Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil' Kim's Lyricism

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of South Florida - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-3...

Author: Greg Thomas

14 downloads 687 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of South Florida - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-30

Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh

10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas



This page intentionally left blank

Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism

Greg Thomas



Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh

HIP-HOP REVOLUTION IN THE FLESH

Copyright © Greg Thomas, 2009. A much shorter version of chapter 4 appeared in Journal of Pan-African Studies 1:7 (2007): pp. 23–37. Peter Rodrigo of Rise With Us Illustration and Design Studio, “Goddess” (Cover Photo, 2008) Vincent Soyez, “Lil’ Kim in African Warrior Pose, Sitting on a Royal Throne” (2003) Jonelle Davies of IShineDesigns (Photos of Exu and Table-Images, 2008) Jamaul Smith of Art by Any Means, “The Compound Esu” & “St. Kimpa Vita of Kongo” (2008) LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Black Magic (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969) Elaine Brown, “The End of Silence” (Words and Music by Elaine Brown, 1969) King Magazine Harris Publications, Inc. (May/June 2003) Genre Magazine (July 2000) Alexei Hay/Art Department, “Lil’ Kim in Burka” (2003) Derrick Santini: “The Saint” (2005) First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–61180–1 ISBN-10: 0–230–61180–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



For Quin, Nick, and Ike, for “Heretics” of the Future




List of Illustrations and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Orals . . . Head . . . Genius: The Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure of Hard Core Sexual Poetic Justice: On African Matriarchy, Flexible Gender Systems, and The Notorious K.I.M. Mic “God/dess” . . . Eshu-Elegba: Signifying Divine Freedom— In the Flesh (Black) Consciousness (Reprise): Neo-Soul’s “Baduizm,” African Cinema of Liberation, and Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H” “First Female King”: The Art of Morph and Monarchy in La Bella Mafia’s Beehive It’s the Lyrical Sex Pistol: Or, A Rebel Music that Rewrites Anatomy—Rhyme after Fiery Rhyme The “Sound Clash” of The Naked Truth: Erotic Maroonage, Public Enemies, and “Rap COINTELPRO”

11 33 57 85 111 133 159

Conclusion

191

Notes

197

Works Cited

215

Index

227



Contents




Illustrations I.1 1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 5.1 5.2 6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Lil’ Kim in African Warrior Pose, Sitting on a Royal Throne (Photo) Table-Image of Hard Core (1996) Tracks Table-Image of The Notorious K.I.M. (2000) Tracks Statue of Exu out of Brazil (Photo) Painting of Exu out of Brazil (Photo) “The Compound Esu” (Portrait) Table-Image of La Bella Mafia (2003) Tracks Lil’ Kim’s Cover of King magazine (Photo) Lil’ Kim’s Cover of Genre magazine (Photo) Table-Image of The Naked Truth (2005) Tracks “Lil’ Kim in Burka” (Photo) “St. Kimpa Vita of Kongo” (Portrait) “The Saint” (Photo)

10 16 36 60 62 66 114 131 143 162 185 187 189

Table 7.1

Clashes Sounded


178


Illustrations and Tables




U

nbeknownst to me, the writing of this project began when I was invited to participate on a panel entitled “Rap, Reggae and Revolution,” which was part of an important Black Studies conference organized at Florida International University in Miami by Carole Boyce Davies and its African New World Studies department. The dynamic energy of their programs over her years as chair would inspire me in ways far too numerous to count. I am doubly thankful now for this original invitation to give that talk in May 2003. For after “Rap, Reggae and Revolution,” I could not stop this writing on The Notorious K.I.M. and the text that would become this book was born. Let me give the greatest thanks next to every last, past, and future alum of “QUEEN B@#$H 101,” “Hip-Hop Eshu: QUEEN B@#$H Lyricism,” and “HipHop’s QUEEN B@#$H” Writings,” the undergraduate and graduate-level courses I’ve taught over the years now with enormous political and intellectual satisfaction. Like Hip-Hop itself, these students rocked worlds and I hope they continue to make their mark from here to eternity. My own thought and daring has grown leaps and bounds thanks to them or the truly exciting work that we have done together. I owe a tremendous debt to Haile Gerima and the Black Washington, DC, community surrounding his Sankofa Video, Books & Café. There I have participated in many forums on Hip-Hop especially. The preparation, affirmation, and productive frustration linked with such critical dialogues would turn out to be priceless to me in everything I do. Plus, in this context, I finally got the pleasure to meet up and bond with the one and only Acklyn Lynch, a true comrade of the mind, a true pillar of this Black Washington, DC, community via Trinidad and Tobago, and a true teacher you want in your audience at all times. The work of Carolyn Cooper has been of extraordinary value to me, without a doubt. I stand on my feet and applaud her trailblazing, “forerunner” function in the Black, Pan-African world. Where would we be without “erotic maroonage,” after all!?! This second book of mine would not be what it is without the ground of insights provided in the work of Carolyn Cooper beforehand; she has made what I do in the name of our struggle so much easier: Nuff thanks! I hope the radical impact of the NEH Summer Institute on “African Cinema” organized in 2004 by Mbye Cham of African Studies at Howard University is palpable in these pages. While in Dakar I met filmmaker Fatou Kandé, who touched me with her drive, her politics, her art, and her Hip-Hop. Like Boubacar Boris



Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Diop, the renowned novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, she introduced to me to the dopest emcees in Senegal. I am grateful to all of you. A presentations of pieces of my ideas here took place at the African American and Diasporic Research in Europe conference at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (2004); the African Literature Association conference in Boulder, CO (2005); the Fiftieth Anniversary of the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists organized by the African Community of Culture affiliated with Présence Africaine in conjunction with UNESCO and Harvard University’s W.E.B. Dubois Institute for African and African American Research in Paris, France (2006); the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil (2007); and the Global Reggae conference at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica (2008), among other places. Many of the audience responses were as useful to me as the responses of Yaba Amgborale Blay and Kalia A. Story, the guest-editors of a special issue of the Journal of Pan-African Studies, where a piece of chapter 4 of this book was first published. Certain friends and colleagues have helped create an environment or a conversational context which is indispensable, too. Janis A. Mayes has been first among them and literally vital to me in our academic enclave (or ghetto?). A translator, critic, and champion of Real Black Studies, she was also first to declare my work-in-progress a firm reality—to any and everyone in earshot, whether or not they were ready, which always made it realer. In addition to her, there is Nicole Edwards and Allen Frimpong; Peter Carlo-Becerra and Lena Delgado de Torres; Phyllis Lynne Burns, Quincy Norwood, and LaMonda Horton-Stallings; Aaron Kamugisha and Moustapha Diop; and many more. Luckily, Katerena Moustakis and Tony Muhammed each helped me out with some specific but very significant matters regarding audio and pictorial material, when I was pressed. To all of the artists who allowed their art to be reproduced in these pages, I am thankful: Jamaul Smith is special in this regard. Then there is Peter Rodrigo, who also comes to my rescue on the regular, making conversation and our environment better by crafting images such as “Goddess,” a picture-perfect cover image if there ever was one. Ultimately, this book owes a great deal to Jonelle Davies of IShineDesigns, its informal visual art director as a matter of fact. She created artwork; she helped me format artwork; she provided great advice and comfort in the process of selecting and securing artwork, relieving me of no small amount of stress in the process. What’s more, a long, long time ago, she blasted Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core louder than I’d ever heard it before in public—hyped up with her girlfriends and sister Dalia, all ecstatically in tune with every lyrical move. The sounds transported. If another musician said, “I heard you twice the first time,” I can say now that it was this specific moment that was at least the second first beginning of this project born to fruition, completely overcoming me, as Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh. Beyond all of those above, I can thank no one else more than my whole entire family, our ancestors, Eshu-Elegba and The Notorious K.I.M. herself.



xii

Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H” Lyricism: From Hard Core to The Naked Truth and Beyond

W

hat would “Hip-Hop” be without Afrika Bambaataa of the Universal Zulu Nation? He has been dubbed “Master of Records” and “Father of the MixTape” as well as “Godfather of Hip-Hop” (or “Grandfather of Hip-Hop”). By any name, he represents one-third of Hip-Hop’s “Holy Trinity” along with DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. Of the three, he is said to be most responsible for the music’s original African flavor; and it was he who founded the “Mighty Zulus” as a former member of the Black Spades “gang” or street organization from the Bronx, New York. He explains how he turned a negative into a positive after a life-changing trip to Africa for Yes, Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project’s Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade: “What I did is took all these elements from all these great leaders and teachers that we had at that time and said I will start a group called the Zulu Nation—from seeing a movie back in the early ’60s called Zulu. Just to see these Black people fighting for what was theirs against the British that always stuck in my mind” (Fricke and Ahearn 2002, 44). “I was inspired,” he continues elsewhere: “It was powerful to see Black people standing up and fighting at a time when we were only in Heckle & Jeckle roles” (Bambaataa 2003, 130): “So what I did, with myself and a couple of other of my comrades, is get out in the street, start talking to a lot of the brothers and sisters, trying to tell them how they’re killing each other, that they should be warriors for their community” (Fricke and Ahearn 2000, 44). A year later, on November 12, 1974, the four elements of deejaying, graffiti-writing, break-dancing, and emceeing were brought together and baptized under the banner of “Hip-Hop.” The term may have been coined by Bambaataa or Luvbug Starski or Bambaataa with Luvbug Starski. Unquestionably, Afrika Bambaataa conceived and promoted it with his “worldwide ambassadors” of Zulus in a grassroots cultural movement that would declare knowledge to be the “fifth” element of Hip-Hop. Their double mantra or motto of “peace, love, unity and having fun” (Bambaataa 2003, 130)



Introduction

2


and being “warriors for the community” (Fricke and Ahearn 2002, 44) supplies a foundational definition of “Hip-Hop” frequently and strangely ignored by academics and journalists who present themselves as “experts” on Hip-Hop, or “Hip-Hop Revolution.” *

*

Yet it is this Hip-Hop that is the context of Lil’ Kim’s revolution within a revolution at the musical level of lyricism. Her revolution is about power, knowledge, and pleasure. It is full-bodied and intellectually devastating. She got “shit” to make the world shake, as she puts it on The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Revolution” (2000), a symbolic song title that should make the politics of her intent obvious to anyone willing to listen. Such a claim is sure to catch many unawares. For many commentators on and mere consumers of “rap” remain trapped in a philosophy of mind that is foreign to Hip-Hop and more or less hostile to bodies—all human bodies in general, the Black bodies of Africa and the African diaspora in particular. But isn’t the unabashedly sexual rapper simply “unconscious,” they would reply; isn’t most or all Hip-Hop “mindless” and “meaningless,” at best, today if not always; isn’t the “rap” produced by this culture of the masses merely about titillation minus any mental stimulation? So goes the refrain of those who uphold the false divisions of Western bourgeois imperialism over Hip-Hop, consciously or unconsciously. This was hardly the revolutionary approach of Huey P. Newton in “The Mind Is Flesh” (1974). He takes aim at the European “Age of Enlightenment” associated with René (“I think, therefore I am”) Descartes, although it is argued that the idea that there are “two different kinds of existence or status,” mental and physical, is “as old as Socrates” or Plato of “Ancient Greece” (Newton 2002, 318–319). Society is rethought and reinterpreted without the separation or hierarchization of “rationality” and “sensuality.” A “hidden agenda of yearning and gratification of the flesh is bound to be represented by images, by the feeling of nostalgia, and finally by rebellion” (323). This is defined as the revolutionary’s field of inquiry. An ultimate victim of state repression himself who wrote a Ph.D. dissertation that would become War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (1996), Newton first surveys state repression or counter-insurgency in “The Mind Is Flesh.” It is exposed as the ruling class’s attempt to effect a “control of bodies” for “tyranny and the American Empire” (328). The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare proposes technology to control the nervous system and sexual responses of citizens, specifically “homosexuals” and “socially troublesome persons” (326), for example. The National Security Agency follows suit. University-trained criminologists speculate on electrophysiology to control, via the brain, “such phenomenon as movement, desire, rage, aggression, fear, pain, and pleasure” (327). Reapplying the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, for “a new humanity,” Newton sought to rescue “the entire human body” from the alienation of modern Western science in the name of “intellect, character, freedom and joy.” A joyous, brilliant, and righteous freedom is to be had: “The Mind Is Flesh!” (329–330).



*

3

An imperial, anti-body mentality or frame of mind is also not the revolutionary perspective of Opal Palmer Adisa, a Black woman writer of the Afro-Caribbean and the author of Eros Muse: Poems & Essays (2006). In “The Orgasmic Rapture of Writing,” she reflects on her own creative process: “I write out of my insatiable desire to know and I come to sex out of my irresistible need to feel, to eat passion, and it is this flame, this deep involvement in all aspects of life that is an important element of all my writing” (145). Her dedication is equally reflective and suggestive: “My only crime is writing, yet I descended into sin when I flaunted how much I enjoy this writing thing, and I wanted to wallow in it as much and as often as I could as if it were melted chocolate in which to bathe” (ix). Any traditional line between knowing, feeling, and desiring or between thinking, sexing, and creative writing is not just blurred; it’s orgasmically subverted and destroyed. As she imagines a way out of the ongoing history of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism for Africa and the African diaspora. The subject of Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh is arguably an even less conventional “writer” according to dominant definitions than Opal Palmer Adisa, a publisher of books (a more recognized form of writing, at least); and she would be an even less conventional politico than Huey P. Newton (a revolutionary male and an official “Minister of Defense,” of the Black Panther Party, at least), no matter how maligned he may currently be in this counterrevolutionary period of history. For as a Hip-Hop emcee, Lil’ Kim is presumed by elite definitions to be only an object of knowledge (“distraction,” “entertainment”), not a transmitter of knowledge herself. The politics of her lyrical thirst for power and pleasure as well as knowledge appear to be almost inconceivable under the dominant regime of power, knowledge, and pleasure, despite the fact that the writer-subject of Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh literally makes meaning for living, as a rambunctious way of life. *

*

*

Speaking of need, metaphor, linguistics, and gratification, Cheryl Clarke has stated as a Black lesbian-feminist poet and essayist: “Rarely are we as experimental in our pursuit of sex as the singers. We are not confident about and less direct in dealing in the here and now for conceit. We wish a lot for sex.” She speaks of the Blues. This was in a passage from The Days of Good Looks, or “She Still Wrote Out the Word Kotex on a Torn Piece of Paper Wrapped Up in a Dollar Bill . . .” (Clarke 2006b, 168), a line lifted out of a passage from Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982). The one poet says of the other: “Her verse is not only free; it is wild” (178), after and in light of a pivotal conclusion: “whenever black women express themselves sexually on paper or in the sack, we’re taking the risk of being rejected, misunderstood, silenced. And the more non-male oriented and women-centered, non-heterosexual and non-penile-oriented our expressions, our acts, the greater the risk” (164). This is Lil’ Kim—an artist, writer and “singer” of Hip-Hop who as a lyricist transgresses this order of things, prolifically, while unafraid of risk-taking in a society where not taking the risk means folding before the powerful and their oppressive, repressive rule of law, “order,” or violence.



