), p 6.
Ben Folds, A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons (New York: Ballantine Books, 2019), pp 272–274. Google Books tends to conceal p 273, which as in this abridged excerpt explains, "the part that I chose to excerpt skewed sad", "like a sad Johnny Cash song with a lot more vulgarity. Slowing these words down from their gangsta-rap presentation and adding a melody creates an absurd effect, both sad and funny. Sung this way, the misogyny in the original lyrics, no matter how wrong, COULD be explained by how badly the narrator was hurt". "It was a joke only to the extent that the comedy I loved from the seventies was a joke: It was based on something real".
Nielsen SoundScan, "Hot Digital Songs", "Pop 100" & "Hot 100", Billboard, 2005 Apr 2;117(14):63–64, reveals that for the week ending April 2, the Ben Folds cover version of "Bitches Ain't Shit" simultaneously entered the Hot 100 at #71, rose from #46 to #43 in its second week on the Pop 100, and rose from #25 to #18 in its second week on the Hot Digital Songs.
Ben Folds's first bypass of record labels was an EP, titled Speed Graphic, released in July 2003, that debuted atop Billboard's Hot Digital Tracks chart in August 2003. But, this success being very relative, a music journalist, in January 2004, reacted, "Ben Folds has a new CD. What? You didn't know? That's because there is little, if any, publicity regarding this new five-song EP, available online only from a website— www.attackedbyplastic.com —created for the purpose of marketing it, from Apple's iTunes, and from Sony Music Digital Download. In a recording coup, Folds has recorded and released this album on his own to avoid the publicity circus" [Jonathan Nelson, "Ben Folds: Speed Graphic EP", Treblezine.com, Treble Media, 9 Jan 2004]. The EP, his first, includes a cover version of The Cure's 1985 single "In Between Days" and debuted on Billboard's Hot Digital Tracks chart the week ending August 9 at #1, selling 1 300 units, ahead of Avril Levigne's live EP [Silvio Pietroluongo, Minal Patel, Wade Jessen & Keith Caulfield, "SinglesMinded: It's 'Five O'Clock' at No. 1 on Country Singles & Tracks", Billboard, 2003 Aug 9;115(32):82]. Levigne's live EP, Try to Shut Me Up, released through only Apple's iTunes, had debuted the prior week, ending August 2, at #1 [Silvio Pietroluongo, Minal Patel & Wade Jessen, "SinglesMinded: RCA label group repeats its chart-topping trifecta", Billboard, 2003 Aug 2;115(31):64].
Michael Z. Newman, "Movies for hipsters", in Geoff King, Claire Molloy & Yannis Tzioumakis, eds., American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (London & New York: Routledge, 2013), pp 75–76.
Justin A. Williams, " 'Cars with the boom': Music, automobility, and hip-hop 'sub' cultures", in Sumanth Gopinath & Jason Stanyek, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Volume 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p 139.
Nielsen SoundScan, "The Billboard 200: Nov 11 2006", Billboard, 2006 Nov 11;118(45):85.
Ben Folds, A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons (New York: Ballantine Books, 2019), pp 271–272 & 274.
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Music video, "Ben Folds Five—'Brick' ", BenFoldsFiveVEVO @ YouTube, 25 Oct 2009. For a contemporary reaction, see Charles Aaron, "Singles", Spin, 1998 Jun;14(6):136.
Amy Cook, Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), p 32: "I analyze the performance of the same song by two different artists at different times (Dr. Dre and Ben Folds)".
Amy Cook, Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), pp 93–94 & note #69, delivered on p 166, which reports August 2015 viewing of "Ben Folds—Bitches Ain't Shit (live)" @ YouTube ID lxh2TRoef1Y, 4 Apr 2007. (Note that this live performance varies from the studio recording in several ways, including its drummer, who sings the first eight bars of the Snoop verse, being Sam Smith instead of Lindsay Jamieson, and the next eight bars, musically crafted as a middle eight, lack addition of a synthesizer at high pitch to mimic the rap song's eerie ring ubiquitous, called the "funky worm".)
Denise Smith, "Songs for Silverman, Ben Folds, Epic Records", Third Way, 2005 Jun;28(5):31.
Rita Hao, Fall 1998, "And now a word from our sponsors: Feminism for sale", in Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler, eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages ofBitchMagazine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Reprinted therein is allegation of "that most bizarre of phenomena, the nervous Ben Folds Five/Verve Pipe fan who feels threatened by feminist empowerment ('How come them chicks get their own concert tour and us guys don't?')" [p 115]. In 1996, playing a festival, Sarah McLachlan had found a planner hesitant to bill two female performers in a row, whereupon she began the Lilith Fair [Yohana Desta, "Lilith's Fair ladies take girl power on U.S. tour", TheEagleOnline.com, The Eagle (American University), 31 Mar 2010]. Until its revival in 2010, it was held for three years, 1997 to 1999, traveling to cities across America [Ibid.]. "Never in pop history have female singers been quite so aggressively, shrewdly marketed on the basis of gender alone," reported Newsweek [Staff, "The selling of girl power", 28 Dec 1997]. In its first year, selling more tickets than the conventional traveling festivals Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. [Ibid.], the Lilith Fair was "a cultural movement lauded by fans for its feminist ideals and lambasted by critics for its lack of diversity" [Melissa Maerz, "The oral history of Lilith Fair, as told by the women who lived it", Glamour.com, Glamour, 5 Jul 2017]. Some women wondered, "Why does this have to be so crunchy and folky? How come you don't have Courtney Love, or 7 Year Bitch, or Elastica?" "Why isn't Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliott on this?" [Rachel Tashjian, "12 photos from the 1998 Lilith Fair, the best festival fashion ever", Garage.Vice.com, Vice Media, 11 Jun 2018]. "But while many massive artistic undertakings meet criticism with defensiveness, Lilith Fair came back the second year with a lineup that was much more diverse, racially and musically. You might even consider it legendary" [Ibid.].
Kate Stone Lombardi, The Mama's Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger (New York: Avery Publishing/Penguin Group, 2012), quotes Michael Kimmel suggesting a usefulness of the college women's video: "What moms can say to their sons is, 'Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric? That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [p 230] Lombardi, likewise, hints that "guys" will perceive their own "moms" in the collegiate young women's clubhouse appearance, genteel manner, and "angelic voices" as an altogether unthinkable target of lewd misogyny [pp 229–230]. For reference, here is the Lombardi book's full treatment of the song: "The Barnard Collegea cappella group posted their rendition of hip-hop superstar Dr. Dre's song 'Bitches Ain't Shit' on YouTube. Dressed in pink, the young women's angelic voices rise in harmony, gently singing the lyrics 'Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks. Lick on these nuts and suck the dick.' Those are actually some of the milder lyrics, and the incongruity of hearing the incredibly misogynistic words coming sweetly out of these college students' mouths makes its point. 'What moms can say to their sons is, "Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric?" ' Michael Kimmel says. 'That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [pp 229–230] Thus, besides Lombardi's syntax that strictly, but trivially, states that the women's voices are dressed in pink, she may overlook that the choir covers only the Ben Folds version, whose most harshly misogynous lyrics she quotes when suggesting that the choir also sings the Dr. Dre song's more harshly misogynous lyrics. At such recurrent mixup, Folds elsewhere clarifies, "That song is like a six-minute-long misogynistic rant that never stops, and I took most of that stuff out" [Chris Steffen, "Ben Folds on repeating mistakes, conjuring characters, and repeating mistakes", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, 23 Aug 2019]. Lombardi is also, in any case, "a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and for seven years wrote a popular regional column that focused on family issues. Her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reader's Digest, Parenting magazine, and other national publications, and she is the winner of six Clarion Awards for journalism from women in communications. She lives in New York with her husband and is the mother of two adult children, a son and a daughter [Contributor webpage, "Kate Stone Lombardi", Ideas.Time.com, Time USA, LLC, visited 16 Dec 2021].
Susan Macky-Kallis, "Violence and aggression", in Mary Kosut, ed., Encyclopedia of Gender in Media (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2012), p 418.
Reportedly, on Ben Folds Live, his October 2002 live album compiled from recent tours, March into July, as a piano soloist, "Folds finally explains the backstory of the hit 'Brick' " [Chris Molanphy, CMJ New Music Monthly, 2002 Dec;(108):46]. Otherwise, an interview of Folds upon the July 2019 release of his memoir renders an audio file and transcribed "highlights" that offer, On his high school girlfriend's abortion and his song about it, "Brick": "I mean it's not something I talked about much when the song was out. In fact, I never answered an interview question about that song. Try having a hit song and not answering a question about it." "Look, I let her know this book was coming out and I sent her the copy of that section to make sure she was OK with it. She's very happy that someone might benefit from the story." [Robin Young, "Musician Ben Folds tells the story of himself", WBUR.org, WBUR-FM, 29 Jul 2019]
booksc.org
ur.booksc.org
Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to"Archived 2021-12-17 at the Wayback Machine, in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.]
On Saturday, June 12, 1993, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, the brutalized and mutilated body of Mollie Mae Frazier, age 81, was found in a field near her home. Victor Brancaccio, 16, once an altar boy, but otherwise troubled, would recall listening on his walkman to The Chronic track "Stranded on Death Row" when the elderly woman, a passerby, unwittingly provoking his attack on her, had criticized him for rapping the coarse lyrics aloud. For details, see Karen Testa, Associated Press, "Man convicted of widow's slaying gets new trial, fashionable defense", Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct 1998, and Erin MacPherson, "Family members plea to judge for grandmother's killer to stay behind bars", CBS 12 News website, 17 Jan 2018. On the American climate of controversies over song lyrics in the early 1990s, see Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First (Wesleyan U P, 2002), p 295.
Jeff Weiss, journalist, writes that Dre, then age 27, "was nearly destitute". Besides his Calabasas house, bought with money from N.W.A's 1988 or debut album, the "former N.W.A. sound architect was flat broke and fighting legal turmoil on multiple fronts. In the year leading up to The Chronic, disturbing headlines overshadowed his music: a punch by Dre shattered another producer's jaw; MTV News reported on a shooting that left four bullets in his leg; he totaled his car; and his house burned down. In May 1992, Dre left a music industry convention in New Orleans in handcuffs after allegedly participating in a brawl that left a 15-year-old stabbed and four police officers wounded. None of this even accounts for his attack on rapper and Pump it Up! host Dee Barnes—a brutal assault that indelibly stains his legacy" [J Weiss, "25 years later, Dr. Dre's 'The Chronic' remains rap's world-building masterpiece", ChicagoTribune.com, Chicago Tribune & The Washington Post, 15 Dec 2017]. The July 1992 shooting was in South Central L.A. at a party, where, Dre claimed, he was among a group calling someone's girlfriend ugly, whereas the assaulted producer was Damon Thomas, soon prompting Eazy-E to comment, "He had the Dee Barnes thing, breaking that kid's jaw, driving his car off the cliff, getting shot, New Orleans. None of that ever happened when he was down with us" [Gerrick Kennedy, Parental Discretion Is Advised (New York: Atria, 2017), p 201].
complex.com
A chord is multiple notes played at once, standardly three notes related as a triad, which a casual listener might call simply "a note" or, if a piano chord, simply "a key". Yet if literally a single note, it could sound empty. In each "Bitches Ain't Shit" bar, these backbeat chords—that is, chords on beats #2 and #4—may be synthesized and may mimic piano chords. But these chords' origin and nature, apparently two chords, the first on both backbeats of a bar, and the second chord on both backbeats of the next bar, and so on, alternating like so, remain unclear as to this Wikipedia article [this footnote added 24 Mar 2020]. Maybe talking about these alternating chords is the vice president of Complex Media's content operations, who writes, "There's this ping at the end of each bar of Dr. Dre's 'Bitches Ain't Shit.' It changes pitch with the bass line. You've heard that shit before? Oh man, I'm like Pavlov's f–ing dog when I hear that—my neck becomes an involuntary muscle: It refuses to not snap. I'm a rap Philistine, which, in non-faux-rap-intellectualspeak means I'm a beats man. And that's one of my favorite beats, ever." [Jack Erwin, "For my rap brothers with daughters: Loving (and hating) hip hop on Father's Day", Complex.com, 21 Jun 2015] (Being a "beats man" and thus "smugly commonplace or conventional"—"philistine", Dictionary.com, visited 1 Jan 2022—may allude to purported purists who, although hip hop began as dance music, tout "lyricism" instead.) Unclear is why this discussion identifies the "ping" at only each bar's end—not also each bar's approximate midpoint—and how "the ping" also "changes pitch with the bass line". It is the cymbal strike, only beat #1, that both ends the bar and starts the next bar. Yet indeed, beat #4 is the bar's final beat, whereupon the bass riff soon initiates to attain primary stress on beat #1, then articulates till beat #2—having the first "ping"—and then resonates till about beat #4, having the "ping" that may seem to trigger the bass riff to repeat.
