THE RAP-MUSIC PARADOX

I love, revere, and respect women. So how can I listen to music that demeans them?

THE LAST SUMMER OF MY TWEENS-1987-I GOT MY HANDS ON a cassette of Too $hort's Born to Mack and was titillated by the first rap songs I'd heard with profanity. Beyond the curse words, the way $hort spoke about women gobsmacked impressionable me. On "Freaky Tales," he boasts of several salacious escapades. On "Dope Fiend Beat," the album's very next song, he begins with his now-signature epithet-a singsong Biiiiiiiiiitch!-delivers a preamble, and launches into his first verse: "Bitches on my mind/I can't hold back, now's the time/All you loudmouth bitches talk too much/And you dick-teasin' bitches never fuck."

My mom seized the tape but never trashed it, and I soon sleuthed it and began clandestine listening. Not only did Born to Mack use language to describe girls/women that had been verboten by my mother and sanctified great-grandmother-the two most important women in my lifeits lyrics proffered a kind of manual for how to treat women, worked to inculcate me on the value of girls/women, or the lack thereof. N.W.A released Straight Outta Compton the next year, an album that became the standard-bearer for gangster rap. On "Dopeman," Ice Cube raps, "Strawberry, Strawberry is the neighborhood ho," characterizing a woman who'd have sex for crack in the hood. While $hort and N.W.A were laying a foundation of patriarchy and misogyny and sexism, I was at least a decade from learning the meaning of any of those words, much less considering them with informed acuity.

Just a few years later, I would head-bob before my varsity basketball games to Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit," off The Chronic. "Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks/Lick on these nuts and suck the dick," went the hook. "Gets the fuck out after you're done/Then I hops in my coupe to make a quick run."