INTRODUCTION


Like any emcee worth her or his salt, she would insist that she needs no introduction. She is not simply a pop cultural reference, a celebrity among celebrities, a fashion item, a subject of hearsay or scandal, or even the quintessential icon of female rap performers since 1995. She is the scribal voice of an ever expanding body of work. She begins her career with The Notorious B.I.G.’s group, Junior M.A.F.I.A., and their debut album, Conspiracy (1955). She blasts solo with Hard Core (1996) and, after his murder, The Notorious K.I.M. (2000), La Bella Mafia (2003), and The Naked Truth (2005) before Ms. G.O.A.T.: Greatest of All Time (2007), the mix-tape that will represent a new phase in her longevity as an emcee extraordinaire. For Lil’ Kim, only a reintroduction should be necessary in the case of those who have shown little or no literacy in her Hip-Hop school of rhyme. This is a lyrical rather than a biographical study which might call her by her “government” name. The significance of mic-names in Hip-Hop is overlooked or suppressed by critics who display a need to control or ignore the crafted meanings and self-identifications of Hip-Hop emcees. Analytically, it is of interest that Lil’ Kim writes of a life born in Brooklyn into an abject poverty; teenage homelessness; paternal abandonment; and street hustling, en route to her discovery by Biggie Smalls; a Hip-Hop rebirth; and her eventual maternal family reunion, after Black musical stardom. Then there is social backlash, federal imprisonment, and bouncing back on wax. Her uncensored mic-name is “Big Momma/Queen Bitch,” and this is a political-intellectual (not a biographical or governmental) study of one phenomenal, groundbreaking, wild and free thing: “Hip-Hop’s QUEEN B@#$H Lyricism.” *

*

*

In point of fact, her mic-naming or renaming encodes everything that HipHop Revolution in the Flesh is all about. It is the first written and commonly rewritten text of the emcee. Lil’ Kim makes her Hip-Hop entrance as “Big Momma” in Junior M.A.F.I.A., whose acronym stood for Junior “Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes.” This “gangsta” ethos of theirs indicates one grassroots challenge to the bourgeois establishment that rules the globe. Because she is “Big Momma” and ultimately “Queen B/Queen Bee/Queen Bitch,” Lil’ Kim did not make her Hip-Hop entrance as a sexual minority, an exotic, or some disempowered girl in this storied clique of eight men and one woman. She came in lyrically as “Lieutenant” to their mentor, “Big Poppa,” or The Notorious B.I.G. (“The General”). She came in as alter ego and heir to the throne—with a royal, matrilineal Blues resonance all her own. The magic of mic-naming or its power of the word made flesh is most evident when she puts to work the metaphor of the beehive, the apiary, a metaphor that will extend throughout the entirety of her Hip-Hop songbook. The “nature” of a Queen Bee is not subject to male domination or strict gender confinement, let alone sexual-erotic oppression or repression. She’s a matriarch. She doesn’t serve, she’s served. Her mating is a phenomenon (joyful and/ or lethal). She castrates her willing drones and takes charge of their genital equipment within herself, to fertilize herself, later, by herself, when she pleases.



4

5

She’s far from a slave to male or female classification. She’s African-descended. Accordingly, Lil’ Kim has crafted something phenomenal: a lyrical system of logic that is (1) anti-sexist; (2) gender-defiant; and (3) ultra-erotic, systematically and simultaneously, in an indigenously Black mode of expression or universe of meaning. Such a feat she accomplishes while the dominant system of logic continues to depict and define Black culture as incapable of art and thought as well as culture, let alone sexual revolution as an advance on so-called civilization itself. The “nature” of this Queen Bee is not just an alibi for sexism, homophobia or sexual conservatism of any kind, therefore, although this is precisely how “nature” is appealed to outside of her Hip-Hop hive. Her artful body of work calls forth new bodies of knowledge and new body politics as a consequence. No past or present academic school of thought can come close to laying such a claim. The text of The Notorious K.I.M. is nothing short of guerilla in its militant assault on sexism. What anti-sexism is more radical? In the wake of the tradition of Hip-Hop rhyme that she inaugurates, many critics and commentators have wondered whether or not this should be called “feminism,” an unquestioned term which functions as a sort of “name-brand” or privileged rhetoric for antisexism in the modern bourgeois West. There is an assumption that this version of anti-sexism articulated as feminism must be sexually conformist or conservative, especially now when “sex-radical” feminism is long off the agenda of most forms of feminism institutionalized and professionalized today. The assumption is also that no serious anti-sexism could possibly come from outside (or beneath) the modern bourgeois West. The text of The Notorious K.I.M. is nothing short of guerilla in its militant assault on gender, itself, as well. It radically rejects what Toni Cade Bambara termed “the madness of masculinity and femininity” in The Black Woman: An Anthology’s “On the Issue of Roles” (1970, 102). It is genderdefiant while other academic, feminist and non-feminist traditions of thought retain or respect gender, routinely, no matter how much it requires the sexist oppression of “women,” not to mention “men,” normally to enforce the madness of unquestioned constructions of heterosexuality and homosexuality both (also for the modern bourgeois West, of course). The text of The Notorious K.I.M. is finally ultra-erotic, to boot. For its defiance of gender does not lead to a reduction of pleasure; it radically multiplies and amplifies pleasure. It is nothing short of guerilla in its militant assault on any repression of the human body’s capacity for individual pleasure, erotic joy and collective celebration. (It would be problematic to label it “hyper-sexual,” as have many contemporary critics and commentators, for there is no unquestionable standard of sexuality to police how much erotic or sexual activity is allegedly “too much,” “not enough” or “just right” in the judgment of some proto-fascist calculation of “the norm” in any specific culture or society.) If a past or present academic school of thought can lay claim to one (or, maybe, two) of the above features of this Hip-Hop lyricism, it cannot boast of them all so systematically and simultaneously in a grassroots and PanAfrican rather than a Western bourgeois tradition. It’s always “QUEEN B@#$H 101” in her instructive mic posture. Hence, on “Who Shot Ya?” (2004), a freestyle, she states that “fuckin wit Queen B(ee) . . . ain’t safe.” She’ll leave a stinger in your face, she warns. The effect of her attack will



INTRODUCTION


simulate the Mumps; and, lyrically, she spits that kind of “shit” that gives a “nigga” goose bumps. She’s “Honey Girl.” This means she makes moves and break rules, while envious and powerless others are mad that she keeps “mad multi-millionaire dudes” droning all around her, Hip-Hop and Bed-Stuy/Brooklyn’s “finest.” The male domination of women based on sex and gender is made a memory in this narrative. Subsequently, on Ms. G.O.A.T.’s “QUEEN B@#$H 101,” a track that winks at the history she makes as the first Hip-Hop emcee to visit a college or university course in her honor and the first female emcee to be the focus of such a course of study, she headlines the show: Lil’ Kim is in “her own class” and she “got her own class.” Her royalty is touted and shouted over and over. Droning again, men see her videos and go lick the televisions slow. Gender-flipping and ultraerotic as usual, she’s a “Super Freak” female “Mack” (or “pimp”) with make-up on her most aggressive, suggestive words. Defying standard categorical grids, she’s a “tri-sexual,” or “try-sexual,” whose “panties” are edible and unforgettable. Her anti-sexist position is on top. Men gather around her merely to lay back hypnotized, ritually encircling and enshrining this “talk of the town.” Her whole block is with her and she keeps it “buzzing” at all times. It’s always “QUEEN B@#$H 101,” an occasion for typically sexual-political lessons, when her Hip-Hop mic is on. *

*

*

Lil’ Kim does indeed have “shit” to make the world shake with her recreation of power, knowledge, and pleasure in lyricism—a Hip-Hop recreation that is her career hobby or pastime, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the actual end-product of her verse or rhyme. Like the most forceful of warriors, for certain, she reproduces both the “fifth” element of Hip-Hop and its fun-filled love of life’s celebration, even under the deadliest of historical conditions or circumstances. Critically, William W. Sales, Jr. wrote in From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (1994): “The model of Malcolm X, the intellectual, challenged every ghetto youth to be a serious intellectual, that is, knowledgeable about her/himself and the society in which she or he lived” (207). The Hip-Hop that came to boldly resurrect Malcolm X in speech and image during the 1980s and 1990s should confirm this observation, plenty. This is especially so when the foundational conception of Hip-Hop championed by Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation is kept front and center. This shall be no less the case, moreover, when the political and intellectual transformation of Malcolm X/El Hajj Malik El Shabazz/Omowale on matters of gender and sexual relations in Black liberation struggles is remembered instead of forgotten after his assassination. Musically, his Pan-African respect and relevance for the young was reiterated in African cinema by Djibril Diop Mambety’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil or The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999). It was his final work before his own premature death and a part of his “Histoire des petites gens” or “Tales of Little People” series of films. It can be read as an allegory of Hip-Hop—set in Dakar, Senegal. The heroine is Sili Laam, a young girl who moves from the countryside to the streets of the big city to hustle newspapers, such as The Sun, or Le Soleil, to “feed



6

7

[her] family.” Physically, she has a crippled leg that seems to be a metaphor for the colonial-imperialist “leg up” or advantage that Europe and white North America has on Africa in the current global economic system. She manages to compete for survival against all odds with sheer determination and will. When other young, male paper hustlers try to intimidate Sili and squeeze her out of their horribly desperate turf, she is not fazed: “We continue,” she proclaims. She cliques up with a sympathetic teen, Babou Seck. After a scoring a big sell that nets $10,000 CFA from a paternalistic businessman, Sili shares the loot with her family and friends. She buys an umbrella for her blind grandmother and distributes the change in coins among women on the street of her grandmother’s age. Harassed by a nosy police officer, she marches him to the local precinct and charges him with greed and corruption. She then lobbies for the release of another woman also falsely accused. The rest of her money is spent on a party of music and drink for her friends. Whether or not it is before Hip-Hop arrives in Dakar, officially, Sili Laam dances in a new yellow dress and sunglasses to a tune played on a boom box by a street deejay rolling around in a wheelchair. It is easy to see or hear Lil’ Kim in her tale, and vice versa. Today, there are over three thousand Hip-Hop acts counted in Senegal, the largest audience for Hip-Hop beyond the African diasporic spaces of the United States and France. The filmmaker Mambety’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil or The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun was described as a hymn dedicated to the courage of “les enfants de la rue,” or “the children of the streets,” who would create Hip-Hop Revolution to triumph over status-quo tragedies internationally. Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism meshes the double mantra or motto of Hip-Hop, “peace, love, unity and having fun” and being “warriors for the community,” in an extensive lyrical analysis of emceeing. The tactical emphasis is not on break-dancing, deejaying, or graffiti-writing but on knowing (or knowledge) in general and human embodiment in particular. The once popular concept of sexual revolution is not a cliché in the hands of The Notorious K.I.M. It is a spin on revolution in “trueschool” Hip-Hop whose intellectual and political ramifications are incredibly far-reaching. It represents a ghetto youth intellectualism that does not conform to the limited intellectualism of the establishment, which it strives to overthrow. It signifies an oppositional politics of the “street” or grassroots that does not subordinate itself to the state, which oppresses and exploits the masses from Africa to North America and beyond. It does not simply remix or recycle the world-view of the Western bourgeoisie. What’s more, it in Lil’ Kim regenerates all of those ecstatic Zulu women warriors recalled by Afrika Bambaataa in their would-be revolution against British Empire and all of its European thought about gender, sexuality and eroticism as well as white-supremacy and humanity in general. *

*

*

This much is to be made plain in a sequence of seven chapters on “Hip-Hop’s ‘QUEEN B@#$H’ Lyricism.”



INTRODUCTION


First, “Orals . . . Head . . . Genius: The Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure of Hard Core” considers poetry’s connection to “heresy” and ancient or alternative forms of consciousness while probing Lil’ Kim’s boundless, mind-blowing practice of “orality” on her debut solo album. The oral here functions as a means of pleasure, erotic and verbal; an instrument of intelligence; and a sign of the power of speech, as the emcee maximizes orality’s possibilities for Hip-Hop. Second, “Sexual Poetic Justice: On African Matriarchy, Flexible Gender Systems, and The Notorious K.I.M.” highlights the amazing similarities to be remarked between her contemporary anti-sexist/gender-defiant/ultra-erotic writing in Hip-Hop and the academic writing of Ifi Amadiume, who rewrites the social and sexual history of continental Africa and thereby what is traditionally called “human civilization.” Third, “Mic ‘God/dess’ . . . Eshu-Elegba: Signifying Divine Freedom—In the Flesh” moves well beyond Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s famous intellectual flirtation with the “orisha” (or spiritual divinity) of the Yoruba and the Fon peoples of present-day Nigeria and Benin. It unearths an extraordinary Hip-Hop embodiment of this supernatural trickster figure who transcends time and space in order to affirm the divine claims of Hip-Hop emcees; a oneness of the “sacred” and the “profane,” so to speak; and the African otherworldliness of Lil’ Kim’s selfproclaimed divine mission or message. Fourth, “(Black) Consciousness (Reprise): Neo-Soul’s ‘Baduizm,’ African Cinema of Liberation, and Hip-Hop’s ‘QUEEN B@#$H’ ” confronts the politics of popular notions of “consciousness” and “unconsciousness,” as they rely on conventional, racist and sexist European attitudes toward minds and bodies historically. Lyrically, Erykah Badu is revealed to have a great deal in common with Lil’ Kim in a fashion that does serious damage to any concept of “consciousness” that seeks to promote erotic repression in the name of intelligence rather than as erotic repression itself. The cinematic “sexual consciousness” of Ousmane Sembène is referenced to accentuate this point across genres, geopolitical borders, and generations. Fifth, “ ‘First Female King’: The Art of Morph and Monarchy in La Bella Mafia’s Beehive” reconstructs Lil’ Kim’s chameleon discourse of royalty, power, and identity in a microphone narrative that spans from Junior M.A.F.I.A. to the demise of The Notorious B.I.G. to her conceptual resurrection as “King [and Queen] of New York,” “Ms. [Frank] Whyte,” “First Female King” or “Head of La Bella Mafia,” a matriarchal Hip-Hop “Mob” of justice ruled not by men but women who work with men and women under their collective leadership in a manner reminiscent of a history of “female kings” on the continent in Northern, East, West, Central, and Southern Africa. Sixth, “It’s the Lyrical Sex Pistol: Or, A Rebel Music That Rewrites Anatomy— Rhyme after Fiery Rhyme” examines Lil’ Kim’s exploration of what deejay Shabba Ranks and critic Carolyn Cooper have dubbed “the lyrical gun” in DancehallReggae. The potency of this weapon is often figured with regard to genital potency, usually male. In The Notorious K.I.M., the potency of gun and genitalia get astonishingly recast—via Hip-Hop lyrics as well as lyrical graphics—until human anatomy and power relations are fundamentally reconfigured, in battle,



8

9

for her anti-sexist/gender-defiant/ultra-erotic agenda of sexual poetic justice in the African diaspora. Seventh, “The ‘Sound Clash’ of The Naked Truth: Erotic Maroonage, Public Enemies, and ‘Rap COINTELPRO’ ” engages her fourth solo album as the first complete Hip-Hop response to the “Hip-Hop Cop” squads of counterinsurgent state repression targeting Hip-Hop artists, icons and activists, after the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It revisits Hip-Hop as “heresy” insofar as her pioneering mix of militant sexual politics and anti-state politics manifests an alternative mass-based morality, aesthetics, economics, and consciousness which looks toward a new order of power, knowledge, and pleasure—like Maroons rising against slavery of all kinds in modern “Plantation America.” Grounded in its vital Pan-African context, this is “Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H” Lyricism,” Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh.