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
dictionary.com
A chord is multiple notes played at once, standardly three notes related as a triad, which a casual listener might call simply "a note" or, if a piano chord, simply "a key". Yet if literally a single note, it could sound empty. In each "Bitches Ain't Shit" bar, these backbeat chords—that is, chords on beats #2 and #4—may be synthesized and may mimic piano chords. But these chords' origin and nature, apparently two chords, the first on both backbeats of a bar, and the second chord on both backbeats of the next bar, and so on, alternating like so, remain unclear as to this Wikipedia article [this footnote added 24 Mar 2020]. Maybe talking about these alternating chords is the vice president of Complex Media's content operations, who writes, "There's this ping at the end of each bar of Dr. Dre's 'Bitches Ain't Shit.' It changes pitch with the bass line. You've heard that shit before? Oh man, I'm like Pavlov's f–ing dog when I hear that—my neck becomes an involuntary muscle: It refuses to not snap. I'm a rap Philistine, which, in non-faux-rap-intellectualspeak means I'm a beats man. And that's one of my favorite beats, ever." [Jack Erwin, "For my rap brothers with daughters: Loving (and hating) hip hop on Father's Day", Complex.com, 21 Jun 2015] (Being a "beats man" and thus "smugly commonplace or conventional"—"philistine", Dictionary.com, visited 1 Jan 2022—may allude to purported purists who, although hip hop began as dance music, tout "lyricism" instead.) Unclear is why this discussion identifies the "ping" at only each bar's end—not also each bar's approximate midpoint—and how "the ping" also "changes pitch with the bass line". It is the cymbal strike, only beat #1, that both ends the bar and starts the next bar. Yet indeed, beat #4 is the bar's final beat, whereupon the bass riff soon initiates to attain primary stress on beat #1, then articulates till beat #2—having the first "ping"—and then resonates till about beat #4, having the "ping" that may seem to trigger the bass riff to repeat.
Hedonism means "devotion to pleasure as a way of life" [Dictionary.com, visited 26 Mar 2020].
disco-disco.com
Nelson George, "Rhythm & blues", Billboard, 1986 Mar 29;98(13):27, identifies Galaxy Sound's owner as Dick Griffey. Viewable in 2021, a tribute website places the SOLAR building at 1635 North Cahuenga Boulevard, Hollywood, CA, 90028, "right between Hollywood Blvd and West Sunset Blvd, and just a few blocks from the legendary Capitol Records Tower. The building included office space and his Galaxy Sound Studio where most of his acts had recorded their hits" ["This is a Tribute to.... SOLAR (Sound Of Los Angeles Records)", Disco-Disco.com, visited 21 Aug 2021].
doi.org
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to"Archived 2021-12-17 at the Wayback Machine, in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.]
Mike Barnes, "Invisible jukebox: Ice T", The Wire, 1996 Jul;(149)40–44, snippet view of pp 41 & 42, while p 42 contains, if unseen, quote of Ice T saying, "All men are dogs: how many times have you heard women say that?" [p 42].
Discussing Ben Folds's accompaniment, altogether playing as a trio, is Betty Clarke, "Ben Folds—Hammersmith Apollo, London", TheGuardian.com, Guardian News & Media Limited, 2 Jun 2005. Photos are viewable elsewhere: Hayley Madden, contributor, Getty Images editorial #85019781, Ben Folds w/ Lindsay Jamieson & Jared Reynolds, and #85019918, Folds w/ Jamieson, live performance, Hammersmith Apollo, UK, 13 Dec 2005.
glamour.com
Rita Hao, Fall 1998, "And now a word from our sponsors: Feminism for sale", in Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler, eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages ofBitchMagazine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Reprinted therein is allegation of "that most bizarre of phenomena, the nervous Ben Folds Five/Verve Pipe fan who feels threatened by feminist empowerment ('How come them chicks get their own concert tour and us guys don't?')" [p 115]. In 1996, playing a festival, Sarah McLachlan had found a planner hesitant to bill two female performers in a row, whereupon she began the Lilith Fair [Yohana Desta, "Lilith's Fair ladies take girl power on U.S. tour", TheEagleOnline.com, The Eagle (American University), 31 Mar 2010]. Until its revival in 2010, it was held for three years, 1997 to 1999, traveling to cities across America [Ibid.]. "Never in pop history have female singers been quite so aggressively, shrewdly marketed on the basis of gender alone," reported Newsweek [Staff, "The selling of girl power", 28 Dec 1997]. In its first year, selling more tickets than the conventional traveling festivals Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. [Ibid.], the Lilith Fair was "a cultural movement lauded by fans for its feminist ideals and lambasted by critics for its lack of diversity" [Melissa Maerz, "The oral history of Lilith Fair, as told by the women who lived it", Glamour.com, Glamour, 5 Jul 2017]. Some women wondered, "Why does this have to be so crunchy and folky? How come you don't have Courtney Love, or 7 Year Bitch, or Elastica?" "Why isn't Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliott on this?" [Rachel Tashjian, "12 photos from the 1998 Lilith Fair, the best festival fashion ever", Garage.Vice.com, Vice Media, 11 Jun 2018]. "But while many massive artistic undertakings meet criticism with defensiveness, Lilith Fair came back the second year with a lineup that was much more diverse, racially and musically. You might even consider it legendary" [Ibid.].
Trent Clark, "Offset blasts Snoop Dogg's critique of Cardi B's 'WAP' without dissing him", HipHopDX.com, HipHopDX, 12 Dec 2020, sharing apparently candid video of rapper Offset, who is rapper Cardi B's husband, responding to Snoop's recent interview comment, when about her song "WAP" that was #1 on the main popular songs chart, Billboard Hot 100, "let's have some imagination! Let's have some, you know, privacy, some intimacy where he wants to find out as opposed to you telling him."
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Lisa Wade, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010, reports a cappella singing of "Dr. Dre's Bitches Ain't Shit.' " But the embedded video, on YouTube since November 2008, reveals performance of the Ben Folds cover version. The sociologist's announcement at the popular feminist blog duplicates hers on her own website the prior day [Lisa Wade, "Finding glee in Dr. Dre's 'Bitches Ain't Shit' ", TheSocietyPages.com, Sociological Images, 14 Sep 2010]: "Sociologist Michael Kimmel passed along a fantastic and entertaining example of resistance. In the video below, a Columbia Universitya cappella group sings Dr. Dre's 'Bitches Ain't Shit.' The appropriation of the song works on so many levels: the all- heavily-white, all-female group, the sweet choral arrangement, the pastel prep fashion, the strategically placed tennis rackets. They use race, class, and gender contradictions to force us to see and hear the song in a new way. All serve to mock the original, taking the teeth out of the language at the same time that they expose it as grossly misogynistic. Awesome."
Emily Sernaker, interviewer: You wrote that American audiences usually assume the songwriter is writing a confessional piece. Do you see the listener's tendency to think something is autobiographical as limiting? Ben Folds: It's limiting if you allow it to be. If I feel that my credibility hinges on how literally true a song is, then that is limiting. Then I can only write songs about what actually happened." "I think it's unfortunate that someone like Bruce Springsteen has to come out and admit that he never souped-up a car or didn't make out with a girl at some park somewhere. He's one of our greatest poets. But people still can't accept that he's not being autobiographical, and they get angry when they find out he didn't actually live some things in his songs." [Emily Sernaker, "Going toward what glows: An interview with Ben Folds", LAReviewOfBooks.com, Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 Oct 2019]
"The house was described by fire officials and neighbors as heavily damaged, particularly its shingled roof and the attic, which was completely destroyed. Fire officials estimated damage at $125,000. 'It looks like a dinosaur ate a huge chunk out of it,' said neighbor Amanda —, 16" [Henry Chu & Aaron Curtiss, "Fire damages rap singer's house, injures 2 firefighters", Los Angeles Times, 29 Jun 1992].
Richard Harrington, "Critics hit Newsweek's bum 'rap' ", The Washington Post, 28 Mar 1990. Harrington explains that the Newsweek article, more like a mere opinion piece, so broadly stereotyped rap that it triggered a unified rebuttal by some three dozen music critics, including Harrington. (For a short take, see Times Wire Services, "Critics rap Newsweek on rap", Los Angeles Times, 29 Mar 1990.)
During a routine traffic stop on April 11, 1992, the trooper was shot by Ronald Ray Howard, age 19, reportedly listening to "Soulja's Story", a track on 2Pac's November 1991 album 2Pacalyse Now. With Howard's attorneys expected to claim this as an influence and mitigating factor at his sentencing, the widow, Linda Sue Davidson, filed in October 1992 a product-liability lawsuit alleging gross negligence via music that incites "imminent lawless action". Interviewed, she said, "Ron Howard may have pulled the trigger, but I think Tupac, Interscope, and Time Warner share in the guilt for Bill's death and they ought to take responsibility for their actions" [Chuck Philips, "Testing the Limits", L.A. Times, 13 Oct 1992].
On Saturday, June 12, 1993, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, the brutalized and mutilated body of Mollie Mae Frazier, age 81, was found in a field near her home. Victor Brancaccio, 16, once an altar boy, but otherwise troubled, would recall listening on his walkman to The Chronic track "Stranded on Death Row" when the elderly woman, a passerby, unwittingly provoking his attack on her, had criticized him for rapping the coarse lyrics aloud. For details, see Karen Testa, Associated Press, "Man convicted of widow's slaying gets new trial, fashionable defense", Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct 1998, and Erin MacPherson, "Family members plea to judge for grandmother's killer to stay behind bars", CBS 12 News website, 17 Jan 2018. On the American climate of controversies over song lyrics in the early 1990s, see Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First (Wesleyan U P, 2002), p 295.