INTRODUCTION


Figure I.1

Lil’ Kim in African Warrior Pose, Sitting on a Royal Throne


Orals . . . Head . . . Genius: The Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure of Hard Core

Lil’ Kim, keep messin’ niggas’ heads up with your nasty self. (Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot, Supa Dupa Fly’s “THANK YOU’S” [1997]) Take your genius lifestyle and flaunt it! . . . We’re geniuses and proud of the fact that our intelligence is accumulated outside totalitarian regimes. (Nightjohn, The Hiphop Driven Life: A Genius Liberation Handbook [2005]) You neva seen this stroke o’ genius: [I] put tha cleanest, meanest lips on ya . . . (Lil’ Kim, The Notorious K.I.M.’s “How Many Licks?” [Remix] [2001])

T

here are “blk / puritans” among us, Sonia Sanchez wrote in a poem from We a BaddDDD People (1970); and they would have us believe that “the word fuck / u / mutha fucka” is “evil” (Sanchez 1970, 17). The Black Arts Movement poet mocks these puritans by saying they came “straight off the boat” called the Mayflower. It was the great orator Malcolm X who would most famously and forcefully remind us that there were no Black folk landing on “Plymouth Rock” in New England, among the original, white puritans who came to colonize North America; genocide “Indians” (“Native Americans”); and enslave Africans for centuries. Although they present themselves to history as seekers of freedom, they wrest freedom away from non-Europeans in the name of their freedom. Their Puritanism has since become synonymous not simply with a specific religious sect (i.e., Calvinism, Presbyterianism, or Protestantism), but with social conservatism in general and sexual repression in particular. For there to be “blk / puritans,” then, there must be some Black people, some elite class of Blacks, who imitate the puritans who enslave or oppress them. They do so in large part by denouncing the masses of Black people and the Black culture of resistance that will scream “fuck / u / mutha fucka” in the face of white racist power. It is not this language of Black folk that is “evil,” consequently, in We a BaddDDD People; it is “WITE / AMURICA” or its society of oppression



1


that is “the only original sin” (17). As Sanchez’s publisher, editor, and founder of Broadside Press, Dudley Randall would note in her preface, she “hurls obscenities at things that are obscene” (Randall in Sanchez 1970, 9); and this was to be no small part of the poet’s revolutionary appeal. What is an “obscene” word, after all? In linguistics, there is supposed to be no such thing as a “bad” word. There are only certain social norms or codes that label some words “good” (or “respectable”) and stigmatize some words as “bad,” by contrast. Arthur K. Spears addresses this issue in “African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscenity,” his contribution to Saliko S. Mufwene et al.’s collection of essays, African-American English: Structure, History and Use (1998). As a Black linguist aiming to address racist-elitist ideas about Black speech, Spears rejects the rhetoric of “obscene language” altogether. He refers instead to “uncensored speech” (Spears 1998, 226). Since “relatively little theoretical attention has been given to ‘bad’ language” (231), despite the official linguistic position that would respect all language use, as language use, it is important to raise a series of questions: “Who has the power to judge? Who has the power to censor?” (243). Whose speech is valued, and whose speech is devalued, even demonized; why or in whose interests? Then, attention is shifted away from the so-called badness of some speakers to the question of censorship—the unjust power of some to censor the speech of others—which is to say, the cultural politics of domination (and the dominated’s resistance to domination). It is no surprise that the prime example of “so-called obscenity” in Spears today comes from “rap music.” Ripe with its own “fuck / u / mutha fucka” word sorcery, gloriously turning (someone else’s) “bad” into “good,” Hip-Hop leads him to conclude: “Obscenity, in the final analysis, is in the ears of the hearer” (242). What’s more, “[s]ome expressions . . . are eschewed simply because they bring us [human beings], species chauvinists that we tend to be, too closely face to face with our animal biology, e.g., shit, fuck, and others denoting basic biological functions” (243). This is a matter of “consciousness” (248), often of sex and consciousness. It is especially a problem among sexist puritanical elites, who in their preoccupation with male rappers like to ignore the fact that females rappers are as skilled in “bad language” as anyone, anywhere, anytime (231). If, ordinarily, Hip-Hop is hated by haters of Hip-Hop because it destroys puritanical delusions about bodies as well as minds, Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop is beyond extraordinary in this regard. For the most part, it starts with her debut solo album, Hard Core (1996), a “game-changing” or “paradigm-shifting” classic in hindsight. Neither rap, Black music nor Black popular culture would ever be the same in its wake; and, given Hip-Hop’s influence on international music and culture, her influence is felt worldwide. Immediately, Hard Core had its faithful celebrants—without a doubt. It also had its critics or detractors. They included puritans of all persuasions, and genders, in addition to fans who could handle its “Big Momma” posture only when it was buffered by the presence of “Big Poppa,” The Notorious B.I.G., and the otherwise all-male crew of Junior M.A.F.I.A. Many came to celebrate this work late. The celebrants and detractors would both agree, however: Hard Core is astonishing in its oral virtuosity and overall “nastiness” on the mic. Its orality was so all-consuming that more than a few commentators



12

13

assumed it to be “only” about “oral sex.”1 This assumption is narrow and misleading, yet telling. Interestingly enough, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot wrote, “Lil’ Kim, keep messin’ niggas’ heads up with your nasty self,” in the “THANK YOU’S” section of her first album, Supa Dupa Fly (1997). For as a lyricist in an oral tradition, Lil’ Kim uses her mind and her mouth to “fuck with your head,” so to speak, to free up your mind, body, and mouth from a puritanical culture of language and knowledge. The concept of “obscenity” is absolutely alien to HipHop, where to be “nasty” is to command the power of speech in the most potent, unrestricted manner possible. The sexual and non-sexual meaning of this nastiness on Hard Core undermine the false separation of mind and body that is the hallmark of Western societies which utilize this separation to enforce racism, sexism, classism, and empire. In point of fact, Lil’ Kim’s nasty Hard Core orality showcases “the oral,” multi-dimensionally, as a sign of the power of speech; as an instrument of intelligence or knowledge; and as a means of pleasure—so much so that she can be said to have no peer in this “poetry of emcees” which should reject the politics of Puritanism for a new stage of Black liberation, for sure.2

“Cultural Guerilla [Warfare]”—Sylvia Wynter’s Rap on Poetics and Politics Sylvia Wynter is an important, elder and always challenging figure in Black Studies, or what she would call “the intellectual struggle” over the course of the modern world; and it is in the spirit of cultural revolution that she writes her many brilliant essays, including “Ethno or Socio Poetics” (1976). Christopher Columbus tales aside, she examines the politics of the art of poetry in her examination of Europe or the West’s rise to global power—as of the sixteenth century— when it comes to violently overpower Africa and the “non-West,” or “the Rest of Us” (Chinweizu 1975). The struggle for power is no less a struggle for truth, a struggle for what will count as knowledge when political-economic power is monopolized by a very select few. This is why Wynter highlights here the connections between art and truth, poetics and politics, race and class in an essay that should be of particular interest to Hip-Hop, or its revolution, especially given her treatment of “popular oral cultures” throughout the “New World” of Africans in the Americas (Wynter 1976, 85). From the outset, she tells us that her interest is in revolution or breaking out of orthodox boxes of ideas for radical social change. Poetics is treated not only in terms of art, or aesthetics, but the art of “self-making.” How are selves made today in the wake of the West’s white racist empire? Wynter writes that pre-sixteenth century Europe characterized itself as essentially “Christian” (not “human beings,” which is in actuality a later category of description). It characterized others, real and imagined, as “Pagans” or “Heathens” (78–79). It saw Europeans as standing somewhere between “angels” and “animals,” aspiring to be closer in status to Christianity’s “God” (82). This was a more religious than strictly racial understanding of self and society until non-Europeans were cast in the role of “animals” in the context of slavery, colonization and imperialism (86). Thus,



ORALS . . . HEAD . . . GENIUS


Wynter provides an outline of Western “humanism.” In the nineteenth century, Christian Europe would associate itself with “Universal Truth.” Negatively, it would associate “Heathens” with “heresy”—or a mind consumed by all things “ethnic,” “radical” and “revolutionary” (79). This is really the definition of “cultural racism.” For European society would imagine itself as the one and only model of “humanity” (or “manhood”) as it sought and seeks to impose this selfmaking on others whom it casts as “sub-human” (86). The Western bourgeoisie created “the idea of the Primitive, the idea of the savage, of the ‘despised heathen’ ” (83); in the process, it stifled some of its own ways of knowing which were stigmatized as “heretical” along with the ways of non-Western people, worldwide. According to Wynter, it is in poetry or art that an alternative cultural awareness lives on, offering radical possibilities of “cognition” (knowledge or intelligence) for those on “the rebel side of the barricades.” “Poetry is the agent and product by which [‘humankind’] names the world, and calling it into being, invents his [or her] human as opposed to [its] ‘natural’ being” (87). A revolutionary self-making remains urgent for the oppressed, for the planet. This is what unites poetics and politics in “Ethno or Socio Poetics.” Crucially for Hip-Hop’s masses, it is not just more middle-class poetry that is called for as Wynter exposes bourgeois myths or propaganda concerning race as well as class. Europe and North America may act as if the West’s rise to power was due to their “hard work” and “values,” but it is clear that the empowerment of this culture came from the power of guns and exploitation. They shift from feudal societies to capitalism as a result of the hard, unpaid work of those cast as “natives” and “niggers.” It is the enslaved and the colonized, therefore, who produce the fruits of the global system ruled by Europe and North America in the interests of Europe and North America. The myth that the West “evolves” alone on its own is one that Wynter terms the myth of “the Immaculate Conception of the West” (89 n.23). The European bourgeoisie was able to take power from the old European aristocracy and overpower all others thanks to “the X factor” of its exploitation of the lands and labor of non-Europeans (88). The West then proceeds to devalue and degrade the culture or “humanity” of everyone it will oppress and exploit under the guise of “Western civilization.” Wynter recounts this tale of money, guns, and power through a reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the conquistador Gilligan’s Island–like novel that is widely considered the first novel ever written in English. As she exposes the class propaganda of anti-Black racism or white-supremacism, internationally, she exposes the hypocrisy of middle-class denunciations of Hip-Hop by extension. The white (and “brown”) bourgeois preference for the poetry (and violence) of Europe (or empire) is predictable, frequently panicked, and a political problem for the majority of the world’s peoples. When Wynter turns to “the continuing possibility of poetry itself” (Wynter 1996), despite the widespread dehumanizations of the West, she turns to the spoken word of those at war with the words and deeds of the contemporary Western elite. With respect to the past, there are the “tribal” poetics writ large in the “oralprecapitalist cultures” of “American Indians” (82; 89). Closer to the present, there are the poetics of the Black experience in the Americas or the Western hemisphere.



14

15

They include the Spirituals, Blues, Jazz, Reggae, and Afro-Cuban music, specifically, before the creation of Hip-Hop. These Black popular art forms counteract the attack on Black culture and Black communities in the physical spaces of the West. They supply “an underground cultural experience as subversive of the status quo Western culture as was Christianity in the catacombs of the Roman Empire.” Reinventing “human being,” out of necessity, this poetry is “heretical” insofar as it rejects the racist humanism of the West and orally reinscribes its mind, body, and soul in what Wynter describes as its “daily criticism” of Western domination (85). Elsewhere, she calls this resistance “rewriting knowledge” (Wynter 1992, 18), and “cultural guerilla” warfare (Wynter 1971, 100). “[I] Chose My Life to Be Hard Core”—Lil’ Kim Lil’ Kim certainly lives up to her provocative billing on Hard Core . . . . There’s plenty of substance as well as style, though the Queen Bitch herself gives it to you raw and salaciously like you’d expect, yet also quite wittily and nimbly . . . . [I]t’s hard to think of such a categorically dirty [sic] rap album that’s this accomplished, and it’s furthermore refreshing to hear a woman turn the tables for once, particularly so cleverly with such a venerable supporting cast. (Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide to Hip-Hop [n.d.])

Representing art and resistance, Lil’ Kim would make a self on her rap premiere; and it is a self that is offered as a model of identity and politics. Her gender and sexual politics may be most apparent to the ear; after all, they are undeniably audacious. Yet, further still, these radical politics of sexuality and identity promote a new form of humanity insofar as they picture a radical new relationship between mind and body—with spirit. Or does she radically reinscribe a much older set of relations that have been suppressed, until now, in the white bourgeois West, most especially outside of art? Out of her mouth, the mind and body are lyrically united rather divided, mutual rather than hostile, organically whole rather than split, severed or separated. Later, she would sing, chant and whisper on “I’m Human” from The Notorious K.I.M. (2000): “ ‘I’m human, you’re human,’ so they say / But inside we’re all animals.” This aggressive, verbal embrace of an animal biology for a humanity unafraid of its animal biology is at the heart of her brilliant Hip-Hop expression. To censor or criticize it as “obscene” is to safeguard Western bourgeois humanism, a historically racist-sexist order of language, “knowledge,” pleasure and power. To embrace it is to embrace a poetics and politics that can emancipate us from the Puritanism of this humanism, explosively. And explosively is certainly how Hard Core begins. After its opening skit (“Intro in A-Minor”), the first official lines will scandalize puritans and light a fire in Hip-Hop. She says she used to be scared of the “dick,” but “now I throw lips to tha shit / Handle it like a real bitch.” Punning with extreme wit—as if her life depended on it, Lil’ Kim epitomizes “uncensored speech.” She embodies it in an ultra-erotic militancy that is relentless; and, sex-wise, she is all about revolution. She owns a previous fear of “the dick,” at least rhetorically, on “Big Momma Thang.” This “dick” might stand for sexuality in general, a sexuality that is 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas




Figure 1.1

Table-Image of Hard Core (1996) by Jonelle Davies


17

conventionally assumed to be a male domain. It might stand for any “taboo” sex (such as anal or oral sex), if not male sexuality in particular and the power it is thought to wield. It might equally stand for the desire of a female sexuality that she is intent or “hell-bent” on reclaiming from anyone and everyone who would deny it. The idea of “throwing lip” to it is no less versatile. On the surface, it may be read or heard as a simple although mind-blowing reference to oral sex on a male, or men, who have seriously lost their ability to intimidate. It makes a more symbolic statement about her skills on the mic. So “throwing lip” to anything (including “dick”) signifies her capacity to rhyme, to speak or “spit,” and to “drop science” or knowledge in Hip-Hop. Here is in fact Hard Core’s massive claim to fame: Lil’ Kim handles all of the above, sexuality across the board; the language of emceeing; and traditional Hip-Hop intelligence—like a “real bitch,” “Queen Bitch” that she lyrically is.3 When all is said and done, it is hard to believe she was ever scared. Orality as an Instrument of Knowledge (or Intelligence) A handling of male domination is at the center of this work on wax. This subject has always been at the center of Western humanism, white racist imperialism, or Western bourgeois domination. The Europe that historically characterizes itself as “Christian” and non-Europeans as “Heathen” characterizes its own commitment to patriarchy (a society based on male domination) as a sign of its “superior” culture or “civilization.” It categorizes matriarchy (a society in which females hold power, collectively) as a “pre-historic” state of “savagery” or “barbarism,” where sexuality is out of patriarchal control. There can be no separation of the issue of racism from the issue of sexism or sexuality since a sexist and sexual racism defines the white-supremacist West. It invents an evolutionary historical scheme that construes culture or “civilization” as a progressive “social” development from matrilineage or “mother right” and matriarchy to pseudo-monogamy, father-headed nuclear family, and the male power and privilege of patriarchy. This scheme of gender and sexuality similarly sees culture or “civilization” as arising out of Africa, which is at the very bottom of this system of values, on to the Mediterranean and then to Western Asia until Europe is pitched as the high point of human culture, history, or “civilization” itself. The great Cheikh Anta Diop unmasks Europe’s “masculine imperialism” in The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Matriarchy and of Patriarchy in Classical Antiquity (1959), most notably, while Ifi Amadiume expands this perspective in Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture (1997), for example. A symbolic and sexual motherhood royally in check, it is in line with these Pan-African values of radical female empowerment that Lil’ Kim emcees as Hard Core’s “Big Momma/ Queen Bitch.” Her use of language as lyricism is nothing if not a matter of knowledge, as she seeks to school men and women or males and females on how she triumphs against all odds in the late-twentieth century context of the African diaspora. Once, she would testify in Vibe magazine: “Things I rap about now is things I been through. And God knows I don’t want to go back to doin’ what I had to do 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas




before. So I talk about it to get it away from me” (Lil’ Kim in Saxon 1997, 79). She raps about it as a way of gaining control over it and its meaning. Aside from Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation’s declaration of “knowledge” as the all-important “fifth element” of Hip-Hop,4 KRS-One and the Temple of Hip-Hop have named “street knowledge” as one of their nine basic elements of Hip-Hop, alternatively.5 Knowledge is knowledge; and knowledge is where knowledge is. “Street knowledge” should not have to be qualified. Yet it is vital not to overlook the special knowledge it takes for the poor and Black to survive on the streets of white social and economic oppression—in North America and beyond. Whereas KRS-One and Afrika Bambaataa speak from the Bronx, New York, Chester Himes spoke of Harlem, similarly, as an ex-prisoner, novelist and expatriate in his poignant Blues play, Baby Sister (1961). Describing ghetto life conditions under which the oppressed and exploited are coerced into preying upon one another for survival, he writes in prologue: [I]t is perfectly reasonable and natural that these people should be hungry, the wolves and the sheep alike. If your own food—food for the soul and food for the spirit as well as food for the stomach—had been held just out of your reach for three hundred years, or longer, you would be hungry too. And one way to keep from starving in this land of plenty when you have no food is to eat your baby sister. (Himes 1973, 12)6

Rhyming from Brooklyn, New York, Lil’ Kim does not simply write stories of “baby sisters” (or “baby girls”) being eaten alive by “wolves,” however. She tells stories that turn the tables on these wolves and the whole system or politics of sexual domination. In her profound tricksterism, the hunter becomes the hunted; the predator, prey. The men who would make “sweet meat” of her and hers are set up to be slayed in one fashion or another instead. Many preach on endlessly about ethics and Hip-Hop without ever thinking to question gender and sexual politics in the least. But her preoccupation is with sexual and poetic justice without fail. This is her Hip-Hop, how she deploys language, sexuality and knowledge in and through and for Hip-Hop—as a brazen “pedagogy of the oppressed” and exploited, no less. The unforgettable young “bitch” from the street (“guaranteed to stay down”) heard on Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” (Conspiracy, 1995) will triumphantly boast on “Spend a Little Doe” that she was lost in “the field” no more. Now, she’s the “shit”: “Go by tha name of ‘Lil’ Kim, tha Queen Bitch.’ ” And, of course, this M.A.F.I.A.’s her clique. On “Kim Gets Deeper” from Ms. G.O.A.T. (2007), where is she is unmistakably proud to have been “taught” by “the streets,” she will lay claim to original knowledge of her own: “Amazin Queen B(ee) in tha place / My thoughts paint pictures(,) y’all just copy and trace.” The interpretation of her meaning can be double. Her orally expressed thoughts are novel and innovative (perhaps aborginal), while others fail to think innovatively or against the contemporary grain. Either they just unoriginally copy and trace establishment thought or they just copy and trace her creative, imaginative, anti-establishment thoughts, unoriginally. Insofar as this is the case, Ms. G.O.A.T.’s “Kim Gets Deeper” also