Death Row actually counterattacked, in August 1995 suing Tucker [Cynthia Littleton, "Time Warner, rap foe sued by Death Row", UPI, 18 Aug 1995], and in March 1996 publicizing alleged dirt that its hired private investigators, Palladino & Sutherland, found on her [Chuck Philips, "Anti-rap crusader under fire", Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar 1996]. The lawsuit was later withdrawn [Elaine Woo, "C. DeLores Tucker, 78; civil rights pioneer led a spirited campaign against gangsta rap", Los Angeles Times, 14 Oct 2005]. But soon, Death Row imploded, by troubles in house, signaled and spurred by Dre's departure to form Aftermath Entertainment in March 1996, by Tupac Shakur's shooting death amid Death Row posturing in September 1996, by CEO Suge Knight's imprisonment for parole violation in March 1997, and basically completed by Snoop's departure, going to Master P's No Limit Records, in January 1998 [Neil Strauss, "Rap empire unraveling as stars flee", The New York Times, 1998 Jan 26, § D, p 1]. Cf., Thomas Harrison, Music of the 1990s (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), p 51. Harris notes that Tha Dogg Pound saw its October 1995 or debut album, Dogg Food, "delayed, as sharesholders of their parent record company, Interscope/Time Warner, had decided that they would protest the lyrical content of the album". Harris claims that, "coupled with the shareholder's protest, Suge Knight's incarceration, Snoop Dogg's exit, and Tupac Shakur's death ended the label's hold on the hip-hop scene". As Harris concedes, "the album did enjoy high sales". But in Harris's estimation, "this was the last high-selling album released on Death Row in the 1990s". On the contrary, released months later, in February 1996, 2Pac's All Eyez on Me was a juggernaut. Merely, by February 1998, Tha Dogg Pound's Daz was the last high-selling artist still with Death Row [Strauss, NYT, 1998]. And in 1995, Interscope, not having shareholders, had sided against Warner, a quagmire resolved by their splitting, as Warner was the only major label with American shareholding [J Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65]. And even without Interscope and its next major label, MCA/Universal, there was the giant independent label Priority Records, unfettered in distributing gangsta rap, like N.W.A and the Geto Boys, ready to pick up Death Row's distribution [Strauss, NYT, 1998 & Randall Sullivan, Labyrinth: The True Story (Grove Press, 2007)]. In fact, it was Priority that had distributed Tha Dogg Pound's album Dogg Food [Chapman, Spin, 1996].
Debbie Clare Olson, "Films, exploitation", in Melissa Hope Ditmore, ed., Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Volume 1 (Greenwood Press, 2006), pp 165–166 calls blaxploitation "exploitation films". They are usually set in "exaggerated" areas, either the Deep South or the inner city, with characters that exaggerate the vices and ills of sex, drugs, and violence. Blaxploitation films were produced for only about five years, but depicted stereotypes of pimps and prostitutes remained prevalent in popular media even in 2005, since the films allegedly had the "ability to create and then naturalize certain stereotypes, particularly for those marginalized groups". Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown, based on 1974 film Foxy Brown, was tribute to blaxploitation films. Another allegation is of blaxploitation films is "gratuitous violence and nudity" as "ever-lingering misogynistic barriers", although " 'Foxy Brown' introduced blaxploitation film audiences to strong, sexy, and outspoken women for the first time" [Sari Rosenberg, "April 5, 1974: 'Foxy Brown' starring Pam Grier was released", MyLifetime.com, A&E Television Networks, 5 Apr 2018]. In 1994, cultural critic Nelson George described the lead actor, Pam Grier, as a cult figure liked even by many feminists. Grier was a rare nonwhite woman who had star vehicles developed for her physical beauty and ability to punish men who challenged her [Greg Braxton, "She's back and badder than ever: Pam Grier's '70s blaxploitation films are a big kick again, making the star a hot retro hero", Los Angeles Times, 27 Aug 1995]. And by August 1995, or 20 years after her film career's pinnacle, Grier was in high demand by young fans [Ibid.].
The music trio 213 originally formed in Long Beach, California, in 1985, and reunited a few months after Nate Dogg, after three years in the Marines, returned in 1991 [Lola Ogunnaike, "Dogg day afternoon"[permanent dead link], Vibe, 2001 Dec;9(12):156–160Archived 2022-04-19 at the Wayback Machine]. In the studio at the back of the V.I.P. record store in Long Beach, the trio made a demo tape. Rebuffing Warren G's requests, Dr. Dre refused to listen. But at a bachelor party for Dre's buddy, another producer, LA Dre, Warren gave the tape to LA Dre, who forwarded it to Dr. Dre, whose own listen had him summoning 213 to his home studio, where he immediately recorded Snoop. On that and more on Warren, see P.R., "Warren G", in Nathan Brackett with Christian Hoard, eds., The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p 859. For Warren's own telling, see Ebro Darden & Laura Stylez, interviewers, "Warren G talks growing up as Dr. Dre's brother, Snoop's early rap battles and his new album", Hot 97 "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 10 Aug 2015. On the V.I.P. record store, see Andrea Domanick, "World famous V.I.P. Records to close", LAWeekly.com, LA Weekly, 5 Jan 2012.
lmu.edu
digitalcommons.lmu.edu
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
mcall.com
Courtney Long, Love Awaits: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love and Life (New York: Bantam Books/Doubleday, 1996), cites that 1985 movie The Color Purple and 1989 book Disappearing Acts, wherein female characters apparently triumph over male characters, drew accolades, but adds that black men retaliated with rapsongs including "Bitches Ain't Shit". Long suggests that black women then coined the Niggas ain't shit as well as the All men are dogs "clichés" as "defensive and reactionary comebacks" [pxiii]. Whereas the Purple movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and nominated 14 times for an Oscar, was of 1985, the Disappearing book, by Terry McMillan, was of 1989, when Publishers Weekly reported its "flash and energy" but lag in "depth and breadth", while the narrative carries "her politics" via some dialogue effecting "a position paper" or "an old-fashioned kind of novel, the kind with a Message" ["Disappearing Acts: Terry McMillan, author, Viking Books", PublishersWeekly.com, PWxyz, LLC., 1 Aug 1989]. A Hollywood movie was released in 2000. Yet as to Courtney Long, author of the 1996 suggestion that women "coined" All men are dogs once "Bitches Ain't Shit" lyrics "punched back" at reports of "outstanding artistic works" elevating women over men, Long's prior book is a 1995 and, per Google Books, "the nonfiction equivalent to the bestselling Waiting to Exhale" [Courtney Long, Dearest Brothers, Love Awaits, Much Peace, Your Sisters: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love, and Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1995)]. In 1992, before "Bitches Ain't Shit" release in December, the novel Waiting to Exhale, "by any standard an astonishing success", Terry McMillan's book after Disappearing Acts and likewise published by Viking Press, was a New York Times bestseller for 11 weeks by August 9 [Daniel Max, "McMillan's millions", The New York Times, 9 Aug 1992, §6, p 20]. Its paperback rights drew $2.64 million, among the highest ever for a reprint, and Hollywood studio sought rights [Ibid.] The movie adaptation, starring an ensemble cast, in 1995, was the first American black "chick flick" and "was heavily criticized for its male-bashing and materialism" [Deborah Barker, "The Southern-fried chick flick: Postfeminism goes to the movies", in Suzanne Ferriss & Mallory Young, eds., Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008), p 112]. Further, "it presents a liberal interpretation of the heterosexual feminist complaint that 'all men are dogs.' " [Carla Freccero, Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York & London: NYU Press, 1999), p 94]. Allegedly, the movie's subtitle may as well be All Men Are Dogs [Paul Willistein, "Men may hold breath watching 'Waiting to Exhale' ", MCall.com, The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 22 Dec 1995]. Also in 1995, the 1992 book itself, Waiting to Exhale, was associated with All men are dogs griping as a longstanding convention while "brothers are no better" via rap songs that call women "bitches" and degrade them as sex objects [Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. & Colleen Birchett, Africans Who Shaped Our Faith (Chicago: Urban Ministries, Inc., 1995), p 41]. A dozen years later, one Ronnell "Chewy" Coombs depicts the rap lyric as men's whining, and such pimp talk as pretense, somewhat independent of the All men are dogs phrase, which itself is attributed to women's own tendencies preexisting [What Real Niggaz Want from a Woman (Brooklyn, NY: Hip-Hop Fever Promotions, L.L.C., 2008), p 27]. All men are dogs doctrine had long been conventional by American black women, allegedly thus fostering a mirroring by their sons to manifest a "Dog Syndrome" [Kimberly Springer, "Strongblackwomen and black feminism: A next generation?", in Jo Reger, ed., Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp 17–18]. In 1981, some researchers drew recollections from a sample of American young women black and found that their most commonly recalled teachings by their mothers about men were declarations like "no good" and "dogs" [Gloria I. Joseph & Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black & White Feminist Perspectives (New York: Anchor Press, 1981 / Boston: South End Press, 1986), pp 112–113 or –115]. All men are dogs was present [p 114]. Aside from specifically black women, a 2004 article in a popular women's magazine criticized the prevailing pop feminism as "Bad Dog" feminism, allegedly dehumanizing and denigrating men, as by All men are dogs mantra, an "astonishingly" old tactic of female bonding [Emily Nussbaum, "Is this girl power? Men are dogs, men are babies, men are stupid. Come on! Man-bashing may be good for a laugh, but it's no good for women", Glamour (Condé Nast), 2004 Jun;102(6):120–131, p 122].
Not to be conflated, Warner Bros. Records, an intermediary record company, was distinct from Warner Music Group, also called simply Warner Music, a major record company. An intermediary label may accept into its own catalog a small label's releases, thereby distributed with the intermediary's catalog. Yet the major label—Warner Music, a Time Warner company in 1993—controls this distribution. (For general discussion, see Christoper Knab & Bart Day, "How and why major labels and independent labels work together", MusicBizAcademy.com, Midnight Rain Productions, Mar 2004.)
Debbie Clare Olson, "Films, exploitation", in Melissa Hope Ditmore, ed., Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Volume 1 (Greenwood Press, 2006), pp 165–166 calls blaxploitation "exploitation films". They are usually set in "exaggerated" areas, either the Deep South or the inner city, with characters that exaggerate the vices and ills of sex, drugs, and violence. Blaxploitation films were produced for only about five years, but depicted stereotypes of pimps and prostitutes remained prevalent in popular media even in 2005, since the films allegedly had the "ability to create and then naturalize certain stereotypes, particularly for those marginalized groups". Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown, based on 1974 film Foxy Brown, was tribute to blaxploitation films. Another allegation is of blaxploitation films is "gratuitous violence and nudity" as "ever-lingering misogynistic barriers", although " 'Foxy Brown' introduced blaxploitation film audiences to strong, sexy, and outspoken women for the first time" [Sari Rosenberg, "April 5, 1974: 'Foxy Brown' starring Pam Grier was released", MyLifetime.com, A&E Television Networks, 5 Apr 2018]. In 1994, cultural critic Nelson George described the lead actor, Pam Grier, as a cult figure liked even by many feminists. Grier was a rare nonwhite woman who had star vehicles developed for her physical beauty and ability to punish men who challenged her [Greg Braxton, "She's back and badder than ever: Pam Grier's '70s blaxploitation films are a big kick again, making the star a hot retro hero", Los Angeles Times, 27 Aug 1995]. And by August 1995, or 20 years after her film career's pinnacle, Grier was in high demand by young fans [Ibid.].