18

19

seems to maintain that it is better to duplicate her knowledge, at least, and its subversive Hip-Hop revolutionary stance. First, on Hard Core, she would establish a “street knowledge” along with her knowledge of rap or Hip-Hop or rhyming and a serious knowledge of sexual politics as they play out “in the streets,” on record, “in the bedroom,” etc. She makes it known that she has “know-how,” or that she knows how to rap her way to the top of the world of Hip-Hop; to hustle her way out of a world full of wolves (and “haters”); and to hijack no small measure of pleasure in a puritanical and patriarchal world that hands out power and privilege according to race and class as well as gender. As she imparts her knowledge of the physical and its pleasures, she does it in a language which is oral and which rewrites the relationship between the mental and the physical, infectiously. Knowledge of all kinds is rewritten through an orality that showcases the oral as a sign of the power of speech (or communication) and as a means of pleasure (sexual or erotic at large, even verbal) in addition to orality as an instrument of intelligence (or knowledge, “street” and otherwise): Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core poetics operate in each vein simultaneously to undo the soulless mind/body split of the white bourgeois West. Orality as a Sign of the Power of Speech (or Communication) The power of speech, language, or verbal expression is vocalized in countless forms. There are her signature gutturals or “grunts” and “groans,” which preface and punctuate a variety of messages even as they appear to signify something beyond conventional language on their own. Linguists might refer to this speech as “extra-linguistic,” meaning outside of formal language usage; they are extremely linguistic nonetheless. They express what is otherwise inexpressible within established customs of language. These utterances represent a trademark of Lil’ Kim’s rap: “Unh!” “Wha, wha!” and so on. They mark the potency of her words and her wordsmithing persona. Plus, they prepare you for what else she has in store. To communicate effectively and to expand the parameters or possibilities of communication, she will constantly change up her accent, her cadence, her pitch, and her styles of enunciation, for example, both within a specific song (verse or line) and across an entire album. An emcee of many voices, she employs the widest range of oral and literary devices, from alliteration, assonance, and consonance, metaphor, simile, and repetition to onomatopoeia, over and above rhyme, no matter how much rhyming is thought to be the exclusive focus of rapping or Hip-Hop lyricism by most non-emcees. This is all done to the beat of music selected to vary and help diversify what she says and how she says it, powerfully. Indeed, Lil’ Kim may provide a most potent illustration of what FrenchBulgarian critic Julia Kristeva tried to theorize in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980) and Revolution in Poetic Language (1984).7 Yet another approach might argue convincingly that any such gutturals, “grunts” and “groans” in a Pan-African context should be understood as a Black artist’s spoken interaction with the inspirational spirit of music descended and detected in the Wolof or West African processes of deeree (or di re) and djakharlee, both





of which call to mind the critical musical concept of “worrying the line” in many discussions of the Blues and other, twentieth-century Black, African diasporic vocal traditions.8 When it comes to standard classifications, moreover, her Hard Core cannot be said to confine itself to just one specific language. If it is primarily in “English,” per se, Lil’ Kim’s diction is the Blackest of “Black English,” no doubt. This is what is more popularly known as “Ebonics.” Plus, “No Time” will playfully dabble in French (for a censored version or radio edit: “Ooh la, la . . . Oui, oui . . . C’est la vie”), Spanish (“Tryna stick a nigga for his pesos, if you say so . . .”) and then a very prominent Afro-Jamaican “Creole” or patois (“Pun pun nani dani punnani dani”); “Spend a Little Doe” will echo some Spanish (“Hasta la vista!”); and a perhaps Tina Turner–inspired Buddhist chant (“Nam-ryoho-renge-kho”); “Drugs” will offer a truly stunning line of Arabic (“Sharmoot elhasi teezi”); and “M.A.F.I.A. Land” will articulate (or rearticulate) some Italian (“Modano . . . Milano”) with its nimble oral choreography. There will be a lot more of this to come, throughout the length of her recording career; and her remarkable rap multilingualism expands even further when language is understood as “discourse” to include, for example, the language of Hip-Hop, broadly construed; the language of streethustling; the language of male domination or young black female resistance to it; and her lyrical body language, that is, her discourse of sex, gender, sexuality, or eroticism.9 The power of speech to communicate thoughts or ideas and intentions is on full and marvelous display. Literacy is fluency in virtually every sense of the word in Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core expression.

Orality as a Means of Pleasure (Sexual or Erotic, Even Verbal) Her agile use of many “tongues” blurs any distinction between “sex play” and “word play,” particularly as the oral comes to refer to oral pleasure and the politics thereof. There is great pleasure taken in punning for the sake of punning, playing with words physically as much as mentally; and then there is her militant politicization of oral-sex relations between males and females, most of all. Outside the imagination of Hard Core and the tradition it will artfully establish, oral sex is supposed to be a special source of shame—at least or especially for women who are socialized to never ask for it and only reluctantly perform it on men. The act is supposed to be “degrading,” if not “sinful,” never satisfying or stimulating. This taboo and its sexist double-standard are attacked record after record by Lil’ Kim as she rewrites scenario after scenario in order to command pleasure, reciprocity and power in every sexual exchange or interaction: “No Time” orders an unspecified male to lick her “twat” (in the uncensored version), and to lick her where its “hot” (in the censored, radio edit). In the following verse, she responds in kind but in a fashion that will have her take both control and pleasure in the performance. No longer “Daddy,” the man in question is turned into a mere voyeur of her sexual mastery. He is ordered say her name (“Momma”), to signify her sexual dominance; and he complies in the background. The female hustler of “No Time” will give us a number of oral-sexual adages or sexual-political slogans 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


20

21

in Hip-Hop, as in: “No money-money, no licky-licky / Fuck ya dicky-dicky and ya quicky!” She revels in her accentuation of these messages and their addictive play on words, relishing everything she is able to exact from the men under reference. There is literally “no shame in her game” as she reinvents or reinscribes sexuality—sexual mores—for her enjoyment and empowerment. The stutter-stepping two-syllable rhyme scheme she uses in parts (to rhyme suggestive words like “wet,” “forget,” “bet” and “let,” all attached to the repetitive “it” of her sexual imagination), this is often termed “a feminine rhyme” by academic studies of poetry. One-syllable rhyme schemes are termed “masculine.” This would suggest that “feminine rhyming” is harder, more complex than “masculine rhyming,” so to speak. It also suggests that all poetry or rhyming is always related to sex or gender, some way, somehow. At any rate, Lil’ Kim’s rap routinely resists the repression of that which is labeled “femininity” as she rejects the limitations of gender, or the whole opposition between “masculinity” and “femininity,” lyrically combining “sex play” and “word play” in a manner that the “tongue” metaphor for language actually, classically implies. The message of “No Time” regarding gender and sexuality communes well then with its sample of screams and a piano loop from a record by one of James Brown’s Soul Sisters: “Message from the Soul Sisters” by Vicki Anderson (1970), who is also known as Myra Barnes (Mother Popcorn: The Vicki Anderson Anthology, 2005).10 This is not to exclude all of the erotic pleasure Lil’ Kim enjoys and expresses in “polyvocality,” or her countless changes in voices, vocal styles and verbal intonation, verse after verse, song after song, sometimes mid-sentence—none of which can be adequately represented “on the page” as spoken articulations or enunciations. A verbal-physical as well as intellectual pleasure is taken in Lil’ Kim’s erotically charged Hip-Hop, on the regular. In a number of respects, it linguistically satisfies. The oral commentary on oral sex continues after “No Time” on “We Don’t Need It” and “Not Tonight.” Each storytelling song is a “didactic” anthem, “teacherly” yet very far from prudish. Men will not dominate women in society and freely take advantage of them in sexuality (erotically or economically), if this emcee has anything to say about it. Nor will they leave her with no other option except to boycott sex, like a sex-starved puritan. Junior M.A.F.I.A. joins in on “We Don’t Need It” to stage a dramatic conflict over “suckin’ dick” and “lickin’ clit,” as it were. It is her stance that supplies the climax. She commands her man to do his “duty,” to use his tongue to “click” her “booty,” before there is any kind of sex for his pleasure: “You wanna steal tha pussy like a thief / Now twist tha lips without tha teeth.” The double-entendre (or multiple meanings) should be unmistakable, as twisting lips without teeth calls her labia and cunnilingus to mind. The title of “Not Tonight” signifies sharply on the middle-class suburban housewife’s cliché reply to a husband’s desire for sex, which is conventionally cast as her “wifely duty.” The duty is his. There will be sex, tonight; however, he will not control it. This tale refers to a time when “a dude named Jimmy” did everything for Kim, except “eat pussy” or perform oral sex. The story is then transformed into a tale about how her participation in sex is now categorically conditional (“to ‘see’ me, you have to eat me,” in other words); and this strategy





is offered as a striking, collective strategy for all women. Named after his genitalia, or “dick,” since he was only into genital sex, selfishly, an evidently fictional “Jimmy” is quickly forgotten by Hard Core as it makes its “object lesson” simple and plain. The moral of the story is this: “You ain’t lickin’ this, you ain’t hittin’ this.” And there are witnesses, according to Lil’ Kim, who will vouch for this sexual-political policy, just as the remix of “Not Tonight” came to relabel it “Ladies Night” with a crew of popular female rappers (Da Brat, Left-Eye of TLC, and Missy Elliot as well as Angie Martinez, of course).

Hard Core Orality: Power, Knowledge and Pleasure—All Told The power and pleasure of Hard Core orality may combine most perfectly on “Drugs” where the power of the emcee’s words is said to be felt most in the pleasures of the body, the flesh, physically and figuratively. The Notorious B.I.G. opens this seventh song of the album by testifying to Lil’ Kim’s flawlessness on the mic. She identifies herself as the source of “a different kind of high,” asking or instructing her audience to “feel” her on this claim to greatness that is her literal highness as a lyrical narcotic. The “host” of “Drugs” describes herself as “dope,” and extravagance embodied. She leaves others awestruck with both her body and body of work. The “niggaz” in earshot are left with “cum stains,” such is the excitement she brings. She likens the effect of her rap-speech to a “Dillinger” firearm thrown to a jaw. This is how she can keep “niggaz” in “awe,” and why she can join Biggie in claiming her rhyming has no flaws, here or anywhere, now or ever. The “Cleopatra” of “No Time” reappears as the Black “Princess” of “Magnificence” in “Drugs” precisely because her “flow” is “phenom,” or phenomenal; it hits like a “bomb.” At this point, she speaks of what pleases her and “freaking” it Arabic style: “Sharmoot elhasi teezi” is a stock phrase that can be translated as “Lick my ass, bitch.” The power of her lyrical orality enables her to command a sexual orality from the male “bitch” in question. There is a bilingual double-entendre here of reading or writing “backwards,” as in Arabic, and of giving her pleasure “from the back,” orally, back and forth—both acts being achieved with “tongue.” This is “word play” and/or as “sex play,” par excellence. Lyrically “electrifying,” Lil’ Kim’s mind and mouth are pictured as a stimulant, a drug that stimulates the bodies (and “heads”) of her listeners. The comparison will be a constant throughout her career. Any distinction between mind and body is disintegrated by this physical metaphor for orality’s rhetorical effect, hence Biggie’s testimony on the chorus of “Drugs” where he likens her to different mixes of marijuana, such as “La,” “Ganja” and “Sensimilla”. He feels “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” to be “The Ultimate Rush.”11 A royal title song, for certain, “QUEEN B@#$H” begins with her boasting about “dusting off” foes like Pledge (the furniture polish). Rap similes proliferate. Now, she is hitting them as hard as sledgehammers, continuing the mind/ body connection of “Drugs.” Even this last song’s mid-stream dedication/shoutout had reflected her complete dedication to every aspect of the oral: “To my niggaz that trick a little / To my bitchez that suck dick a little.” These “bitchez” do



22

23

it while their “niggaz” lick their “middles,” Lil’ Kim reminds us. When she states that she receives all the “ooh’s” and “aah’s,” onomatopoeically, along with all the jewels and cars, these sounds could be the sounds of an applauding crowd (literally because lyrically electrified); and they could be the sounds of erotic pleasure, which both her physical-sexual as well as and lyrical-textual performance would typically elicit. “QUEEN B@#$H” insists that her rhymes melt in our mouths, blending with the body once more. Her personal style is further, duly punctuated by another flamboyant, gender-flipping line in which she claims to have “buffoons” eating her “pussy” while she watches cartoons, having just compared her gun and/or sexual potency to hurricanes and typhoons. So mob thugs bow down to her. The multiple meanings of her punnings are incomparable, as usual: “I got that bomb-ass cock, a good-ass shot / wit hard-core flows that keep a nigga dick rock.” The “cock” in question is hers. The shot may be her sex, her sex-shooting, her gun-fire as much as her spit-fire. The powerful flow of Hard Core is best signified in the end by arousal, if not erection, extreme stimulation of the body via the mind and mouth behind her Hip-Hop lyricism. This is how “Intro in A-Minor” sets up the oral-to-aural experience of Hard Core. It’s not a concerto. It’s a skit, ironically. An unidentified male is heard to exit a taxi in front of a movie theater, as if on the streets of New York’s Times Square. He enters and encounters a box office worker from whom he purchases a ticket for “Lil’ Kim, Hard Core.” Her music, “Big Momma Thang” begins to play in the background. A concession stand is approached for a small order of popcorn, a large order of butter and a lot of napkins, revealingly. The customer is next heard walking into a screen room filled with moaning and groaning, which is when stereotypical “porn music” begins to play as a background soundtrack. The rapper would be the star of this show. The patron or spectator unzips his pants and calls out her name, masturbating noisily as he yells. Anticipation builds. What he or we must anticipate is more action from her, his climax and perhaps hers. The acoustics of his visual pleasure at the sight of her morphs into our aural pleasure at the sound of her. Soon, this fantasy explodes in ecstasy (“Work it, bitch!”), an orgasm, exactly as the first song of her Hard Core orality explodes into the foreground, as if it were the cause and content of ecstasy itself. “Big Momma” and “Queen Bitch,” Lil’ Kim makes it plain that her rap “thang” is stronger than “porn” with regard to sensual power and impact, whether the senses activated are explicitly sexual or not; whether or not the gender or genitalia of reference is male or masculine, female or feminine,. The effect of lyrical skill and intelligence is supposed to be felt in Hip-Hop—not just “reasoned” or rationalized; it is supposed to be felt collectively in a mind/body nexus that is full of soul as well. For this reason, “Dreams” tells us to “watch this rap bitch bust all ova ya nuts.” Her orgasm and lyricism come together in one fell swoop. For anyone can “nut” in this, her context. “Dreams” also tells us that she “fucks” mics in the “fly” way. Provocatively, she penetrates the oral tool of the microphone, by whatever means. Lastly, “Dreams” boasts at another point that she is “on fire” and “getting head” by the Harlem Boys Choir. The spiritual orality of their singing in church is rechristened as an erotic tribute to her sacred and sexual divinity on earth, as a “mic-god/dess” supreme. The closing track of her debut solo album,





“**** You” (or “Fuck You”) confirms this logic in true Hip-Hop fashion. It tells us that she keeps her “pussy fresh, like Doug E.” The supreme metaphor for her supreme female anatomy is a human beat-boxer and show-stopping emcee, Doug E. Fresh. The supreme metaphor for emceeing a supreme show is, conversely, her supreme female anatomy or genitalia. This “fresh” phrasing hearkens back to the wild and witty bravado of “Big Momma Thang,” orally, when she asks the “cunninlinguist” what’s on his mind when his tongue is inside her “pussy”—it’s not marriage, or a baby carriage; it’s strictly her. “Big Momma” is “Queen Bitch” (and vice versa) inasmuch as her sex and speech are undomesticated by marriage or motherhood under patriarchy or male domination: Lil’ Kim’s rap and her sex were in full political effect when she rhymed, with unquestionable passion: “[I] chose my life to be Hard Core.”