newsweek.com
Rita Hao, Fall 1998, "And now a word from our sponsors: Feminism for sale", in Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler, eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages ofBitchMagazine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Reprinted therein is allegation of "that most bizarre of phenomena, the nervous Ben Folds Five/Verve Pipe fan who feels threatened by feminist empowerment ('How come them chicks get their own concert tour and us guys don't?')" [p 115]. In 1996, playing a festival, Sarah McLachlan had found a planner hesitant to bill two female performers in a row, whereupon she began the Lilith Fair [Yohana Desta, "Lilith's Fair ladies take girl power on U.S. tour", TheEagleOnline.com, The Eagle (American University), 31 Mar 2010]. Until its revival in 2010, it was held for three years, 1997 to 1999, traveling to cities across America [Ibid.]. "Never in pop history have female singers been quite so aggressively, shrewdly marketed on the basis of gender alone," reported Newsweek [Staff, "The selling of girl power", 28 Dec 1997]. In its first year, selling more tickets than the conventional traveling festivals Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. [Ibid.], the Lilith Fair was "a cultural movement lauded by fans for its feminist ideals and lambasted by critics for its lack of diversity" [Melissa Maerz, "The oral history of Lilith Fair, as told by the women who lived it", Glamour.com, Glamour, 5 Jul 2017]. Some women wondered, "Why does this have to be so crunchy and folky? How come you don't have Courtney Love, or 7 Year Bitch, or Elastica?" "Why isn't Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliott on this?" [Rachel Tashjian, "12 photos from the 1998 Lilith Fair, the best festival fashion ever", Garage.Vice.com, Vice Media, 11 Jun 2018]. "But while many massive artistic undertakings meet criticism with defensiveness, Lilith Fair came back the second year with a lineup that was much more diverse, racially and musically. You might even consider it legendary" [Ibid.].
newyorker.com
During 1995, Tucker and Bennett, codirector of conservative advocacy group Empower America, recently director of US antidrug policy, and once the US secretary of education, appeared in a television commercial against music that allegedly "celebrates the rape, torture, and murder of women". In May, Dole joined the battle against "violent and sexually degrading music". They all targeted Time Warner apparently since its major music company Warner Music Group, as the only publicly traded American music company, was singularly vulnerable to public pressure. But, as foreign companies, like Germany's Bertelsmann Music Group, or BMG—the major label parenting, for instance, Arista Records, offering distribution to Bad Boy Entertainment—were delivering even more gangsta rap, Time Warner alleged itself targeted by political opportunists. Still, while gaining only some 2.5% of its own income from Interscope, Time Warner was in some 40% of households via cable television, and needed congressional approvals to expand in cable. [On the Tucker and Bennett teamwork against Time Warner, see Ken Auletta, "Fighting words", The New Yorker, 12 Jun 1995, p 35. On that and Time Warner's counteraccusation, see Richard S. Dunham & Michael Oneal, "Gunning for the gangstas", Business Week, 1995 Jun 19;3249:41. Toward the BMG tangent, see Christina Saraceno, "Bad Boy and Arista part ways", Rolling Stone, 21 Jun 2002. On Dole joining, and the pressure on Time Warner amid an important congressional bill on cable reform, see Julia Chaplin,"Dogg Fight", Spin, 1995 Oct;11(7):46. On Time Warner's profits and ownerships, which, besides the major label Warner Music Group, included some intermediary labels, too—Atlantic, Elektra, Reprise, and Warner Bros.—and on Warner Music Group dropping Interscope to likely nil consequence for either Time Warner, Interscope, Death Row, or music lyrics, see Julia Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65.]
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
"At its core, a Western popular music drum pattern usually consists of three rhythmic layers: "The downbeat layer normally features the bass drum. In many cases, the primary and/or secondary downbeats (first and third beats of the common-time bar) are played as part of the rhythm in this layer. "The backbeat layer is often played on the snare drum, and it frequently plays one or both of the backbeats (beats two and four of the bar). "The pulse layer is usually played on the hi-hatcymbals or the ride cymbal. It often presents a (more or less regular) sequence or pulsation of notes. In most patterns, the pulsation is faster than the quarter-note beat." [Senn O, Kilchenmann L, Bechtold T & Hoesl F, "Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners' attitudes", PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0199604] Here, note indicates not a pitch but instead a span: a whole note, lasting four beats, spans the whole bar, and so a quarter note, lasting one beat, spans from any beat until the next beat. (On the relation between note duration and beat fraction, see Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–23.) A cymbal's pulsing faster than four beats per bar is viewable in portions of a drum cover of the Chainsmokers, "Don't Let Me Down (Illenium Remix)" [Matt McGuire "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 5 Jun 2016]. (The first cymbal strike is on beat #1, stranded vocal starts on beat #2, and reaching vocal starts on beat #4.) Although Dr. Dre's cymbal, struck every four beats, namely, once per bar, pulses four times slower than the native pulse, the same principle of attack on a 1/2 beat or a 1/4 beat, and so on, is how Dr. Dre's bass drum syncopates offbeat and how the bass riff grooves.
"Humans' ability to perceive regularity in rhythm, even when the rhythm itself is not uniformly regular, relies on the mechanism of metre perception. Involving the perception of regularly alternating strong and weak accents, metre in music forms nested levels of isochronous pulses that can be hierarchically differentiated based on their accentual salience." [Witek MAG, Clarke EF, Wallentin M, Kringelbach ML & Vuust P, "Syncopation, body-movement and pleasure in groove music", PLoS One, 2014;9(4):e94446] In other words, metre is uniformly spaced "beats" as timepoints altogether manifesting a regularly recurring pattern of silence, attack, and strength, while a music piece manifests multiple of such patterns overlapping. Metaphorically, then, metre is "an abstract grid" as the "scaffolding for rhythm" and yet, thereby, is "an aspect of rhythm" such that, expounding flexibly upon the metre, "rhythm is flowing metre, and metre is bonded rhythm." [Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London & New York: Continuum, 2007), p 136, quoting others]. "Syncopation is one of the most studied forms of rhythmic complexity in music. It can be defined as a rhythmic event that violates listeners' metric expectations" [Witek et al., PLoS One, 2014;9(4):e94446]. Metre's most basic level is the bar, while popular music's bar structure is denoted 4/4, a span of four beats [Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–23]. By a 4/4 bar's traditional metre, beat #1 is strongest or the primary stress, thus the downbeat, while beat #3, also strong, is the secondary stress or the other downbeat, whereas beats #2 and #4, weak or unstressed, are the backbeats [Senn O, Kilchenmann L, Bechtold T & Hoesl F, "Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners' attitudes", PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0199604, sec "Materials and methods: Pattern category"]. The downbeats tend to get kick/bass drum attack, yet the backbeats usually get attack by an accenting instrument, standardly snare drum [Ibid., Wyatt et al., Ear Training, 2005, p 23]. Whereas the kick's thump is bassy, the snare's tap is sharper [Trevor de Clercq, "Rhythmic influence in the rock revelation", in Russell Hartenberger & Ryan McClelland, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp 190–191]. "As a result, beats 2 and 4 are arguably more accented in rock on a regular basis than beats 1 and 3", which, despite their "structural importance", premise "the familiar joke among popular musicians that 'friends don't let friends clap on beats 1 and 3.' " [Ibid.] Yet besides a metric downbeat's contrast from a backbeat, an instead rhythmic downbeat contrasts from an upbeat. For instead an orchestra, led by the conductor's wand movement, beat #4 is the upbeat, weak, setting up the forthcoming downbeat, beat #1, strongest [John W. Wright, Matt Fisher & Lisette Cheresson, eds., The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind, 3rd edn. (New York: St Martin's Press, 2011), p 195]. Yet in popular music, upbeat often implies not metric structure but instead rhythmic structure, which varies both stress and timing, whereby both metric downbeats, #1 and #3, as well as both backbeats, #2 and #4, are in fact downbeats, simply beats or, more specifically, whole beats, whereas an upbeat is any midpoint between beats, thus a 1/2 beat, positioned where the word and occurs when counting a whole bar, "One and two and three and four and." [Ibid.] Meanwhile, given genre conventions, a music theorist explains, "It is not quite right to say that syncopation is the stress of a normally unstressed beat—often stress will be expected on such beats—but rather, it is stress that is not placed on the metrical downbeat." "For instance, funk has stress on '4'—the 'backbeat'—and tango on '2 and.' " [Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London & New York: Continuum, 2007), p 138].
In 2017, prefacing a live performance, Folds explained, "You know, what's interesting, this controversial song, I didn't write it. I wrote the music to it, and Dr. Dre wrote the words." "There's a lot to be offended by in the song; I apologize if there are any bitches in the audience." "But honestly, the thing is that I took what is actually a heartfelt melody—and I spent it on this song. And the reason I did is because I thought that it was interesting to sing in a little, tiny-ass white voice the things that were being said, anyway, that we were consuming" [Sherman Theater, Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, 18 Apr 2017]. For further, see Mark Beaumont, "Remember the '90s fad for 'hidden tracks' on CDs?", § "6: Dr Dre—'Bitches Ain't Shit' ", NME.com, BandLab Technologies, 5 Apr 2019.
nytimes.com
Chris Steffen, interviewer, "Ben Folds on repeating mistakes, conjuring characters, and repeating mistakes", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, 23 Aug 2019. Here, piano rock singer Folds discusses his own 2005 cover version of "Bitches Ain't Shit" and clarifies that he took most of the original song's "misogynistic rant" out from his own version. Yet Folds also says, "Dr. Dre is no dummy: there's comedy in it, there's Quentin Tarantino, and then there's also serious stuff in it." In turn, about the Hollywood filmmaker, Bret Easton Ellis, "The gonzo vision of Quentin Tarantino", NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 12 Oct 2015, cannot "imagine an earnest 20-something millennial dreaming up a film as perverse and lurid" as his 1994 film Pulp Fiction or 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, much less "his racially explosive comedy-western Django Unchained." Ellis deems 2015 "obsessed with 'triggering' and 'microaggressions' and the policing of language", whereas Tarantino's films are "relentlessly un-PC."
A counterprotester, Gary Jenkins, 31, a lawyer, shouted, "You're steamrolling our dreams, you're steamrolling our aspirations, you're steamrolling who we are. But we're here to say that we will not stand for it. We know what is right. We know what is wrong. Music is not the killer, it is not the ill. The ill is the streets". Willie Stiggers, 15, an aspiring rapper, before climbing onto the steamroller, shouted, "No justice, no peace!" Noel Rosa, also 15, of the rap nickname Kiddynamite, verbally squared off with Janice Robinson, 38, a Butts supporter then working for a record company. Janice told him, "You did not listen, my brother! The Reverend said he was not attacking rap or rappers. He was attacking negative rap!" Noel persisted, "I understand that! But he should be attacking the white power structure, who own the record companies, who own the cable stations." Janice affirmed, "He did. He said it was mainly their fault because they were the ones with the money." Noel retorted, "But what is he doing now? Actions speak louder than words! He's attacking us black rappers now!" Janice posed, "Do you consider yourself a negative rapper?" Noel demanded, "What is negative? You tell me what negative is!" According to Janice, "Negative is when my 14-year-old daughter comes home with a tape that says, 'Gangster bitch!' That's negative!" [CL Levy, "Harlem protest", NYT, 6 Jun 1993, § 1, p 39].
Death Row actually counterattacked, in August 1995 suing Tucker [Cynthia Littleton, "Time Warner, rap foe sued by Death Row", UPI, 18 Aug 1995], and in March 1996 publicizing alleged dirt that its hired private investigators, Palladino & Sutherland, found on her [Chuck Philips, "Anti-rap crusader under fire", Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar 1996]. The lawsuit was later withdrawn [Elaine Woo, "C. DeLores Tucker, 78; civil rights pioneer led a spirited campaign against gangsta rap", Los Angeles Times, 14 Oct 2005]. But soon, Death Row imploded, by troubles in house, signaled and spurred by Dre's departure to form Aftermath Entertainment in March 1996, by Tupac Shakur's shooting death amid Death Row posturing in September 1996, by CEO Suge Knight's imprisonment for parole violation in March 1997, and basically completed by Snoop's departure, going to Master P's No Limit Records, in January 1998 [Neil Strauss, "Rap empire unraveling as stars flee", The New York Times, 1998 Jan 26, § D, p 1]. Cf., Thomas Harrison, Music of the 1990s (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), p 51. Harris notes that Tha Dogg Pound saw its October 1995 or debut album, Dogg Food, "delayed, as sharesholders of their parent record company, Interscope/Time Warner, had decided that they would protest the lyrical content of the album". Harris claims that, "coupled with the shareholder's protest, Suge Knight's incarceration, Snoop Dogg's exit, and Tupac Shakur's death ended the label's hold on the hip-hop scene". As Harris concedes, "the album did enjoy high sales". But in Harris's estimation, "this was the last high-selling album released on Death Row in the 1990s". On the contrary, released months later, in February 1996, 2Pac's All Eyez on Me was a juggernaut. Merely, by February 1998, Tha Dogg Pound's Daz was the last high-selling artist still with Death Row [Strauss, NYT, 1998]. And in 1995, Interscope, not having shareholders, had sided against Warner, a quagmire resolved by their splitting, as Warner was the only major label with American shareholding [J Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65]. And even without Interscope and its next major label, MCA/Universal, there was the giant independent label Priority Records, unfettered in distributing gangsta rap, like N.W.A and the Geto Boys, ready to pick up Death Row's distribution [Strauss, NYT, 1998 & Randall Sullivan, Labyrinth: The True Story (Grove Press, 2007)]. In fact, it was Priority that had distributed Tha Dogg Pound's album Dogg Food [Chapman, Spin, 1996].
Courtney Long, Love Awaits: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love and Life (New York: Bantam Books/Doubleday, 1996), cites that 1985 movie The Color Purple and 1989 book Disappearing Acts, wherein female characters apparently triumph over male characters, drew accolades, but adds that black men retaliated with rapsongs including "Bitches Ain't Shit". Long suggests that black women then coined the Niggas ain't shit as well as the All men are dogs "clichés" as "defensive and reactionary comebacks" [pxiii]. Whereas the Purple movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and nominated 14 times for an Oscar, was of 1985, the Disappearing book, by Terry McMillan, was of 1989, when Publishers Weekly reported its "flash and energy" but lag in "depth and breadth", while the narrative carries "her politics" via some dialogue effecting "a position paper" or "an old-fashioned kind of novel, the kind with a Message" ["Disappearing Acts: Terry McMillan, author, Viking Books", PublishersWeekly.com, PWxyz, LLC., 1 Aug 1989]. A Hollywood movie was released in 2000. Yet as to Courtney Long, author of the 1996 suggestion that women "coined" All men are dogs once "Bitches Ain't Shit" lyrics "punched back" at reports of "outstanding artistic works" elevating women over men, Long's prior book is a 1995 and, per Google Books, "the nonfiction equivalent to the bestselling Waiting to Exhale" [Courtney Long, Dearest Brothers, Love Awaits, Much Peace, Your Sisters: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love, and Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1995)]. In 1992, before "Bitches Ain't Shit" release in December, the novel Waiting to Exhale, "by any standard an astonishing success", Terry McMillan's book after Disappearing Acts and likewise published by Viking Press, was a New York Times bestseller for 11 weeks by August 9 [Daniel Max, "McMillan's millions", The New York Times, 9 Aug 1992, §6, p 20]. Its paperback rights drew $2.64 million, among the highest ever for a reprint, and Hollywood studio sought rights [Ibid.] The movie adaptation, starring an ensemble cast, in 1995, was the first American black "chick flick" and "was heavily criticized for its male-bashing and materialism" [Deborah Barker, "The Southern-fried chick flick: Postfeminism goes to the movies", in Suzanne Ferriss & Mallory Young, eds., Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008), p 112]. Further, "it presents a liberal interpretation of the heterosexual feminist complaint that 'all men are dogs.' " [Carla Freccero, Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York & London: NYU Press, 1999), p 94]. Allegedly, the movie's subtitle may as well be All Men Are Dogs [Paul Willistein, "Men may hold breath watching 'Waiting to Exhale' ", MCall.com, The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 22 Dec 1995]. Also in 1995, the 1992 book itself, Waiting to Exhale, was associated with All men are dogs griping as a longstanding convention while "brothers are no better" via rap songs that call women "bitches" and degrade them as sex objects [Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. & Colleen Birchett, Africans Who Shaped Our Faith (Chicago: Urban Ministries, Inc., 1995), p 41]. A dozen years later, one Ronnell "Chewy" Coombs depicts the rap lyric as men's whining, and such pimp talk as pretense, somewhat independent of the All men are dogs phrase, which itself is attributed to women's own tendencies preexisting [What Real Niggaz Want from a Woman (Brooklyn, NY: Hip-Hop Fever Promotions, L.L.C., 2008), p 27]. All men are dogs doctrine had long been conventional by American black women, allegedly thus fostering a mirroring by their sons to manifest a "Dog Syndrome" [Kimberly Springer, "Strongblackwomen and black feminism: A next generation?", in Jo Reger, ed., Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp 17–18]. In 1981, some researchers drew recollections from a sample of American young women black and found that their most commonly recalled teachings by their mothers about men were declarations like "no good" and "dogs" [Gloria I. Joseph & Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black & White Feminist Perspectives (New York: Anchor Press, 1981 / Boston: South End Press, 1986), pp 112–113 or –115]. All men are dogs was present [p 114]. Aside from specifically black women, a 2004 article in a popular women's magazine criticized the prevailing pop feminism as "Bad Dog" feminism, allegedly dehumanizing and denigrating men, as by All men are dogs mantra, an "astonishingly" old tactic of female bonding [Emily Nussbaum, "Is this girl power? Men are dogs, men are babies, men are stupid. Come on! Man-bashing may be good for a laugh, but it's no good for women", Glamour (Condé Nast), 2004 Jun;102(6):120–131, p 122].
Angus Whitehead, " ' Stick it to the pimp': Peaches' penetration of postmodern America's mainstream", in Tristanne Connolly & Tomoyuki Iino, eds., Canadian Music and American Culture: Get Away From Me (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2017), wherein pp 259–260 skim the Canadian singer/rapper Peaches' shtick of chronically trying to offend men by vulgar sexual objectification of men when she is not issuing political judgments, yet the next page alleges a different reason that American music fans have not widely embraced her despite her "strong US following". At her American concerts in 2003, "crowds yelled, 'fuck you, bitch', 'get off the stage, gay man'." Peaches, however, viewed this as her success antagonizing patriarchal views. Americana's vexation at Peaches allegedly revealed "enduring inequality" since Dr. Dre can glorify pimps over hos in "Bitches Ain't Shit", but "even in 2016, an American mainstream has a problem with women intelligently articulating, parodying, and playing with the hitherto male preserve of graphic, macho sexual attitudes", as in the "nuanced, witty pedagogy" of Peaches, who is quoted, "The music must first be good. Then I can offend, make people think, and make them dance" [p 261]. On the other hand, Matt Lemay ["Peaches: Fatherfucker", Pitchfork.com, Condé Nast, 29 Oct 2003], scorns her 2003 album, Fatherfucker, as mostly mindless and numbing, despite Lemay praising her prior or 2000 album, The Teaches of Peaches, as disarmingly direct and instinctive [Sound recording, "Peaches—F*** the Pain Away", XL Recordings "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 11 Aug 2014].
Courtney Long, Love Awaits: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love and Life (New York: Bantam Books/Doubleday, 1996), cites that 1985 movie The Color Purple and 1989 book Disappearing Acts, wherein female characters apparently triumph over male characters, drew accolades, but adds that black men retaliated with rapsongs including "Bitches Ain't Shit". Long suggests that black women then coined the Niggas ain't shit as well as the All men are dogs "clichés" as "defensive and reactionary comebacks" [pxiii]. Whereas the Purple movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and nominated 14 times for an Oscar, was of 1985, the Disappearing book, by Terry McMillan, was of 1989, when Publishers Weekly reported its "flash and energy" but lag in "depth and breadth", while the narrative carries "her politics" via some dialogue effecting "a position paper" or "an old-fashioned kind of novel, the kind with a Message" ["Disappearing Acts: Terry McMillan, author, Viking Books", PublishersWeekly.com, PWxyz, LLC., 1 Aug 1989]. A Hollywood movie was released in 2000. Yet as to Courtney Long, author of the 1996 suggestion that women "coined" All men are dogs once "Bitches Ain't Shit" lyrics "punched back" at reports of "outstanding artistic works" elevating women over men, Long's prior book is a 1995 and, per Google Books, "the nonfiction equivalent to the bestselling Waiting to Exhale" [Courtney Long, Dearest Brothers, Love Awaits, Much Peace, Your Sisters: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love, and Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1995)]. In 1992, before "Bitches Ain't Shit" release in December, the novel Waiting to Exhale, "by any standard an astonishing success", Terry McMillan's book after Disappearing Acts and likewise published by Viking Press, was a New York Times bestseller for 11 weeks by August 9 [Daniel Max, "McMillan's millions", The New York Times, 9 Aug 1992, §6, p 20]. Its paperback rights drew $2.64 million, among the highest ever for a reprint, and Hollywood studio sought rights [Ibid.] The movie adaptation, starring an ensemble cast, in 1995, was the first American black "chick flick" and "was heavily criticized for its male-bashing and materialism" [Deborah Barker, "The Southern-fried chick flick: Postfeminism goes to the movies", in Suzanne Ferriss & Mallory Young, eds., Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008), p 112]. Further, "it presents a liberal interpretation of the heterosexual feminist complaint that 'all men are dogs.' " [Carla Freccero, Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York & London: NYU Press, 1999), p 94]. Allegedly, the movie's subtitle may as well be All Men Are Dogs [Paul Willistein, "Men may hold breath watching 'Waiting to Exhale' ", MCall.com, The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 22 Dec 1995]. Also in 1995, the 1992 book itself, Waiting to Exhale, was associated with All men are dogs griping as a longstanding convention while "brothers are no better" via rap songs that call women "bitches" and degrade them as sex objects [Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. & Colleen Birchett, Africans Who Shaped Our Faith (Chicago: Urban Ministries, Inc., 1995), p 41]. A dozen years later, one Ronnell "Chewy" Coombs depicts the rap lyric as men's whining, and such pimp talk as pretense, somewhat independent of the All men are dogs phrase, which itself is attributed to women's own tendencies preexisting [What Real Niggaz Want from a Woman (Brooklyn, NY: Hip-Hop Fever Promotions, L.L.C., 2008), p 27]. All men are dogs doctrine had long been conventional by American black women, allegedly thus fostering a mirroring by their sons to manifest a "Dog Syndrome" [Kimberly Springer, "Strongblackwomen and black feminism: A next generation?", in Jo Reger, ed., Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp 17–18]. In 1981, some researchers drew recollections from a sample of American young women black and found that their most commonly recalled teachings by their mothers about men were declarations like "no good" and "dogs" [Gloria I. Joseph & Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black & White Feminist Perspectives (New York: Anchor Press, 1981 / Boston: South End Press, 1986), pp 112–113 or –115]. All men are dogs was present [p 114]. Aside from specifically black women, a 2004 article in a popular women's magazine criticized the prevailing pop feminism as "Bad Dog" feminism, allegedly dehumanizing and denigrating men, as by All men are dogs mantra, an "astonishingly" old tactic of female bonding [Emily Nussbaum, "Is this girl power? Men are dogs, men are babies, men are stupid. Come on! Man-bashing may be good for a laugh, but it's no good for women", Glamour (Condé Nast), 2004 Jun;102(6):120–131, p 122].
revolt.tv
In the 1974 film Foxy Brown, heavy in sexuality and violence, its protagonist, played by Pam Grier, is a supersexy vigilante who hunts down a murderous drug ring by posing as a prostitute. Grier cameos in the 1994 music video for Snoop's Doggystyle album's song "Doggy Dogg World", as does Rudy Ray Moore, who played the 1975 film Dolemite's protagonist, a pimp and nightclub owner [Cheryl L. Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p 217]. (In the biggest Chronic single, "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang", Snoop raps, "Showing much flex when it's time to wreck a mic / Pimping hos and clocking a grip like my name was Dolemite".) For more on the music video, see Eithne Quinn, Nuthin' But a "G" Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p 146. In gist, the video is mainly Snoop, then Kurupt, then Daz, accompanied by classic R&B group The Dramatics, on a nightclub stage for an audience featuring vintage celebrities, Grier playing the date of Dr. Dre, who with Ricky Harris directed the music video [Preezy Brown, "9 music videos that bridged the gap between blaxploitation and hip-hop", Revolt.tv, 15 Jun 2018].