Hip-Hop Coda: Sexology and Musicology—or Minding Bodies with Words . . . on Wax It may be very useful to think about this Hip-Hop obliteration of the racist-sexist mind/body split of the bourgeois West with regard to “sexology” as well as “musicology.” In the antibody or body-phobic intellectual context of European and Euro-American culture, sexologists operate as the licensed “experts” on sexual embodiment—at least for the “professionals” of “medical science.” In Hip-Hop, The Notorious K.I.M. adopts a comparable posture on “Off the Wall,” explicitly telling audiences to call her “Dr. Ruth” as she speaks the truth. A photo of popular sex therapist (and former Israeli sniper) Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Lil’ Kim taken at a Grammy’s party was once published by the “In the Mix” section of the tenth anniversary edition of Vibe magazine (September 2003, 140). Still, it is rather telling that no professional textbook on “human sexuality” seems to rival the catalogue of erotic possibilities captured by this Hip-Hop songbook. Her records form a true taxonomy of things sexual that the elite culture of sexology tries to keep under lock and key—with “bourgeois respectability” intact; and its scope is nothing short of stunning. Moreover, unlike most Western sexologists, Lil’ Kim’s systematic exploration of sex and it pleasures in music does not hide the sexual pleasures of its author or stigmatize any kind of sex outside white middle-class social norms or ideals.12 An exception to this rule would be the antifascist Wilhelm Reich, whose radical conception of “oral orgasms” or “orgasms of the mouth” can be radically expanded by her Hip-Hop.13 This is an art of the oral that is scrupulous about minding bodies . . . on wax. While there is sex work all over Hard Core, a lush life of sex fantasy was laid out on “Dreams,” which maps a whole field of sexual scenarios, enhancements and positions to be confronted for years. There is sex with or enhanced by drink or drugs (as she boasts about “all the Rhythm & Blues singers” up to Case). There is group sex rather than sex between two individuals or a couple (as she moves on to Troop and H-Town). There is sex climaxed by female ejaculation (after she runs through Babyface, Brian McKnight, Joe, and D’Angelo, she has 112 “nuts to bust,” before she celebrates with a reference to Hi-Five). There is sex with “water



24

25

sports,” which give added meaning to oral sex (as she calls for “pussy-eating positions” and “Men of Vizion,” after [a] “New Edition,” not to mention the Harlem Boys Choir). There is “rimming” or “salad-tossing,” oral-anal sex apart from oral-vaginal sex (as she scatologically puns on Mista and their song “Blackberry Molasses”). There is an invitation to voyeurism and public sex (as she leaves Intro and Skin Deep in the wake of her desire). There is sex with women on top, physically (as her climbing leaves R. Kelly jumping and whining, not “bumping and grinding”). There is sex-role play or reversal (as she casts Joe as her “ho” and Tony Rich as her “bitch”). There is masturbation, besides (as she disses Jason [Wheeler] and rhymes through Solo and After 7). And, strikingly, this is all from a single song, “Dreams (of Fuckin’ an R&B Dick),” whose chorus may give the impression that it will concern “missionary sex” alone!14 If Hard Core’s “Dreams” can be seen as an actual erotic guide, a musicalsexological map to the rest of her explorations of sex on record, it does not exhaust her lyrical imagination or possibilities. If there was “69-ing” and toe-licking before (on “Big Momma Thang” and “Drugs”), and light sado-masochism (on “I Need You Tonight” from Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s Conspiracy [1995] as well as “Call Me” with Too Short from Booty Call: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [1997]), she would later pull out a menstrual whip for an unreleased track with Rupaul entitled “Bad Girls” (circa 2000). She also threatens a man with sexual mutilation or castration there—again, for her sexual-political pleasure. There was pornographic sex or sex with the aid of adult video or visuals along with phone sex on “Call Me,” just as her unlikely cameo on Will Smith’s “Da Butta” (Willennium, 1999) redefines “real phone sex” as visually focused sex with live, multimedia TV cameras or camera phones. Lil’ Kim documents and rails against “minute men” or premature ejaculation time and time again: “No Time” and “We Don’t Need It” set the stage for her verse on Methods of Mayhem’s “Get Naked” (Methods of Mayhem, 1999), a rock-rap collaboration featuring her and George Clinton (Fred Durst and Mix Master Mike). This happens to be the same song on which she screams: “Fuck a blow-job / It’s a muthafuckin hobby!” Finally, the sex with dildos heard during “Spend a Little Doe’s” spectacular stick-up is heard again in her guest verse on Usher’s “Just Like Me” (My Way, 1997). The erotic or sexological intelligence of Lil’ Kim’s lyricism seems as inexhaustible as her Hip-Hop orality overall. Such a “coda” (or addendum) would be lacking without some critical attention to “safe(r) sex” since, without it, neither mind nor body could be kept alive in contemporary times—to think or feel; to enjoy life or sex; or, in certain cases, to condemn sex in moralistic rants and tones. Lil’ Kim’s sexual consciousness could be said to climax, once, in “Rockin’ ” or Funkmaster Flex’s The Mix Tape, Volume 4: 60 Minutes of Funk (2000). A rarely discussed piece of work, it raises and reinterprets the question of safety in the practice of sex or sexuality. One specific passage begins with an initial check for erection, after which Lil’ Kim requires each partner to pass her inspection, before she will give him any love and affection. There is a bass line shouted out and a base line of sexual principles. A man is first instructed to meet her on a mezzanine and, second, to hop up into her limousine. Both references conjure the prospect of public or semi-public sex.





He is told that he can “trick” or “treat,” like it’s Halloween, but the trick or treat must be “squeaky clean.” She entices him by saying she can gargle—something (ejaculate?)—like it’s Listerine, even if in the act she messes up her makeup made by Maybelline. After her alluring, verbal seduction of him, he is instructed to stick “it” in here like a vaccine: “Then I cud cum clean like a hygiene and a pocket full of D/dreams.” On command, she is to be penetrated (vaginally or anally and, of course, orally) as we are all penetrated when vaccinated (or “getting a shot”). These images picture sexual act after sexual act with purifying puns, the most cleansing of metaphors possible. Oral sex comes in the language of “mouthwash,” after inspection. Otherwise penetrative sex comes in the language of protection, or immunization, after inspection. At this point, similes stacked, Lil’ Kim can herself “cum clean,” again couching orgasm in the language of hygiene, redundantly, or abundantly. The pocket full of Dreams (or dreams) in the end punctuates this idea impressively. “Dreams” signify desire (ambition and aspiration) as well as sexual fantasy. In addition, it calls forth that fantastic song from Hard Core. But the “pocket full” also sends us to store for condoms. “Dreams” is or was a brand of condom: “Condoms from a Woman’s Perspective,” this is how they have been advertised. Conventional “safe sex” campaigns strike many or most as “sterile,” anti-erotic, if not anti-sex. They are unsuccessful in a number of senses as a result. A kind of female “Dr. Feelgood-cum-oral poet,” Lil’ Kim crafts by contrast a “ fresh and clean” aesthetic that eroticizes the “wildest” episodes of sex as “safe(r) sex,” lyrically leaving us “disease-free,” super-satisfied as well as physically and mentally alive. What better way to dismiss the mind/body split of the West than to use the mind to discover ways to satisfy the human body, the historically defamed body in which every human mind (and “soul”) is organically lodged? “Poetry in Motion: Mind ⴝ Body ⴝ Soul,” or Nightjohn’s Hip-Hop Liberation Then there is the body’s own enhancement of the mind, conversely: Sylvia Wynter’s writings on poetry or how poetics may embody outlaw modes of knowing, being, feeling and desiring—under a white-supremacist empire—this is all confirmed today by Hard Core’s orality as well as Nightjohn’s The Hiphop Driven Life: A Genius Liberation Handbook (2005). A.K. and Bayo are “Nightjohn,” or Arnett Kale Powell and Adebayo Alabi Olorunto. They would self-publish their tour de force at the ages of eighteen and twenty, respectively, as artists and authors of this especially insightful, revolutionary chapter of their thoughts: “Poetry in Motion: Mind ⫽ Body ⫽ Soul.” In their preface, they refer themselves as “America’s worst nightmare squared: We are Hiphop” (5); and they explain their collective pen name: The fictional character Nightjohn in Gary Paulsen’s novel [Nightjohn, 1993] is the ultimate symbol of heroism, honor, and courage. These are traits that we work on daily to express [ourselves] as human beings, men, and emcees. Not only does the character Nightjohn know how to read; he escaped to freedom in the North and



26


27

Accompanied by an audio CD, this is not Robinson Crusoe or a book of the Western bourgeoisie. As Nightjohn, A.K. and Bayo recognize that “we have always had to create our own definition of what it is to be human” (78). They dare to identify with the “superhuman” through Hip-Hop, dubbing themselves “Artistic Kings” and “Brilliant Ambitious Young Orators” (82). They do written and spoken word battle against U.S. miseducation and racist imperialism while promoting a new (or much older, more African) understanding of “intelligence” that supplies a Hip-Hop framework to help understand the genius, poetics, and politics of Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core, much like Sylvia Wynter has for understanding Black music-poetry in the Americas as a whole.15 Redefining humanity, The Hiphop Driven Life redefines “intelligence” in a most imaginative manner. They put to use Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1993) in “What’s Your Highest Intelligence?” The single-minded notion of “intelligence” propagandized by Europe throughout the world is rejected entirely: “We see genius as something that is ‘remembered’ about the vast reservoir of potential within our soul. For us, genius is something that is always with us unconsciously, our aims are to consciously tap into it and use it in our daily life” (Nightjohn 2005, 324). The multiple intelligences they consider from their Hip-Hop perspective include: musical intelligence (“God bless the Deejay . . . . The deejay is an icon for musical intelligence. Deejays channel anger, frustration, happiness, and joy of the Eternal,” 328); naturalist intelligence (“One would have to assume that groups of people who disregard the environment; polluting the air and water, as well as tearing down trees lack a little . . . intelligence about nature,” 330); spiritual intelligence (“We know plenty of college graduates, professionals, and so-called intellectuals who can’t tell the difference between their Spirit and their Egos,” 332); existential intelligence (“The second people see something they never thought was possible, is the second they may decide it’s possible for themselves . . . . This is the essence of street knowledge,” 334); verbal-linguistic intelligence (“Hiphop’s emcees and spoken word poets express the highest form of verbal intelligence on the planet,” 335–336); bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (“Western [Cartesian] thought separates the mental from the physical. What a horrible way to live life! . . . People need you to teach them how to free themselves mentally through bodily expression,” 340– 341); spatial-mechanical intelligence (“It has been reported that the great orators of the past were able to memorize entire speeches and stories by envisioning a large building or coliseum and linking pictures to words to rooms. The mind is powerful when we think not only according to numbers and words, but also according to images . . . . God bless the graffitist,” 345–346); interpersonal-social intelligence (“What human beings don’t have are enough leaders with enough courage to outthink, outsmart, and outperform . . . . the machines,” 350); logical mathematical intelligence (“It is the imperialist use of the digits 1 or 0 that turn



willingly returned to the South. He had to go back into slavery as an undercover slave to teach other Africans in bondage. . . . This is a trait which makes Nightjohn’s character superhuman. This is a trait which makes our Purposeful dedication to touching other people’s lives superhuman. (8)


numbers into a civilized human’s antithesis,” 351); and intrapersonal intelligence (“Who is brave enough to claim the Divine Purpose to start a Hiphop curriculum, which focuses on RIGHT knowledge, RIGHT education, and RIGHT respect for all humanity?,” 355), not to mention emotional intelligence (“The things we really want in life are states of mind like happiness, peace of mind, security, and fulfillment, not a high I.Q. score and a J-O-B in a cubicle,” 127). Significantly, this chapter begins with famous words from Malcolm X: “You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being” (X quoted in Nightjohn 2005, 323). Such a Hip-Hop, Pan-African, anti-imperialist approach is totally unafraid of the body and its genius, which is why it can embrace, even quote Lil’ Kim without fear or anxiety (262). It instructs us not to be humble in the face of oppression, but to flaunt Hip-Hop genius as an everyday lifestyle: “We’re geniuses and proud of the fact that our intelligence is accumulated outside of totalitarian regimes” (148). Those who explore embodiment are not labeled “unconscious” in a commonly elitist fashion. Instead, Nightjohn upholds the “cipher” in “Poetry in Motion: Body ⫽ Mind ⫽ Soul” as a perfect model for how the physical, the mental and the spiritual should be unified toward a “coordinated, congruent personality” (232). There is no “heathenism” in their worldview, or “heresy.” In this view, mind and body and soul are all of equal, inseparable value. They note that striving only to perfect the mind leaves one too theoretical and unable to live freely. They also note that cardiovascular exercise pumps the heart, expands the lungs and, in the process, increases oxygen and activity in the brain (224). Their dismantling of “Western Cartesian” philosophy or its soulless mind/body split would also manage to declare with wonderful insight: “Our bodies will do anything to fight for freedom, sometimes more than our minds or hearts will permit” (339). If dance is Nightjohn’s immediate example here to illustrate the potential harmony of mind, body and soul as well as the bodily expression of human liberation across history, sexuality is engaged in an extensive, equally innovative discussion of The Hiphop Driven Life. They choose their lives to be “hard-core,” too. Young orators and writers, intellectually hardcore in print as much as the young Lil’ Kim would be on wax, on record, Nightjohn move from promoting Hip-Hop “poetry in motion” in general to “sexual poetry in motion” in particular. They do not fear, despise or devalue the body, so there is no reason for them or us to fear, despise or devalue sex or sexuality. This clearly sets them apart Eurocentric middle-class dogma and its many non-European mouthpieces in or around Hip-Hop domains. “Sexual drive, emotion, and chemistry is part of genius” (235), they argue, audaciously, as they call for a sexual philosophy and knowledge base under puritanical, hedonistic “America” (236). They call for sexual intelligence, sexual integrity in addition to sexual tolerance, advising: “You should seek complete mind blowing sex in mind, body, and soul . . . . If you feel that sex gives you some type of sexual power and helps you do good in the world, do your thing” (236–238). They conclude their section of “Poetry in Motion” entitled “The Sweetest Taboo—Overstanding Human Sexuality” with a list of nontraditional yet “empowering thoughts” (238), or “New Empowering Beliefs about Sex.” A trailblazing intellectual framework for understanding Hip-Hop



28

29

and sexuality emerges from Hip-Hop itself, not Western academia; not white or bourgeois “society” at large.16 Where else can we read or hear the following, for example: “Sex provokes a higher consciousness.” “Life is not about having more orgasms, but being orgasmic in every moment.” “Sex is the Song of All Songs” (239), etc.? Readers of Nightjohn’s The Hiphop Driven Life (and listeners of their rap rhymes) would need to tune into nineteen-year-old Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core, which is “poetry in motion” at its finest—classic Hip-Hop poetics and politics in mental, physical, and spiritual motion. Conclusion Hip-Hop embodies an “orature” whose words are associated with Black youth, whose young Black words belong to an old, very oral (as well as literate) culture. And neither Black people, young (Black) people, nor (young, Black) oral traditions are respected by a white-dominated society which fetishizes literacy and literature. Yet, if they fail to interrogate contemporary issues of sex or sexuality, class and youth (or the whole issue of so-called obscenity), academic scholars of orature are right to insist that writing as an art and skill itself began in Africa, historically. Its racist appropriation by Europe or the West maintains an elite hierarchical system giving all privilege to “scribal” as opposed to “spoken” expression. This is why, as a phrase, “oral literature” begs the question of literature’s current power over orature, a linguistically more appropriate choice of terms. In HipHop, however, the common assumption that there must be a distinction between “literature” and “orature” does not go unchallenged. Literally and metaphorically, its writing is oral; its orality is writerly or “written.” An emcee or rapper “writes” rhymes as well as “drops” them or “spits” them, as a “true lyricist,” and an artist who can lay down vocals or verses without ever writing any of them down on paper may command the most respect of all. Hip-Hop encompasses “orature” and “literature,” so to speak, when appreciated outside establishment, North American (or Western) claims to knowledge.17 Classically, Amadou Hampâté Bâ would remark in “The Living Tradition” from UNESCO’s General History of Africa: I. Methodology and African Prehistory (1981) that speech refers to “a total perception, a knowing in which the entire being is engaged.” It is seen and heard and smelled and tasted and touched. “That is why everything in the universe speaks: everything is speech that has taken on body and shape” (170, emphasis mine). A novelist, critic and now publisher, Ayi Kwei Armah expands upon these thoughts concerning the speech of “griots” and the tradition of writing in continental Africa in The Eloquence of the Scribes: A Memoir on the Sources and Resources of African Literature (2006). There are white and “blk,” bourgeois or pseudo-bourgeois puritans, still, who aim to keep their power or status in place; and they cannot afford to admit that this oral poetry of the Black masses is capable of art or intelligence (sexological and otherwise), let alone an independent conception of society or humanity. Yet lovers and haters of Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core have tended to agree on one, obvious, virtually undeniable area of her expertise. Most concede or celebrate her verbal delivery, as if it were somehow distinct from visual imagery or the verbal content





of her lyrical performance. Conflict usually arises when it comes to what she delivers, when she delivers it, and how. Purists and puritans try to discount or disregard (in public, at least) her trademark skill thanks to its constant communication of sexual or erotic skill in a female emcee. For them, a sexual consciousness (knowledge or intelligence) would be a strange, unthinking contradiction in terms, even though these terms were invented by the society of domination or empire for a white racist-sexist conception of humanity (and, of course, “civilization”): Lil’ Kim replies that hers is “a hell of thesis,” on Twista’s “Do Wrong” (The Day After, 2005), where she boasts bawdily about breaking “a fella to pieces” and undressing “his body with telekinesis” (i.e., “the power to move or bend objects with the mind”). Her anti-sexist/gender-defiant/ultra-erotic thesis is supported by a subsequent poem by Sonia Sanchez in Like the Singing Come off the Drum, that is, “Haiku [question from a young sister]” (1999). In this double-haiku, a girl child asks the poet or speaker what is wrong with being a “freak” on stage if we are all “freaks” (“stone freaks” in fact) in our own skin. She affirms this “freakdom” instead of repression and hypocrisy, and unabashedly letting it all hang out (Sanchez 1999, 55).18 The “fallen flesh” of “Original Sin” (or “WITE AMURICA”) is an unacceptable negation of flesh. Written nearly thirty years after We a BaddDDD People (1970), “Haiku [question from a young sister]” seems to be inspired by Lil’ Kim, expressly—in the era of Hip-Hop. On Hard Core, she is that radical alternative to “civilization” construed according to a series of false, Western dichotomies: mind over body; public versus private; male over female,, not to mention literature versus orature, white over Black. Poetically and politically, all Puritanism aside, she mobilizes the power of her mouth and her mind to move and bend bodies against the grain of dominant conceptions of power, knowledge, pleasure, and humanity. She would subsequently inscribe rap skills as sex skills and vice versa—in the name of intelligence—on a remix for “How Many Licks?” from The Notorious K.I.M.: “Ya neva seen this stroke of genius / [I] put tha cleanest, meanest lips on ya penis!” What is her greatest stroke of genius? She is a professional emcee, who gives and gets “professionals,” or “head,” in confirmation of her professional status as a microphone fiend. She seems to be the only such fiend, “male” or “female,” who is bold and sharp enough to bolster her rap with its ultimate metaphor, this oral tribute to orality that operates as a sign of the power of speech, an instrument of intelligence and a means of multifaceted pleasure. She always appears to be saying, stating to and from Hip-Hop: I am so dope at “head,” giving and getting, how could I not be the illest emcee alive? I am so ill on the mic, how could I not give and command the dopest head? How could I not blow any competition off the planet in every which way possible? Lil’ Kim claims knowledge in the context of this power and this pleasure, all in the oral mix of her rhymes. Her savvy usage of “head” points us well beyond the mind frame or “knowledge” of “Western Man.” “Head” can mean many things in this lyricism. It can mean money, as when she concedes her “prejudice” for “big heads,” “presidents” that are “dead,” on “Nobody Do It Better (Than Us),” an unreleased track. This money-meaning morphs into “head” in the sense of “smarts,” intelligence (e.g., Junior M.A.F.I.A. ⫽ Junior “Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes”), or the 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


30

31

economic rationality it takes for poor Black people to get money to survive and then some in a world that would leave most seriously deprived. “Head” can mean leader, someone who is smart and resourceful enough to be a leader, spokesman or spokeswoman, as when Lil’ Kim will identify herself as “Head of La Bella Mafia.” “Head” can mean sex, surely, oral sex that requires great skill as far as she is concerned. Each of these meanings is tied to knowledge, oral and sexual intelligence, literally and metaphorically. This is a logical erotic consequence for Hip-Hop, where a Hip-Hop faithful is referred to as Hip-Hop “head,” him or herself. Emcees or rappers constantly talk about “eating” microphones as well as other rappers or emcees. They attack them, orally. “Not Tonight” made it clear how “rockin’ tha mic” refers to both rapping and oral-sex, while the microphone functions as a sort of “phallic symbol” supreme. So who is afraid to “rock,” and why? If any given rapper or emcee proves to be scared of the “mic,” erotically, then he or she could only be half a “mic fiend,” at best. Certain prudish social attitudes about gender and sexuality would limit his or her complete involvement with the microphone and, by extension, the cultural cosmos of Hip-Hop. This is never the case for The Notorious K.I.M., who argues in effect that she is at least “twice the rapper,” “twice the emcee” on account of her all-around fearlessness on the mic. Her orality is insatiable and, apparently, artistically incomparable. She represents—orals . . . head . . . genius. For her, orality is pleasure; orality is power; it is the power full of pleasure which gives birth to words made flesh in Pan-African tradition, despite Western intellectual “head” games which historically fear and hate bodies, Blacks and Hip-Hop, by and large.







Sexual Poetic Justice: On African Matriarchy, Flexible Gender Systems, and The Notorious K.I.M.

To “sit on” or “make war on” a man involved gathering at his compound at a previously agreed-upon time, dancing, singing scurrilous songs detailing the women’s grievances against him . . . and, in extreme cases, tearing up his hut (which usually meant pulling the roof off). This might be done to a man who particularly mistreated his wife, who violated the women’s market rules, or who persistently let his cows eat the women’s crops. The women would stay at his hut all night and day, if necessary, until he repented and promised to mend his ways. (Judith Van Allen, Women in Africa [1976]) What happened to our sweet song—making love / making love wanting to make revolution? (Ifi Amadiume, “Grassroots Revolution” [Ecstasy, 1995]) And yet another shock squad had moved to Ikereku, to the two-storey building of Atupa Parlour. They sacked it completely, having first put to flight the half-dozen policemen who were posted there on guard . . . . They returned to the camp waving a few underwear looted from her house and singing with coarse relish yet another song: Obo Atupa lo d’ija s’ile / Alake oloko ese [Atupa’s vagina started the strife / Alake, with penis of a poison rat] . . . . When the raiding team arrived, they were joined by the massed camp who milled round the trophies borne aloft on poles, laughing and slapping palms, punctuating the song with obscene [sic] gestures. (Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood [1981])

A

lthough they are thought by themselves and others to be academic experts or authorities, the great majority of scholars who study language and literature are illiterate or ignorant when it comes to the lyricism of Hip-Hop, a language, orature and literature of the Black masses who recast African traditions,



2


left and right, at home and abroad, across time and space, time and time again. The rhyming of Lil’ Kim may be the biggest, baddest example there is of this rewriting of tradition, or “traditional consciousness,” the reinstatement of Africa in a hostile European-American context. But there is a certain, serious lack of consciousness in operation that blocks recognition of this all-important fact. There is an absence of sexual politics or sexual consciousness, specifically, among those who view most (if not all) Black popular music as “mindless entertainment,” in essence, not musical intelligence of any kind. This is true of literary critics for example as well as academic and non-academic consumers of commercial radio and television or music video production, unfortunately now whether the critics and consumers in question are black or white, European or African. It is all the more true when the art in question has an undeniably erotic dimension. Current discussions of Black popular music tend to divide it into categories based on a false, unexamined distinction. On the one hand, there is supposed to be “conscious” or “political” music; and, on the other hand, there is supposed to be “unconscious,” “non-political” music which is more often than not associated with sex, or “gangsta” sexuality in the case of Hip-Hop. This way of thinking is surely an effect of the mind/body split in Western-European culture, which enshrines its version of “consciousness” as “evidence” of its claim to “civilization.” There is nothing African about it. It is a way of thinking that classically supports the logic of racism, sexism and other forms of domination which maintains that white men are mostly “mind” and that the rest of us are mostly “body,” as if white men are supposed to be “masters” of the intelligent world and the rest of us are supposed to be “slaves” to our senses—and their societies. What this artificial and unnecessary opposition between sexuality and “consciousness” ignores is the possibility, the desirability of a sexual consciousness that could mount serious political opposition to such white male domination, Western imperialism, slavery and colonization, white racism and sexism. In Hip-Hop’s history, Black consciousness is often symbolized by a figure of Africa, an African medallion, a calling on Africa of some vitally significant kind. However, white European systems of power colonize Black African peoples at the level of the mental and at the level of the physical, so that many social or political representations of Africa and Black “consciousness” can turn out to be quite white or European both in form and content. For where in them is the militant practice of sexual politics and consciousness that is itself a hallmark of traditional Africa and its social history on the continent and off? Lil’ Kim flaunts just such a sexual-political consciousness in music, lyrically demolishing a system of thought that most people today in the dominant culture take for granted without question; instead of sexual alienation and repression, sexual Puritanism, and hypocrisy, she promotes what we might dub sexual poetic justice for Hip-Hop Revolution. This concept is not meant to make reference to John Singleton’s bad Hollywood film, Poetic Justice (1993), a so-called street romance, starring Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson. Instead, it alludes to a common literary device of Western literature and criticism, simply to move against it. An English drama critic, Thomas Rymer



34

35

is said to have coined the phrase “poetic justice” in seventh century Britain in his The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d (1678). Like a good puritan, he thought works of literature should dictate “proper” moral conduct or behavior; every author should illustrate the triumph of “good” over “evil” clearly and faithfully to his audience of readers. The logic of these values must win the day. Ultimately, “vice” is supposed to be punished and “virtue” rewarded often in a swift and ironic turn of events by the close of any given play, poem or novel. Indeed, if sufficiently “sweet,” “justice” could in effect render each and every text “poetic,” regardless of genre or conventional literary categorization. This approach to literature and society can be traced to Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 330 BC) with its anxious concern for proper “nations” or “civilizations,” which the “classical” philosopher would always identify in terms of racism, patriarchal sexism and slavery. So how might “poetic justice” be transformed as a concept, critically, when “proper” conduct or “civilization” is not defined in the ruling-class, puritanical terms of racial and sexual oppression? Adding an alternative sexual politics and consciousness to conventional “poetic justice,” to create sexual poetic justice, The Notorious K.I.M. will illustrate as much remarkably and repeatedly for her listeners; and she will do so with recourse to a logic of “African matriarchy” and “flexible gender systems” lyrically regenerated in Hip-Hop—beyond Aristotle, Western literary criticism, and Hollywood.

A Strike for Justice: “African Matriarchy” in “QUEEN B@#$H” Hip-Hop This reading (or hearing) may be conducted best via Ifi Amadiume, academicintellectual, activist and author of various works on “African matriarchy,” among other things. Nobel Prize–winning novelist, Toni Morrison once said in Vibe magazine: “I always have a healthy respect for young people’s music because I know the part that makes other people shudder is the part that makes it new.” “Think of Lil’ Kim,” she continues, “someone who wants to sing Bessie Smith . . . We have to talk about this stuff” (Morrison in Morales 1998, 97). Black feminist writer and critic, bell hooks once said in Paper magazine: “More dangerous than any words that come out of Lil’ Kim’s mouth are the forces of repressive puritanical morality that seek to silence her” (hooks 1997, 68). While the danger she does pose is more potent and positive than many have realized, what if this danger is at once powerfully old and powerfully new? Lil’ Kim once said of herself, in song, “when I’m gaan, you will appreciate my shit / when I’m gaan, you’ll wanna spit my lyrics.” This was on a royal, Dancehall-inflected remix of “QUEEN B@#$H II” from The Notorious K.I.M. (2000); it was featured on a DJ Boom mix-tape appropriately entitled Ya’ll Ain’t Ready! She proceeds to put herself in perspective, cosmically, prophesying the indelible mark she must have already made on the planet. Another Vibe article by Robert Marriott comes close to clarity on this point, in spite of a rather predictable problem of interpretation: “Lil’ Kim’s mythology is about pussy, really: the power, pleasure and politics of it. . . . Like a priestess out of some ancient matriarchy, she makes songs that deify it, demand we respect,



SEXUAL POETIC JUSTICE


Figure 2.1

Table-Image of The Notorious K.I.M. (2000) by Jonelle Davies

revere and glorify it” (Marriott 2000, 126). For him, all “matriarchy” is “ancient” and “mythical” because apparently unreal; it is a throwaway reference, nothing more; and, if far from irrelevant, his reference to “pussy” is short-sighted, even simple-minded. For Amadiume’s Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion & Culture (1997), by contrast, the sexual politics of matriarchy are something else entirely. What is “matriarchy” then? This scholar revisits “the nineteenth century debate on matriarchy” in the West by way of the “African renaissance” writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, especially his L’unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire (1959) or The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (1959). While “patriarchy” is normally defined as the male domination of women, Amadiume does not define “matriarchy” merely as the opposite of patriarchy or as women’s total domination of men. She sees this logic as flawed, fundamentally, since men’s domination of women is itself nowhere ever total or absolute. Yet here is how a certain reality is erased: “The concept of matriarchy as female rule has been the main reason why the idea was ruled out as non-existent in history” (Amadiume 1997, 73), by European historians and intellectuals in particular. Besides “patriarchy,” what Amadiume does meticulously redefine is “matriarchy” in a number of studies before and after Re-Inventing Africa, such as African Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case (1987), Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (1987) and Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women Struggle for Culture, Power & Democracy (2000). She scorns the European version of history



36

37

that deforms the history of Africa, male and female Africans, specifically regarding “matriarchy,” building on The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, and recognizing the same “renaissance man” saluted in a song by Les Nubians entitled “Immortel Cheikh Anta Diop” on their album One Step Forward (2003). The results will be central to any serious analysis of Lil’ Kim, the emcee whose mic-name speaks volumes: “Big Momma/Queen Bitch.” Terming Africa “that continent of matriarchy” (Amadiume in Diop 1989, xvi), Amadiume rejects the classic confusions of Western anthropology: “Matriarchy as was constructed by African women,” she maintains, consists of at least four basic elements (in no necessary order of importance): 1. 2. 3. 4.

“a very clear message about social and economic justice” “a powerful goddess-based religion” “a strong ideology of motherhood” “a general moral principle of love” (Amadiume 1997, 101).