Interscope agreed to pay Ruthless a "huge" cash payout and publishing royalties on Dre's Death Row earnings: 10% on production and 15% on solo performance [Gerrick Kennedy, Parental Discretion Is Advised (Atria, 2017), p 156]. By some estimates, Eazy's royalty payments were up to some $1.5 million before his 1995 death: 25 to 50 cents per copy on some three million sold [Al Shipley, "Dr. Dre's The Chronic: 10 things you didn't know", Rolling Stone, online, 15 Dec 2017].
During 1995, Tucker and Bennett, codirector of conservative advocacy group Empower America, recently director of US antidrug policy, and once the US secretary of education, appeared in a television commercial against music that allegedly "celebrates the rape, torture, and murder of women". In May, Dole joined the battle against "violent and sexually degrading music". They all targeted Time Warner apparently since its major music company Warner Music Group, as the only publicly traded American music company, was singularly vulnerable to public pressure. But, as foreign companies, like Germany's Bertelsmann Music Group, or BMG—the major label parenting, for instance, Arista Records, offering distribution to Bad Boy Entertainment—were delivering even more gangsta rap, Time Warner alleged itself targeted by political opportunists. Still, while gaining only some 2.5% of its own income from Interscope, Time Warner was in some 40% of households via cable television, and needed congressional approvals to expand in cable. [On the Tucker and Bennett teamwork against Time Warner, see Ken Auletta, "Fighting words", The New Yorker, 12 Jun 1995, p 35. On that and Time Warner's counteraccusation, see Richard S. Dunham & Michael Oneal, "Gunning for the gangstas", Business Week, 1995 Jun 19;3249:41. Toward the BMG tangent, see Christina Saraceno, "Bad Boy and Arista part ways", Rolling Stone, 21 Jun 2002. On Dole joining, and the pressure on Time Warner amid an important congressional bill on cable reform, see Julia Chaplin,"Dogg Fight", Spin, 1995 Oct;11(7):46. On Time Warner's profits and ownerships, which, besides the major label Warner Music Group, included some intermediary labels, too—Atlantic, Elektra, Reprise, and Warner Bros.—and on Warner Music Group dropping Interscope to likely nil consequence for either Time Warner, Interscope, Death Row, or music lyrics, see Julia Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65.]
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
salon.com
Arielle Bernstein, "Girl swagger and blood lust: Rihanna, Taylor Swift and repackaging toxic masculinity for a female audience", Salon.com, LLC, 12 Jul 2015. Bernstein argues that female consumers and female artists have adopted "toxic masculinity" through chronic exposure to such media. "The sexualized violence in 'BBHMM' "—that is, R&B singer Rihanna's music video to her 2015 single "Bitch Better Have My Money"—"is particularly troubling" [Ibid.]. "One of the joyful things about watching 'BBHMM' is seeing a female auteur flex her muscles, building on the themes of successful artists who came before her and owning her power. The painful thing is knowing that this fantasy of power is so easily stripped away. In writing this article I watched 'BBHMM' over and over again; at first the scenes of violence were hard to sit through, but eventually I became inured to it. The shocking things became less shocking; the ordinary things more ordinary. I felt this same way listening to Eminem rap years ago in my teens and early 20s. I felt this way driving around with my college boyfriend, me in the passenger seat, listening to a version of 'Bitches Ain't Shit' by Ben Folds. 'I don't like this,' I said. 'It's ironic. It's funny,' my then boyfriend told me gently: 'It doesn't mean anything.' But it did. And it does. I've sat through so many songs about bitches and whores, and so many shows where cut-up female bodies are just part of the landscape. 'It's not about you,' a girl at a party tells me, when a sexist song begins to play. But it is. It is and it is and it is." [Ibid.] Berstein, perhaps evoking New York gangsta rapper Biggie Smalls's published persona, the Notorious B.I.G., uses the nickname "NotoriousREL" and "teaches writing" at a Washington DC university ["Arielle Bernstein", Salon.com, visited 30 Dec 2021], which calls her a "cultural critic who focuses on film, TV, art, culture, and how social media and digital communications shape human expression, interaction, intimacy, and empathy" [Arts & Sciences, "Arielle Bernstein: Sr professorial lecturer: Literature", American.edu, visited 30 Dec 2021].
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
A professor of English and of theatre arts, this Amy Cook, now at Stony Brook University, in New York, is not the American musician Amy Cook. Professor Cook has webpages among English faculty and College of Arts & Sciences administration [both webpages visited 15 Mar 2020 & 11 Aug 2021]. The latter, identifying Cook as its "Associate Dean for Research and Innovation", notes, "Cook specializes in the intersection of cognitive science and theatre with particular attention to Shakespeare and contemporary performance". According to the English webpage, supplemented by Cook's CV linked to there, Cook is 25% professor in the English department, and 75% professor in as well as chair of the Department of Theatre Arts [11 Aug 2021].
Rita Hao, Fall 1998, "And now a word from our sponsors: Feminism for sale", in Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler, eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages ofBitchMagazine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Reprinted therein is allegation of "that most bizarre of phenomena, the nervous Ben Folds Five/Verve Pipe fan who feels threatened by feminist empowerment ('How come them chicks get their own concert tour and us guys don't?')" [p 115]. In 1996, playing a festival, Sarah McLachlan had found a planner hesitant to bill two female performers in a row, whereupon she began the Lilith Fair [Yohana Desta, "Lilith's Fair ladies take girl power on U.S. tour", TheEagleOnline.com, The Eagle (American University), 31 Mar 2010]. Until its revival in 2010, it was held for three years, 1997 to 1999, traveling to cities across America [Ibid.]. "Never in pop history have female singers been quite so aggressively, shrewdly marketed on the basis of gender alone," reported Newsweek [Staff, "The selling of girl power", 28 Dec 1997]. In its first year, selling more tickets than the conventional traveling festivals Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. [Ibid.], the Lilith Fair was "a cultural movement lauded by fans for its feminist ideals and lambasted by critics for its lack of diversity" [Melissa Maerz, "The oral history of Lilith Fair, as told by the women who lived it", Glamour.com, Glamour, 5 Jul 2017]. Some women wondered, "Why does this have to be so crunchy and folky? How come you don't have Courtney Love, or 7 Year Bitch, or Elastica?" "Why isn't Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliott on this?" [Rachel Tashjian, "12 photos from the 1998 Lilith Fair, the best festival fashion ever", Garage.Vice.com, Vice Media, 11 Jun 2018]. "But while many massive artistic undertakings meet criticism with defensiveness, Lilith Fair came back the second year with a lineup that was much more diverse, racially and musically. You might even consider it legendary" [Ibid.].
Andrew Stafford, interviewer, "Another story from an interview with Ben Folds", Patreon.com, Patreon (San Francisco, CA), 31 Aug 2019. The July 2019 release of the Ben Folds memoir occasioned this writer's article for The Guardian [Andrew Stafford, " 'I dreaded that song coming out': Ben Folds on 'Brick,' William Shatner, and hitting rock bottom", TheGuardian.com, Guardian News & Media Limited, 28 Aug 2019]. Yet the writer could not fit into that article the "Bitches Ain't Shit" retirement, "a whole other story, about changing cultural norms in a increasingly volatile political climate, and the importance of being kind."
Discussing Ben Folds's accompaniment, altogether playing as a trio, is Betty Clarke, "Ben Folds—Hammersmith Apollo, London", TheGuardian.com, Guardian News & Media Limited, 2 Jun 2005. Photos are viewable elsewhere: Hayley Madden, contributor, Getty Images editorial #85019781, Ben Folds w/ Lindsay Jamieson & Jared Reynolds, and #85019918, Folds w/ Jamieson, live performance, Hammersmith Apollo, UK, 13 Dec 2005.
For general discussion of what a middle eight is, and of music theory's purist distinction of a middle eight versus a bridge, see Will Byers, "School of rock: Figuring out the middle eight", TheGuardian.com, Guardian News & Media Limited, 8 Jul 2008.
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to"Archived 2021-12-17 at the Wayback Machine, in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.]
thehumanist.com
Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to"Archived 2021-12-17 at the Wayback Machine, in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.]
Kate Stone Lombardi, The Mama's Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger (New York: Avery Publishing/Penguin Group, 2012), quotes Michael Kimmel suggesting a usefulness of the college women's video: "What moms can say to their sons is, 'Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric? That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [p 230] Lombardi, likewise, hints that "guys" will perceive their own "moms" in the collegiate young women's clubhouse appearance, genteel manner, and "angelic voices" as an altogether unthinkable target of lewd misogyny [pp 229–230]. For reference, here is the Lombardi book's full treatment of the song: "The Barnard Collegea cappella group posted their rendition of hip-hop superstar Dr. Dre's song 'Bitches Ain't Shit' on YouTube. Dressed in pink, the young women's angelic voices rise in harmony, gently singing the lyrics 'Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks. Lick on these nuts and suck the dick.' Those are actually some of the milder lyrics, and the incongruity of hearing the incredibly misogynistic words coming sweetly out of these college students' mouths makes its point. 'What moms can say to their sons is, "Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric?" ' Michael Kimmel says. 'That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [pp 229–230] Thus, besides Lombardi's syntax that strictly, but trivially, states that the women's voices are dressed in pink, she may overlook that the choir covers only the Ben Folds version, whose most harshly misogynous lyrics she quotes when suggesting that the choir also sings the Dr. Dre song's more harshly misogynous lyrics. At such recurrent mixup, Folds elsewhere clarifies, "That song is like a six-minute-long misogynistic rant that never stops, and I took most of that stuff out" [Chris Steffen, "Ben Folds on repeating mistakes, conjuring characters, and repeating mistakes", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, 23 Aug 2019]. Lombardi is also, in any case, "a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and for seven years wrote a popular regional column that focused on family issues. Her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reader's Digest, Parenting magazine, and other national publications, and she is the winner of six Clarion Awards for journalism from women in communications. She lives in New York with her husband and is the mother of two adult children, a son and a daughter [Contributor webpage, "Kate Stone Lombardi", Ideas.Time.com, Time USA, LLC, visited 16 Dec 2021].
time.com
Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to"Archived 2021-12-17 at the Wayback Machine, in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.]
treblezine.com
Ben Folds's first bypass of record labels was an EP, titled Speed Graphic, released in July 2003, that debuted atop Billboard's Hot Digital Tracks chart in August 2003. But, this success being very relative, a music journalist, in January 2004, reacted, "Ben Folds has a new CD. What? You didn't know? That's because there is little, if any, publicity regarding this new five-song EP, available online only from a website— www.attackedbyplastic.com —created for the purpose of marketing it, from Apple's iTunes, and from Sony Music Digital Download. In a recording coup, Folds has recorded and released this album on his own to avoid the publicity circus" [Jonathan Nelson, "Ben Folds: Speed Graphic EP", Treblezine.com, Treble Media, 9 Jan 2004]. The EP, his first, includes a cover version of The Cure's 1985 single "In Between Days" and debuted on Billboard's Hot Digital Tracks chart the week ending August 9 at #1, selling 1 300 units, ahead of Avril Levigne's live EP [Silvio Pietroluongo, Minal Patel, Wade Jessen & Keith Caulfield, "SinglesMinded: It's 'Five O'Clock' at No. 1 on Country Singles & Tracks", Billboard, 2003 Aug 9;115(32):82]. Levigne's live EP, Try to Shut Me Up, released through only Apple's iTunes, had debuted the prior week, ending August 2, at #1 [Silvio Pietroluongo, Minal Patel & Wade Jessen, "SinglesMinded: RCA label group repeats its chart-topping trifecta", Billboard, 2003 Aug 2;115(31):64].