In this light, Hip-Hop might immediately recall “The Jump Off” when Lil’ Kim rhymes, “Spread love, that’s what a real mob do / Keep it gangsta, look out for her people,” not to mention another La Bella Mafia (2003) moment when her chorus echoes a primal prayer for love, joy, peace and happiness. (This would be “a general moral principle of love.”) We might recall that “Big Momma Thang” was one of two “signature” tracks recorded for Hard Core (1996), along with “QUEEN B@#$H,” making a huge statement about mothering, Black mothering—not as a narrow reproductive function, but as a whole worldview functioning in the culture at large. (This would be “a strong ideology of motherhood.”) There are also many, many cameo or guest appearances where she keeps up rap’s tradition of divine self-definition, as in “Realms of Junior M.A.F.I.A., Pt. 2,” which appeared on the soundtrack for the movie Mega Man (1996): “Terrified of this Goddess / who be dat artist hittin dick tha hardest.” This mother will strike the fear of God—who is now a Goddess—in the hardest, most “gangsta” of hearts, lyrically “whipping ass” in an otherwise all-male setting. (This is would be “a powerful goddess-based religion” or spirituality.) The Notorious K.I.M. would climax in lyrics that leave her impeaching the U.S. president from his Washington, DC residence and painting the “White House” Black, in effect, while this selfprofessed “First Lady” who is “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” runs the world anew in his wake.1 (This would be “a very clear message about social and economic justice.”) There is infinitely more in the book of Lil’ Kim on matters of economics and justice, matriarchy and patriarchy, in addition to this little matter of “dick” (or sex). Her radical, artful reinvention of Africa is thorough.2 How telling that standard criticisms of the sexually independent female rapper or emcee tend to focus on erotic and economic concerns. This “Hip-Hop” criticism is made by white and Black men as well as women in the modern, middleclass West. It suggests that women are not really sexual beings, or that they should not be, and that sexual relations and economic relations should kept separate, at least when women are exercising strict control over the relationship. This is a “morality” of male privilege. Supposedly, it is all fine and good when men’s sexual





and economic power over women coincide, as in (legal or criminalized) prostitution or (pseudo-monogamous) marriage. Yet it is supposed to be terribly bad when women (especially the dreaded “rapper” of Hip-Hop) make men “pay” for their oppression and exploitation of women, sexually and economically. The sexually independent female rapper who is a sexually explicit female rapper (and who is consequently subject to criticism or denunciation due to a sexual explicitness more or less excused in the case of the sexually explicit male rapper and men as a whole) makes explicit or clear, therefore, the connection between sex and economics under male domination as much as she makes clear her right to erotic satisfaction in the name of independence. This would be sexual self-determination; and it is this model of Hip-Hop that was invented by Lil’ Kim or reinvented, historically, in her Hip-Hop. Such determination has a long and African history according to Amadiume’s record, following the highly regarded record of Diop. If both Amadiume and Diop uphold matriarchy as a value-system or way of life in Africa—before Arab-Islamic and Christian-European imperialism in Africa, importantly, Amadiume is sure to ground it in structures of power or institutions through which collective power is socially guaranteed. This female empowerment is cultural, political, spiritual-religious as well as economic and sexual. It is systemic in character. It is not the power of a few, exceptional individuals: There are two unique and specific contributions that African women have made to world history and civilization. The first is matriarchy as a fundamental social and ideological base on which African kinship and wider social and moral systems rest. The second is directly related to this matriarchal factor. This is the dual-sex character of African political systems, a characteristic uniquely African. (Amadiume 1997, 100)

Amadiume borrows the concept of a “dual-sex system” from Kamene Okonjo who wrote in “The Dual-Sex Political System in Operation: Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria” (1976): A number of West African traditional societies have political systems in which the major interest groups are defined and represented by sex. We can label such systems of organizations “dual-sex” systems, for within them each sex manages its own affairs, and women’s interests are represented at all levels. (Okonjo 1976, 45)

This system contrasts with the “single-sex” system that exists in “most of the Western world,” where political status and power are monopolized by men, and where individual “women can achieve distinction and recognition only by taking on the roles of men in public life and performing them well” (44). The career of Margaret Thatcher in England exemplifies this single-sex system sexism, for many, especially Amadiume. Currently, there is also in England’s former colony Condoleezza Rice—who has been dubbed a “New Age House Negress” by Elaine Brown, ex–Black Panther Party “Chairman” and author of A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (1992) and The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2002).3 Hilary Clinton and former U.S. attorney general Janet Reno (“New Age Miss Ann’s,” according to Brown) are ridiculed along with Rice for



38


39

Women’s Councils constituted the leadership of women’s autonomous government to which all women of specific villages belonged. In most cases, these women leaders were crowned queen by women themselves. If they abused their power or authority, women themselves removed them. The queens reigned inside the market place, which they kept in order. In those anti-centralist or non-state societies which did not believe in having kings and queens, the leaders were simply titled men and women. (Amadiume 1997, 103)

The power of economics is central to this power of politics because African women are at the center of production, literally reigning over the “market place” with their “very clear message about social and economic justice.” The virtually divine status accorded to motherhood did not subordinate them in some devalued domestic sphere; it was related to their much-valued significance in the economic structure of family, household and village life (146). Since justice in this system may take sexual and economic form if men take advantage of women, it could be helpful here to recall an article by Lydia Holt from the premiere issue of fierce (“too bold for boundaries”) magazine: “Pussy!” is evidently its title, Marriott’s remarks in Vibe notwithstanding. Holt offers an etymology or linguistic history of the term and, ultimately, a very pressing question: “Stand up in the middle of the street and scream it at the top of your lungs and see what kind of looks you get.” She might just as easily consult Lil’ Kim for more scientific results. At any rate, the history to which she refers is exclusively, “universally” European, despite her superficial use of Black, Hip-Hop speech: “Back in the day, people kept their family jewels in purses and pouches. And a woman’s ability to reproduce was very valuable. It meant children and children meant plenty of people to work the land, which in turn brought wealth to the family.” Holt consults Low German, Old English, and Old Norse connections between words such as “puse” which means “vulva (external female genital organs),” plus “pusa” and “puss” which mean “bag” or “pouch.” In these contexts, this association of “pussy” with wealth or value is seemingly always controlled by men. As a result, Holt concludes with a question that is posted as a drop-quote at the beginning of the article, beneath the blurred image of a symbolic black cat: “Is pussy still just a receptacle for men, a symbol of their status, or can it become a symbol of our wealth as women?” (Holt 2003, 7). This is a question already answered in abundance by Lil’ Kim’s rhyming in Hip-Hop and Amadiume’s writing in academia. Amadiume’s research in the town of Nnobi in present-day Nigeria makes repeated reference to “sexual strikes” conducted by African women to protest any injustice manufactured by men. The logic seems all so simple: “In sexuality, too, gender realities were such that it was believed that females provided sexual services; hence the political use of the threat of collective withdrawal of sexual services by women” (Amadiume 1987b, 65). This tradition is obscured by critics



“[c]arrying out the agenda of racist men better than any man” (Brown 2002, 245), since sexism is inseparable from racism in this Black radical conception. Amadiume would speak of “two governments” in Africa, alternatively, not one government of, by, and for men:

40


What the men feared most was the Council’s power of strike action . . . When ordered to strike, women refused to perform their expected duties and roles, including all domestic sexual and maternal services. They would leave town en masse, carrying only suckling babies. If angry enough they were known to attack any men they met. Nothing short of the fulfillment of their demands would bring them back; but, by all indications, their demands were never unreasonable. (67)

Give this a beat and what do we have? As a vital collective memory, then, for present and future politics, these “women’s sex-strikes” are treated throughout Re-inventing Africa (Amadiume 1997, 90; 104; 137; 147; 156) and most of Amadiume’s scholar-activism which in a sense culminates in Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism. How could this logic be lost on audiences of Black popular music, today or yesterday? From Blues women in North America to “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ on But the Rent” R&B as well as Jamaican Dancehall, this outlook may be “hard-core” or “soft-core,” more or less radical or revolutionary, depending on the artist or instance. In any event, the background for these investments in erotics and economics is undeniable and extensive, particularly as mic-fiends in Hip-Hop fiend for a power eroded by centuries of Africa’s enslavement and colonization by Europe or the West. This is the context in which the concept of “sexual strikes” takes on double or multiple meanings in Lil’ Kim. A case in point is “Makes No Sense,” a recording from The Notorious K.I.M. sessions featuring Tanya Stephens, “Queen of ReggaeSoul.” Its opening line is as bold it as gets. She sounds like a combination Queen Bee/Black Widow spider on wax, telling us how she’s learned to sex men, castrate them and use their “dicks” as cold-blooded weapons for herself: “My poppa taught me how to ride dicks / Cut ’em off, freeze ’em and use ’em as ice picks.” She boasts about her use of “pussy” as a trap or bait. She sets up so many men this way, she is soon called the Pink Panther: The Black Panther Party for SelfDefense is redefined in terms of a “Black Power” that is really “pink,” symbolically, for “Pussy Power” (which some Panthers actually sloganeered themselves at one point in time).4 The second verse of this song comes hard again. She’s started a line of hats that broadcasts her disdain for specific categories of men, or “niggaz,” while shouting out her loyalty to “women,” or “bitchez,” as a self-identified group with specific, self-identified interests. She gives lesson after lesson on how to treat men who act like dogs in and outside of sex. The climax is another, objectlesson and set-up. Some guy expects gratuitous sex after dinner, or cheap sex without a care for consent. He doesn’t get to “stick.” He gets a stick-up instead. She puts him out of his own car on the highway, making him strip nude in public humiliation as a matter of fact. Finishing what he started, she drives away in his car, with his wallet, having fully reversed the situation of subordination in which



of contemporary female rappers insisting on their sexual independence, explicitly, wielding it like a literal, lyrical sword. There is no doubt about the profound connection between power, sexuality, and politics historically on the continent and beyond, as Amadiume traces what happens when a Women’s Council utilizes its “strongest weapon.”

41

he and this society of men would have placed her and all women. We are left with a rap version of F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1996), as the emcee drives off shouting out the film in a new Porsche whose license plates read “Queen Bitch!” of course. After a third verse, there is an “outro” spat in an Afro-Jamaican Creole or patois that translates this whole scenario in a new location. Now, what is a “sexual strike” by the end of this one, multi-layered song of African music in the Americas? The possibilities are as multiple as Lil’ Kim’s meanings in general: a “boycott” strike or withholding of sex, strategically, when men and boys assume ownership, which is to say, automatic access to the bodies of women whom they oppress and exploit; ● a striking resumption of sex on her part, on her terms, for her pleasure, maybe in exchange for some principled economic advantage, only when her demands are met in favor of women’s position in society as a whole (i.e., “Niggaz wanna git laid / I gotta git paid,” The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Custom Made”); . . . and/or . . . ● a strike or attack on active male predators, who ultimately become prey, maybe for her pleasure as well, or an attack that involves sex and violence, sexual violence, if not a Queen Bitch-style sexual snuffing, a “justifiable homicide” that leaves “bitchez” like her on top, to be sure. ●

She who had herself been set up to be “sweet meat” ends up turning the tables of sexual domination, in short. This is certainly not the stereotype of “the ‘deprived’ African woman” rejected by Okonjo in “The Dual-Sex Political System in Operation” (1976, 45). The Notorious K.I.M. sets it off with a radical sense of justice, sexual and poetic, dedicated to a politics which is as “ancient” as it is “modern,” so to speak: “This is for my bitchez who ain’t neva had shit / settin niggaz up for all they stashes . . . ” (“Chinatown” from DJ Clue’s The Professional 2, 2001). This is essential K.I.M. Her emceeing screams for a proper comprehension of this idea of sexual poetic justice so methodically, systematically implied. Once more, the concept of “poetic justice” suggests some scenario in which justice is finally served, ironically, as a sudden reversal of fate or fortunes; and those who have been wronged before are righteously avenged in the end: “Payback’s a bitch,” in other words.5 This concept combines with the concept of “sexual poetry” easily in at least one of the fundamental elements of Hip-Hop. The lyricism of emcees appears to always have an erotic element whose prominence unnerves its more puritanical, sexually repressive critical opponents. But the Greek root of the word “eros” refers to “life” as well as “love,” according to Audre Lorde’s landmark essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978).6 For African peoples, moreover, the “life-force” of the cosmos is classically related to the power of words as well as sexual reproduction or pleasure; it is intimately related to words which have to be made flesh, or powerfully sensual, in order for there to be any human reality or culture at all. The eroticism of emceeing would be the most “natural” thing in the world, on this view, not to mention a very special occupation. Its





“sexual poetry” should not surprise. While it is erotic or sexual and it is equally poetry, it is thankfully not the poetry of white ruling-class repression authored by Western European elites. That Hip-Hop is currently producing the world’s most famous poets out of a history of oppression supported by the poets of white racist imperialism, this is a sort of “poetic justice” all its own. Lil’ Kim unites the concepts of “sexual poetry” and “poetic justice,” scrupulously. She crafts scenario after scenario in which women who are set up to be taken advantage of by men are vindicated and victorious at last, sexually, economically and otherwise. The tables of domination are turned, overturned or subverted, as she turns phrase after phrase to overthrow the established order of sex, gender and sexuality with a militant resolve. This is her eternal preoccupation in Hip-Hop, this tricksterism. The work of sexual poetic justice is her raison d’être, obviously and at all times, her reason-for-being in rhyme. So waging war against “unconsciousness” or ignorance of sexual politics, La Bella Mafia’s “Can You Hear Me Now?” could shout righteously: “Queen B(ee)’s a Movement / Fight for tha Cause!” Critical Interlude: Jayne Cortez and Audre Lorde—Writing Sex and Warfare And tha funny thing about it: I’m a bitch, And got niggaz runnin from me— like tha Olympics! (Lil’ Kim, “Revolution,” The Notorious K.I.M., 2000)

A Black Arts Movement poet, Jayne Cortez has written much that resonates wildly with Lil’ Kim’s lyricism. Born in Arizona, and raised in Watts, Los Angeles, she is author of no less than ten books, such as her first, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares (1969) and her tenth, Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002). A winner of many awards and critical accolades, Cortez co-founded of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) with Ama Ata Aidoo and co-organized the founding Yari Yari International Conference of Women Writers of African Descent in 1997. She is also director of the documentary film, Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future (1999). Not content to write poetry that remains confined to books, this very musical poet performs her poetry with her band, Jayne Cortez & The Firespitters. In sum, she and they have released a total of nine recordings, albums or CDs. The fire she spits is surely a forerunner of The Notorious K.I.M.’s spit-fire in Hip-Hop. They may be two of the most biological of poets the Black tradition has ever had, a significant fact in the world of the West which fears the biological and what it perceives to be Black and female biologies most especially. “The enemies polishing their penises between / oil wells at the pentagon” begins a stanza from “There It Is” in Cortez’s Firespitter (Cortez 1982, 39). She writes in Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares’s “THEODORE,” for example, of a horn player who had a scream so mean that it could make a dead man “cream” and a “hum” from the slum that could make a “dead sister” come (Cortez 1969, n.p.). In “SUPRESSION,” she writes: “The great pussy pinching throb between my thighs in the nest of 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


42

43

pleasure was my body / The pregnant volcano pressing my belly near eruption was my body.” “R&B” for her in “Noir Martyree” stands for “revolution & blood” (n.p.). Vengefully in “FORREAL,” she writes of roaches spilling from her ears and rats chewing on the carcass of a bastard “I killed with / a hair pin up in my womb” (n.p.). How sweet when read with Lil’ Kim’s braggadocio about carrying a stun gun inside of her hair bun, before the rapper reverses a rape scenario to exact her revenge-cum-justice with a strap-on dildo on “All Hail tha Queen” (another recording for The Notorious K.I.M., a key verse from which would resurface on “Chinatown” or DJ Clue’s The Professional 2). “I wanna be bitchy / I said I wanna be a bitch,” Cortez writes in “DINAH’S BACK IN TOWN” (Cortez 1969, n.p.), her homage to a different Black musical queen, Dinah Washington.7 The rest of Lil’ Kim’s mic-name is then manifest in Cortez via the Blues or a praise poem for Willie Mae (“Big Mama”) Thornton: “Bumblebee, You Saw Big Mama” appears in Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1996); and it is subsequently set to music on Jayne Cortez & The Firespitters’s Taking the Blues Back Home (1996): Big Mama heats up the Blues and, “after you stung her / & she chewed your stinger,” Bumblebee “sees” Big Mama (Cortez 1996, 83). Possibly Cortez’s most famous poem, “Rape” is collected in both Firespitter and Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1984); and it embodies the sexual poetic justice that is emblematic of The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” practice of rhyme. It is divided into four stanzas, two on each of the women for whom Cortez writes: Inez Garcia and Joanne (or Joan) Little. These women had struck back at their male attackers, Garcia in California; Little in a North Carolina prison. They had to stand trial in very high-profile court cases to defend themselves, a second time, in a society that certainly did not help defend them against the men who were rapists. Cortez makes her allegiances clear, asking (with no question marks for punctuation) in refrain: “And just what the fuck else were we supposed to do” (Cortez 1984, 63). The justice is sexual-political and poetic for all to see. A thirty-something Garcia would shoot at her assailant six times, it is said. She was convicted of second-degree murder before a retrial whose verdict would exonerate her after two years of imprisonment. Cortez’s “Rape” champions the just violence of resistance to the violence of racist-sexist violation in a manner that repositions the penetrations of rape, ironically, under patriarchy or male domination. She de-eroticizes the sexual aggression of the male rapist, with the most unflattering of descriptions, while joyfully describing the fact that Inez “pumped lead” into 300 pounds of his “shaking flesh.” The choice of words is crucial, and superb. It is the male rapist who turns out to be forcibly penetrated in the end, not the woman whom he tried to reduce to an object of rape. This is the irony of all ironies. It is the woman “pumps” him—with lead. She makes his flesh “shake,” a sign of his fear or terror, perhaps; his turnabout objectification and destruction (or his reduction to a dead object), perhaps; and, perhaps, his physical channeling of her pleasurable, potentially orgasmic act of revenge. Cortez writes that the Cuban and Puerto Rican Garcia sent his flesh flying to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The deed is so sanctified that a new holiday (Day of the Dead Rapist Punk) is celebrated, by “Inez” as Cortez terminates this stanza and the first half of her infamous anti-rape poem (Cortez 1984, 63).