Death Row actually counterattacked, in August 1995 suing Tucker [Cynthia Littleton, "Time Warner, rap foe sued by Death Row", UPI, 18 Aug 1995], and in March 1996 publicizing alleged dirt that its hired private investigators, Palladino & Sutherland, found on her [Chuck Philips, "Anti-rap crusader under fire", Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar 1996]. The lawsuit was later withdrawn [Elaine Woo, "C. DeLores Tucker, 78; civil rights pioneer led a spirited campaign against gangsta rap", Los Angeles Times, 14 Oct 2005]. But soon, Death Row imploded, by troubles in house, signaled and spurred by Dre's departure to form Aftermath Entertainment in March 1996, by Tupac Shakur's shooting death amid Death Row posturing in September 1996, by CEO Suge Knight's imprisonment for parole violation in March 1997, and basically completed by Snoop's departure, going to Master P's No Limit Records, in January 1998 [Neil Strauss, "Rap empire unraveling as stars flee", The New York Times, 1998 Jan 26, § D, p 1]. Cf., Thomas Harrison, Music of the 1990s (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), p 51. Harris notes that Tha Dogg Pound saw its October 1995 or debut album, Dogg Food, "delayed, as sharesholders of their parent record company, Interscope/Time Warner, had decided that they would protest the lyrical content of the album". Harris claims that, "coupled with the shareholder's protest, Suge Knight's incarceration, Snoop Dogg's exit, and Tupac Shakur's death ended the label's hold on the hip-hop scene". As Harris concedes, "the album did enjoy high sales". But in Harris's estimation, "this was the last high-selling album released on Death Row in the 1990s". On the contrary, released months later, in February 1996, 2Pac's All Eyez on Me was a juggernaut. Merely, by February 1998, Tha Dogg Pound's Daz was the last high-selling artist still with Death Row [Strauss, NYT, 1998]. And in 1995, Interscope, not having shareholders, had sided against Warner, a quagmire resolved by their splitting, as Warner was the only major label with American shareholding [J Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65]. And even without Interscope and its next major label, MCA/Universal, there was the giant independent label Priority Records, unfettered in distributing gangsta rap, like N.W.A and the Geto Boys, ready to pick up Death Row's distribution [Strauss, NYT, 1998 & Randall Sullivan, Labyrinth: The True Story (Grove Press, 2007)]. In fact, it was Priority that had distributed Tha Dogg Pound's album Dogg Food [Chapman, Spin, 1996].
Rita Hao, Fall 1998, "And now a word from our sponsors: Feminism for sale", in Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler, eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages ofBitchMagazine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Reprinted therein is allegation of "that most bizarre of phenomena, the nervous Ben Folds Five/Verve Pipe fan who feels threatened by feminist empowerment ('How come them chicks get their own concert tour and us guys don't?')" [p 115]. In 1996, playing a festival, Sarah McLachlan had found a planner hesitant to bill two female performers in a row, whereupon she began the Lilith Fair [Yohana Desta, "Lilith's Fair ladies take girl power on U.S. tour", TheEagleOnline.com, The Eagle (American University), 31 Mar 2010]. Until its revival in 2010, it was held for three years, 1997 to 1999, traveling to cities across America [Ibid.]. "Never in pop history have female singers been quite so aggressively, shrewdly marketed on the basis of gender alone," reported Newsweek [Staff, "The selling of girl power", 28 Dec 1997]. In its first year, selling more tickets than the conventional traveling festivals Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. [Ibid.], the Lilith Fair was "a cultural movement lauded by fans for its feminist ideals and lambasted by critics for its lack of diversity" [Melissa Maerz, "The oral history of Lilith Fair, as told by the women who lived it", Glamour.com, Glamour, 5 Jul 2017]. Some women wondered, "Why does this have to be so crunchy and folky? How come you don't have Courtney Love, or 7 Year Bitch, or Elastica?" "Why isn't Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliott on this?" [Rachel Tashjian, "12 photos from the 1998 Lilith Fair, the best festival fashion ever", Garage.Vice.com, Vice Media, 11 Jun 2018]. "But while many massive artistic undertakings meet criticism with defensiveness, Lilith Fair came back the second year with a lineup that was much more diverse, racially and musically. You might even consider it legendary" [Ibid.].
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Rob Harvilla, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely, goofs around, and covers Ke$ha at Beacon Theatre", VillageVoice.com, The Village Voice, 15 Dec 2010, indicates that during the December 14 show, Ben Folds "also covers Kesha—'Sleazy,' specifically—if only to force his bass player to sing the line 'Rat-a-tat-tat on your drum drum drum / The beat's so phat gonna make me come.' It's understandable if you're wincing, right now, at the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally. (Ben also has a gentle soft-rock version of Dr. Dre's 'Bitches Ain't Shit,' which he perhaps mercifully doesn't pull out tonight, as it's way more problematic.)"
vox.com
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to"Archived 2021-12-17 at the Wayback Machine, in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.]
Richard Harrington, "Critics hit Newsweek's bum 'rap' ", The Washington Post, 28 Mar 1990. Harrington explains that the Newsweek article, more like a mere opinion piece, so broadly stereotyped rap that it triggered a unified rebuttal by some three dozen music critics, including Harrington. (For a short take, see Times Wire Services, "Critics rap Newsweek on rap", Los Angeles Times, 29 Mar 1990.)
Reportedly, on Ben Folds Live, his October 2002 live album compiled from recent tours, March into July, as a piano soloist, "Folds finally explains the backstory of the hit 'Brick' " [Chris Molanphy, CMJ New Music Monthly, 2002 Dec;(108):46]. Otherwise, an interview of Folds upon the July 2019 release of his memoir renders an audio file and transcribed "highlights" that offer, On his high school girlfriend's abortion and his song about it, "Brick": "I mean it's not something I talked about much when the song was out. In fact, I never answered an interview question about that song. Try having a hit song and not answering a question about it." "Look, I let her know this book was coming out and I sent her the copy of that section to make sure she was OK with it. She's very happy that someone might benefit from the story." [Robin Young, "Musician Ben Folds tells the story of himself", WBUR.org, WBUR-FM, 29 Jul 2019]
The hook of "Bitches Ain't Shit" has four lines: | Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks | Lick on these nuts and suck the dick | Gets the fuck out after you're done–. Then I | hops in my coupé to make a quick run– | [Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020]. Written sources may slightly depart, e.g., Mitchell Jackson, Survival Math (New York: Scribner, 2019), p 125, in the final line: | . . . . | . . . . | . . . . And I | hops in my ride to make a quick run |. MetroLyrics, licensed to share lyrics online, matches Jackson ["Dr. Dre—'Bitches Ain't Shit' lyrics", MetroLyrics.com, CBS Interactive Inc., 2020]. In the parlance, a quick run generally means a "quick trip" for more intoxicant, as in Kurupt's verse, which appends to the hook a trip to the store for a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor.
The music trio 213 originally formed in Long Beach, California, in 1985, and reunited a few months after Nate Dogg, after three years in the Marines, returned in 1991 [Lola Ogunnaike, "Dogg day afternoon"[permanent dead link], Vibe, 2001 Dec;9(12):156–160Archived 2022-04-19 at the Wayback Machine]. In the studio at the back of the V.I.P. record store in Long Beach, the trio made a demo tape. Rebuffing Warren G's requests, Dr. Dre refused to listen. But at a bachelor party for Dre's buddy, another producer, LA Dre, Warren gave the tape to LA Dre, who forwarded it to Dr. Dre, whose own listen had him summoning 213 to his home studio, where he immediately recorded Snoop. On that and more on Warren, see P.R., "Warren G", in Nathan Brackett with Christian Hoard, eds., The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p 859. For Warren's own telling, see Ebro Darden & Laura Stylez, interviewers, "Warren G talks growing up as Dr. Dre's brother, Snoop's early rap battles and his new album", Hot 97 "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 10 Aug 2015. On the V.I.P. record store, see Andrea Domanick, "World famous V.I.P. Records to close", LAWeekly.com, LA Weekly, 5 Jan 2012.
Peter Shapiro, The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop, 2nd edn. (London: Rough Guides, 2005). Trina's song opens, "| Niggas ain't shit but hoes and tricks | Lick the pearl tongue, nigga, keep your dick | Get the fuck out after I cum, so I can | hop in my coupé and make a quick run |" ["Trina—'Niggas Ain't Shit' lyrics", MetroLyrics, CBS Interactive Inc., 2020].
Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to"Archived 2021-12-17 at the Wayback Machine, in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.]
In 2000, there was Trina's debut album and its "Niggas Ain't Shit". In 2001, Dipset's mixtapeDiplomats Volume 1 offered a synthesis, "Bitches Ain't Shit (Remix)". In 2010, Boosie's mixtape Gone Til' December offered a "Niggas Ain't Shit". In 2011, YG's mixtape Just Re Up'd offered a "Bitches Ain't Shit", featuring Tyga and Nipsey Hussle, that samples the original and reached #90 on the main popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100. By 2020, over 40 songs had sampled the original, as listed at "Samples of Bitches Ain't Shit by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg feat. Daz Dillinger, Kurupt and Jewell", WhoSampled.com, originally visited 16 Jan 2020, revisited 25 May 2020 [sampling count at 45 songs].
And in 2006, an obscure group, the Leisure Kings, itself turned the Ben Folds cover—that is, the Dre and Snoop vocals alone—into musical parody of, indeed, a lounge act ["Cover version: The Leisure Kings, 'Bitches Ain't Shit', Total Loungification (Retropolis, 2006) / Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg et al., 'Bitches Ain't Shit', The Chronic (Death Row, 1992), WhoSampled.com Limited, visited 25 May 2020].
wm.edu
scholarship.law.wm.edu
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
"At its core, a Western popular music drum pattern usually consists of three rhythmic layers: "The downbeat layer normally features the bass drum. In many cases, the primary and/or secondary downbeats (first and third beats of the common-time bar) are played as part of the rhythm in this layer. "The backbeat layer is often played on the snare drum, and it frequently plays one or both of the backbeats (beats two and four of the bar). "The pulse layer is usually played on the hi-hatcymbals or the ride cymbal. It often presents a (more or less regular) sequence or pulsation of notes. In most patterns, the pulsation is faster than the quarter-note beat." [Senn O, Kilchenmann L, Bechtold T & Hoesl F, "Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners' attitudes", PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0199604] Here, note indicates not a pitch but instead a span: a whole note, lasting four beats, spans the whole bar, and so a quarter note, lasting one beat, spans from any beat until the next beat. (On the relation between note duration and beat fraction, see Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–23.) A cymbal's pulsing faster than four beats per bar is viewable in portions of a drum cover of the Chainsmokers, "Don't Let Me Down (Illenium Remix)" [Matt McGuire "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 5 Jun 2016]. (The first cymbal strike is on beat #1, stranded vocal starts on beat #2, and reaching vocal starts on beat #4.) Although Dr. Dre's cymbal, struck every four beats, namely, once per bar, pulses four times slower than the native pulse, the same principle of attack on a 1/2 beat or a 1/4 beat, and so on, is how Dr. Dre's bass drum syncopates offbeat and how the bass riff grooves.
The hook of "Bitches Ain't Shit" has four lines: | Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks | Lick on these nuts and suck the dick | Gets the fuck out after you're done–. Then I | hops in my coupé to make a quick run– | [Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020]. Written sources may slightly depart, e.g., Mitchell Jackson, Survival Math (New York: Scribner, 2019), p 125, in the final line: | . . . . | . . . . | . . . . And I | hops in my ride to make a quick run |. MetroLyrics, licensed to share lyrics online, matches Jackson ["Dr. Dre—'Bitches Ain't Shit' lyrics", MetroLyrics.com, CBS Interactive Inc., 2020]. In the parlance, a quick run generally means a "quick trip" for more intoxicant, as in Kurupt's verse, which appends to the hook a trip to the store for a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor.
"Colin Wolfe & The Chronic", live demonstration and Q&A at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, UNC-TV, 1 May 2017, streamed live, now archived, on Moogfest @ YouTube. Wolfe demonstrates and discusses his use of Moog keyboard and bass guitar to help write The Chronic instrumentals. Comments on meeting and working with Dr. Dre start near 33:10 mark. Note that this source perhaps does not discuss "Bitches Ain't Shit" specifically.
Vlad Lyubovny, interviewer, "The D.O.C. on co-writing Dr. Dre's 'The Chronic' & paperwork not being right", VladTV/DJVlad "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 10 Jan 2016. Near 02:33 mark, the D.O.C. affirms he wrote Dre's sole "Bitches Ain't Shit" verse. Near 00:24 mark, he comments, rather, on imparting to Snoop "the formula". Groping a moment for an apt word, he apparently invokes the theme of his own single "The Formula", released in 1989 by Ruthless Records before a car accident, injuring his vocal cords, ended his own rap career. On some principles he imparted, see Soren Baker, "Doing numbers with the D.O.C.", History of Gangster Rap (New York: Abrams Image, 2018), p119.
The music trio 213 originally formed in Long Beach, California, in 1985, and reunited a few months after Nate Dogg, after three years in the Marines, returned in 1991 [Lola Ogunnaike, "Dogg day afternoon"[permanent dead link], Vibe, 2001 Dec;9(12):156–160Archived 2022-04-19 at the Wayback Machine]. In the studio at the back of the V.I.P. record store in Long Beach, the trio made a demo tape. Rebuffing Warren G's requests, Dr. Dre refused to listen. But at a bachelor party for Dre's buddy, another producer, LA Dre, Warren gave the tape to LA Dre, who forwarded it to Dr. Dre, whose own listen had him summoning 213 to his home studio, where he immediately recorded Snoop. On that and more on Warren, see P.R., "Warren G", in Nathan Brackett with Christian Hoard, eds., The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p 859. For Warren's own telling, see Ebro Darden & Laura Stylez, interviewers, "Warren G talks growing up as Dr. Dre's brother, Snoop's early rap battles and his new album", Hot 97 "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 10 Aug 2015. On the V.I.P. record store, see Andrea Domanick, "World famous V.I.P. Records to close", LAWeekly.com, LA Weekly, 5 Jan 2012.
Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020, timestamp 03:25, where Snoop raps the final hook recital's last bar, then Dre's Bitches ain't shitrefrain starts, then Jewell's ad lib occurs, and then Jewell's verse starts.
In the following adaptation of vocal rhythm to typing, the uprights indicate true barlines, which separate the musical bars, also termed measures. Jewell's first lyrical line, I don't give a fuck about a bitch, spans roughly six beats or roughly 1 & 1/2 bars arranged within three consecutive bars. First, in this abstraction of these, the word and, being the syllable immediately before as well as after a beat #, strikes a 1/2 beat, which, midway between beats, may be called an "upbeat" between two "downbeats": | . . . and Four (#4) and | ONE (#1) and Two (#2) and Three (#3) and Four (#4) and | ONE (#1) . . . |. Improvised here, the symbol ^ will denote silence at the 1/2 beat, so instead of counting, "One and two and three", we count, "One. Two. Three". A long dash, —, symbolizes silence for a full beat, so instead of counting, "One and two and three", we count, "One. —and three". Inward arrows, > <, are only where Jewell rapidly vocalizes "give a" as two 1/4 beats in a 1/2 beat's span. Boldface denotes any stressed beat, some of which a performer freely chooses, personalizing the rhythm. BOLD UPPERCASE denotes a stressed beat given primary stress, generally dictated by the metre, whereby dramatic or unceasing departure may derange the performance. Stress variation concerns metre and rhythm, whereas pitch variation, atop these, helps create melody, but pitch, not covered here, differs from stress, which is depicted here for Jewell's first two lyrical lines, prefaced by her ad lib's closure: | . . . -oh- (#4) -hh |YEAH (#1) — (#2) — (#3) I don't (#4) >give a< |FUCK (#1) — (#2) a-bout (#3) ^a (#4) bi- |-ITCH (#1) — (#2) but I'll (#3) let her (#4) kno- |-OW (#1) ^that (#2) she can't (#3) ^fade (#4) ^|THIS (#1) . . . |. Jewell's first three actual words on her #1 counts—the beats that receive primary stress both vocal and instrumental—are thus seen to be yeah, then fuck, then bitch [Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020, timestamp 03:26, where Snoop raps his last bar, Dre echoes one bar, and then Jewell enters].
Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020, timestamp 04:05, where Jewell's verse sets up its I don't give a fuckrefrain, repeated four times, and then switches from singing to rapping.
Apparently definitive is the Kurupt verse's close (while Snoop queries—and echoes another bar): | Bitches on my nuts like –clothes. Heh. | But I'm from the Pound and we don't love them hos. How could y' | trust a ho? (Why—) 'Cause a ho's a trick. I don't | love them tricks (Why—) 'Cause a trick's a bitch, and my | dick's constantly in her mouth— turning them | trick-ass hos the fuck out, now | [Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020, timestamp 01:51].
Sound recording, "One Less Bitch", N.W.A. "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 24 Jul 2018.
Note that on "Bitches Ain't Shit" and, the following year, also on "Ain't No Fun"—Snoop's other reputedly misogynist anthem [Jenkins et al., Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999, p 40]—whereas Kurupt scorns any love ever for a "bitch", and so does Nate Dogg on the latter song, Snoop uniquely suggests having loved a "bitch", if both times incurring his present regret. In "Ain't No Fun", Snoop raps, "| Hoes recognize. Niggas do, too, 'cause when | bitches get scandalous and pull a voodoo, | what you gon' do? You really don't know. So | I'd advise you not to trust that ho. | Silly of me to fall in love with a bitch, | knowing damn well I'm too caught up with my grip |" ["Ain't No Fun (If the Homies Can't Have None) (feat. Nate Dogg, Warren G & Kurupt)", SnoopDoggTV "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 8 Nov 2014, timemark 02:32 for Snoop's verse, or timemark 01:20 for Nate Dogg closing the first verse, followed by Kurupt's verse]. (By contrast, on Tha Dogg Pound song "Big Pimpin' ", on the soundtrack of the March 1994 movie Above the Rim, a Death Row Records release, Snoop's verse opens (with female backup singers), | . . . Now do I | love them hos? (Hell no.) And why is | that? (Because you're Snoop Doggy Dogg. And | you never gave a fuck about a bitch, 'cause to | you, bitches ain't shit but hos and | tricks.) Ha, ha, ha. Dee, dee, dah, dee, dah. |).
Angus Whitehead, " ' Stick it to the pimp': Peaches' penetration of postmodern America's mainstream", in Tristanne Connolly & Tomoyuki Iino, eds., Canadian Music and American Culture: Get Away From Me (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2017), wherein pp 259–260 skim the Canadian singer/rapper Peaches' shtick of chronically trying to offend men by vulgar sexual objectification of men when she is not issuing political judgments, yet the next page alleges a different reason that American music fans have not widely embraced her despite her "strong US following". At her American concerts in 2003, "crowds yelled, 'fuck you, bitch', 'get off the stage, gay man'." Peaches, however, viewed this as her success antagonizing patriarchal views. Americana's vexation at Peaches allegedly revealed "enduring inequality" since Dr. Dre can glorify pimps over hos in "Bitches Ain't Shit", but "even in 2016, an American mainstream has a problem with women intelligently articulating, parodying, and playing with the hitherto male preserve of graphic, macho sexual attitudes", as in the "nuanced, witty pedagogy" of Peaches, who is quoted, "The music must first be good. Then I can offend, make people think, and make them dance" [p 261]. On the other hand, Matt Lemay ["Peaches: Fatherfucker", Pitchfork.com, Condé Nast, 29 Oct 2003], scorns her 2003 album, Fatherfucker, as mostly mindless and numbing, despite Lemay praising her prior or 2000 album, The Teaches of Peaches, as disarmingly direct and instinctive [Sound recording, "Peaches—F*** the Pain Away", XL Recordings "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 11 Aug 2014].
In the Lil' Kim song "Suck My Dick", the hook is performed with a man barking at her (in parentheses): | . . . ('Ey, yo, come here, | bitch.) Nigga, fuck you. (No, fuck you, | bitch.) Who you talking to? (Why you acting like a | bitch?) 'Cause y'all niggas ain't shit. And— | if I was dude, I'd tell y'all to suck my | dick . . .| By contrast, the third and final verse's last four bars musically interpolate but lyrically revise: | Niggas ain't shit, but they still can trick. All | they can do for me is suck my clit. I'm | jumping the fuck up after I cum–. Thinking | they gon' get some pussy, but they gets none–. ('Ey, yo, come here, |. (Compare with the "Bitches Ain't Shit" hook: | Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks | Lick on these nuts and suck the dick | Gets the fuck out after you're done–. then I | hops in my coupé to make a quick run |.) According to Greg Thomas [Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp 52–53], despite written lyrics saying "clit", Lil' Kim vocalizes "click" [Sound recording, "Suck My Dick", Lil Kim "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 8 Nov 2014]. In Thomas's reading of this song, whereby Lil' Kim has already posed, "Imagine if I was a dude, hitting niggas from the back", her saying "click" not only rhymes with the prior line's word trick, but also joins the word dick, which the elder hook employs, with the word clit, which one expects Lil' Kim to employ, and invokes the click or C-L-I-C-K homophone clique or C-L-I-Q-U-E, indicating an exclusive group of associating persons.
Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020, timestamp 02:27.
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56]. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168]. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", RollingStone.com, 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44]. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class [Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13]. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020].
Music video, "Ben Folds Five—'Brick' ", BenFoldsFiveVEVO @ YouTube, 25 Oct 2009. For a contemporary reaction, see Charles Aaron, "Singles", Spin, 1998 Jun;14(6):136.