In the second half of “Rape,” a southern U.S. prison guard receives a similar treatment—historically and poetically—at the hands of Little and Cortez. If Black Panther Elaine Brown would stand next to Garcia at her press conference, stating that the Panthers support Garcia because they support self-defense (Wood 1976, 16), she would also write “We Must Keep on Thanking JoAnne Little” (1975) in The Black Panther (newspaper), while Angela Davis would make a related statement in her article, “Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape” (1975). Little was twenty years old and the only woman in a Beauford County jail when her jailer entered her cell expecting to violate her for his pleasure. In Cortez’s rendering, the guard is “piss drinking” and “shit sniffing,” slurring the Black woman and threatening her life as he orders her to come to his violence (Cortez 1984, 64). Vindicated in the end, Joanne “came down” with an ice pick in his chest. Her jailer and this rapist was found in her cell naked from the waist down and stabbed eleven times with his own ice pick, “the same ice pick that he had kept in his own desk drawer” (Davis 1998, 150). She penetrates him with his own instrument, ironically, for here is another counter-penetration championed by Cortez. So in lieu of a white male rape of a Black woman, there is this alternative penetration of a policeman’s “fat” neck and his “swat freak” chest, which is an act of justice and then some. This is ritualized poetically. The tables are turned and Joanne turns to dance (The Dance of the Ice Picks), as a collectivity of women (and maybe some men) celebrate from coast and coast and house to house (Day of the Dead Rapist Punk, again). The eroticism that patriarchy or male domination invests in the rape of women is undermined and a new eroticism emerges from the violence of resistance, its pleasures, such as when Lil’ Kim rapped that she cuts off dicks, freezes them, and then uses them as ice picks. The emcee maintains in “Cell Block Tango (He Had It Comin’)” with Queen Latifah and Macy Gray: “I’m not guilty, just tryna protect mine / It ain’t my fault he ran into my knife twenty times” (Chicago: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack, 2003).8 On The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Revolution,” she rhymes that the funny thing about all this is that she’s a “bitch” and “got niggaz runnin from [her], like tha Olympics.” Her irony might call to mind the irony found in “Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair” as sung or so powerfully performed by Bessie Smith (1927) and later Dinah Washington (1957). Its outlaw articulation of sexual poetic justice is “cocky” or aggressively self-assured in its radical dismissal of what’s “legal” according to some men’s law for what’s right: “And just what the fuck else were we supposed to do,” closes Cortez in a communal voice now connecting with Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop. Their vision of a paradoxical female penetration of men for the purposes of sexual poetic justice is shared by “Gamba Adisa,” or Audre Lorde, whose African name would be perfectly suited for her character and career: “She Who Makes Her Meaning Clear” or “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known.” She had completed ten books of poems and five books of prose before her untimely death from cancer in 1992. The poetry begins with The First Cities (1969), includes The Black Unicorn (1978) and climaxes in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993). The non-fiction or prose includes The Cancer Journals (1980), Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) and A Burst of Light (1988) in addition



44

45

to her groundbreaking classic, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), which includes “Uses of the Erotic” as well as “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” An historic icon for innumerable and international struggles, Lorde was also appointed Poet Laureate of New York from 1991 to 1992—even though she was far from impressed by establishment honors. The poet and activist for justice of all kinds was as a selfdescribed “Black lesbian feminist socialist mother warrior poet” always willing to earn her name and stripes in battle. And like a great battle emcee, Lorde took pleasure in attacking an anti-gay, white-supremacist, anti-Black U.S. senator in “jessehelms” (1991). His name is spelled in lower case letters and written as one single word, as if it were a slur itself, to counteract this man’s latest slurring of others in the context of his crusade against so-called obscenity supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. The poem opens in a fashion typical for the poet. She self-identifies as a Black woman who is writing her way to the future, but off a garbage scow made up of moral fiber stuck together with Jesse Helms’s “come” (Lorde 1997, 445). She is making a way out of no way; and this ultra-conservative moralism is nothing more than trash. Lorde identifies him as obscene, in fact, which is why for him, “art” is a “dirty” word. Artists are not “obscene.” What is deemed obscene in “jessehelms” is what he and U.S. imperialism or greed-driven warmongering do in Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and Angola. Lorde repositions him and every one of his boys as a privileged political-economic pornographer— who peddles obscenities of oppression. She then foretells his individual downfall or destruction, arguably drafting a blueprint to make it happen. She depicts his imminent degradation by other “white boys,” who are bigger than him. Their “pendulous rules” bump up against Europe from the rear. Their “crystal balls” are spread across the globe and over Africa, “ass-up” to boot. They are waiting for “jessehelms.” The tables are turned in the sodomizing, sado-masochistic act. The homophobic racist gets his due (behind the toilets of the U.S. Senate, appropriately enough), thanks in part to the irony of this use of a gang of homophobic racists. What a penetrating example of sexual poetic justice even as Lorde recognizes that these other white men are likely to be literal and metaphorical rapists of him as well as Africa and Africans: “Your turn now jessehelms / come on it’s time.” He has to lick the handwriting off the warrior poet’s walls (445). Fantasizing about these “chickens coming home to roost” (as Malcolm X put it, for a “poetic justice” himself), so carnally in free verse, she called out her foe in interview statements as well, reaffirming her sexual identity and revolutionary “uses of the erotic” on the whole. She reiterates for “Above the Wind” (1991), which is reprinted in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004), explaining to the editor of Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters: “My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds . . . . Jesse Helms’s objection to my work is not about obscenity, however; or even about sex. It is about revolution and change.” She insists that he knows that her writing is committed to his destruction and “the destruction of every single thing he stands for,” “white patriarchal power” in short (Lorde 2004, 195). Her artistic readiness for warfare or battle is indisputable: “I fight Jesse Helms because





he wants to destroy Black people in Angola and North Carolina and Cuba and South Africa, and eradicate the babies of the South Pacific Rim, and starve school children to support R.J. Reynolds and the tobacco industry, and deny women control over their bodies.” Enough said, she reiterates again her belief in “the power of the erotic” which for her is as inseparable from her writing as “my blood, or my heart or my eyes” (196). The complex combination of the sexual, the just and the poetic, wherein phallic counter-penetrations of sexist male violators are flamboyantly staged for their anti-sexist punishment, this is rarely if ever treated by academic studies of Lorde or Cortez, as “gangsta” as they are in their art of sex and war. Yet neither of these instances may compare with another score by “Big Momma/Queen Bitch,” The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Suck My D**k.” The Justice of Africa’s “Flexible Gender System” in Rhyme: “Suck [Her] D**k” Obviously, critics of “sexism” and “homophobia” (or “crude,” “anti-woman,” and “anti-gay” expression) in “Hip-Hop” show themselves to be criticizing something else altogether when they fail to embrace Lil’ Kim’s sexual revolution in Hip-Hop. They are merely promoting a specific form of sexual, cultural politics—white and middle class—in their blanket condemnations of “rap,” an art form that they have shown no capacity to analyze or understand. You would never know much of Hip-Hop or “rap” exists if you only listen to criticism instead of music. For this now cliché mode of criticism smacks of mere sexual liberalism, besides racism and classism; and none of the above can do much damage at all to “sexism” or “homophobia,” not to mention the white-supremacism they habitually reinforce. After all, what could such critics of Hip-Hop do to explain the initial ad campaign for The Notorious K.I.M., a project that produced “Lil’ Kim—Suck My D!#k” T-shirts? “Suck My D**k” is the fourth track of a long-anticipated sophomore solo album release. Leaked to fans and the mix-tape circuit early, it must be one of the most dynamic compositions ever in the history of music and lyricism, irrespective of genre. The verbal versatility of the emcee is matched only by her sexual flexibility on record. A song that sounds like it will be about a male organ turns out to be about justice meted out to men in a manner that destroys just about every conventional idea there is—in Western society, at least—about gender and genitalia, sex and sexuality. By the time this track is over, it is not even clear what its bawdy title should be, so revolutionary is its radical rearrangement of the body and its possibilities of pleasure. So radical is the revolutionary imagination of power, pleasure, and their politics on The Notorious K.I.M. The opening line is a dedication to “bitchez” and “hoez” dedicated to making ends meet in the ghetto by any means. This voice seems strongly “female” or “pro-female” in its identification. Other “bitchez” are dissed and dismissed as bums. These “bitchez” are not necessarily the female “haters” Lil’ Kim may have been dissing on “Big Momma Thang,” however. These “bitchez” on “Suck My D**k” are by and large “male.” The dissed “bitch” or “bitchez” on all her records may be “male” or “female” as a matter of fact; and they include the “men” 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


46

47

who may enjoy her anal violation of them (“cats hit from the back” here with no strings attached), if and when they disrespect their Queen. Her lyrical penetration is lushly metaphorical, yet made literal at the same time. She is so forceful that she leaves this “cat” bleeding, and “cat” could mean the “guy” himself or his sexualized “bottom.” The rush of it is compared to an enema as this aching “man” might reach for a vinegar solution to sooth his newfound pleasure-in-pain. Or does she add it herself as salt to the wound? (Is he a new millennial virgin to the potency that she represents, historically, matriarchally?) Whether “male” or “female,” “niggaz” love and crave this “Queen Bitch.” Even a U.S. senator catches Stockholm Syndrome in her presence; after he is kidnapped, he refuses to go home to his wife when released: “Kim got em in tha zone, beatin they dicks / even got some of these straight chicks rubbin they tits!” This is to say that everyone loves to love The Notorious K.I.M. and she loves that they love her so. Before the first verse of “Suck My D**k” is complete, the terms “thug” and “bitch” merge to become one in her person, so that now every “thug” wants this “thug,” that “bitch” (or “That Bitch”) who is “Queen Bitch,” indisputably. While she renders every gender and sexuality ambiguous, what is ultimately unambiguous for her is the fact that other “males” and “females,” whether lovers or haters, they all want to have and be this “Queen B(ee)”; and if they are “mad” at Lil’ Kim, it is just because they can’t be Lil’ Kim. Her voice is neither narrowly “feminine” nor “masculine” in any exclusive sense. Neither is there any correspondingly narrow notion of “heterosexuality” or “homosexuality” applicable in truth: “Niggaz mention me for a sexual reference / Lil’ Kim’s everybody’s sexual preference,” she contends later on “Off the Wall.” In the end, “Suck My D**k” pictures her giving it to guys good and treating men like men treat women, socially and sexually—in another, picture-perfect illustration of sexual poetic justice, no doubt. The chorus of this aural, audio extravaganza expresses something ancestral yet again. In traditional Africa, Amadiume writes, any young boys who would “verbally harass” young girls on “bush paths” would be punished by Women’s Councils which would restore safety to the pathways to markets (Amadiume 1987, 67). It is the “cat call” of modern street life that leads to the exchange that is the refrain of “Suck My D**k.” Lil’ Kim plays the role of Women’s Councils of old, while her “boy” Mr. Bristal is her “cat-calling” foil (or fool). He calls her “out her name,” not knowing how she will respond; or how his “bitch” will morph into her “Queen Bitch” The “cat call” of the immature, inconsiderate male is transformed into a “cat” of a different sort as The Notorious K.I.M. proceeds to violate the cats who make these calls and treat them like “pussies” or “assholes” are treated by patriarchy, the society of male domination. This is when she tells the symbolic male to “suck [her] dick.” African “Women’s Councils” aside, she exacts her antisexist vengeance-cum-justice strikingly without keeping any gender or sexuality constraints intact, a feat which is in keeping with another aspect of Amadiume’s extended social history of the continent. Central to Amadiume’s matriarchal analysis is what she calls “flexible gender systems.” She refers to “a neuter construct” or “gender-neutral” categories of identity that can be assumed by anyone, regardless of so-called anatomical sex: “I have shown how in Nnobi social structure there was a flexibility which allowed a





neuter construct enabling men and women to share roles and status. The rigidity of the European gender system allows for only male or female. Its historically male-gendered power structure has consequently kept females out of power” (Amadiume, 1997, 151). Although she reclaims the term “matriarchy” for “African women,” or their institutions and values of female empowerment, African societies were not so rigid in terms of gender that these Western-European notions of “manhood” and “womanhood” can be left in place, politically or analytically. The concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” have a culturally specific history which has for centuries promoted and policed them as the symbolic property of white male-dominated elites: Black people in particular have constantly been characterized as existing outside these very oppressive constructs, historically paying the price for white society’s inability to think beyond its unbending culture of gender and sexuality. In Amadiume, a discussion of language differences between Africa and Europe highlights this point: “I have argued that it is not enough to be critical of European-invented Africa if we ourselves remain uncritical of the European gender structure of the language which we are using and its effect on our thought process and gender relations” (Amadiume 1997, 24). Along with other scholars, she contrasts the third-person masculine singular pronoun “he”—which in English is often supposed to include men and women while graphically privileging men—with non-European languages in Africa (such as Igbo) where comparable pronouns are truly generic, or non-gendered, and where there are genderless terms for primary social concepts such as “leader” (or “ruler”) and “humanity” (unlike “king” and “man,” for example). If Amadiume does speak of “matriarchy” and “patriarchy” in English, strategically mobilizing “manhood” and “womanhood” to make a statement about power, her recognition of a much more flexible system of “gender” is central to the story of how “females” access power along with “males” in Africa as well as how African societies have been structured to transcend what is rigidly enforced as “gender” in the West. Otherwise, she could have never written Male Daughters, Female Husbands, which was named one of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” by Zimbabwe’s International Book Fair in 2002.9 Like much scholarship, and some social activism, it makes a general distinction between “biological sex” and “ideological [or cultural] gender.” This would be the difference between being “male” or “female” versus a “man” or a “woman,” theoretically; it is the difference between human anatomy and the many different, conflicting interpretations of such physical matters there are across cultures, at any give time in history. Various different cultures construe gender and biology (“the body”) in radically different ways, a fact that reveals that neither “human biology” nor “anatomical sex” is a simple (“natural”) “fact a life.” “Sex” is as much a cultural and, therefore, political artifact as “gender.” For this reason, Amadiume could study “male daughters” and “female husbands” in an African society in a way that revises much if not all of what Western societies think about sex and gender, culture and anatomical biology; and Lil’ Kim could animate it, lyrically, in her most brilliant writing of Hip-Hop rhymes. Hence, apart from her emphasis on goddesses, economics, government and mothering, Amadiume stresses how flexible gender systems have given “males”



48

49

and “females” access to a shared power among African peoples. The use of English or European terminology to discuss these social realities will be a problem as long as English or European terminology is used, unfortunately. Nevertheless, she draws a distinction between “male daughters” (or those “females” who are socialized to be play the role that in the West would be identified as “sons”) and “female husbands” (or “females” who marry other “females” or “women” in a specifically African institution of “marriage,” which is far from the same thing as the specifically Western institution of “marriage”). Curiously, Amadiume claims that “woman-to-woman marriage” is always a strictly social rather than sexual institution. But she supplies material for a raunchier reading that would relate well to the sexually explicit female rapper along with her cultural counterpart in “hard-core” (or “blue”) Black female comedians: She was one of the wives who had cooked privately and brought food to the lineage daughters. Having got drunk she accused lineage daughters of failing in their conjugal and sexual responsibilities to her as a wife. She became extremely “vulgar,” and claimed that she had not had sexual intercourse for years; her vagina was therefore getting rusty, and she was hungry for sex! (Amadiume 1987b, 61–62)

This was the wife of a “female husband.” Amadiume observes further of “male daughters” that they might frequently outshine their “male husbands,” considerably: “Very wealthy women soon overshadowed their husbands to the extent that the men were no longer known by their own names, but by reference to their role as husband” (48). All of these situations prove a basic point: “sex, in this context, did not correspond to gender” (51). They need not correspond, ever, then or now, in any situation (as Amadiume and Lil’ Kim illustrate repeatedly). They are both or all social, cultural constructs or inventions, shifting according to period and place. The lack of attention to widespread “woman-to-woman marriages” in Africa represents a real failure of African Studies, for Amadiume. Yet this failure to appreciate “gender flexibility” in general need not define Hip-Hop, or its historical consciousness and embodiment of Africa, given its radical, revolutionary representation in The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Suck My D**k.” On this note, a note on “niggaz” and “bitchez” is necessary. The white middleclass and the Black pseudo-bourgeoisie continue to confuse “nigger” and “nigga,” proudly, arrogant in their ignorance of Black speech and its politics of resistance to white and ruling-class meanings. The word “nigger” is historically, uniformly negative and racist. It (and European languages as a whole from Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese to French, German, and English) has been transformed to translate whole new sets of meanings and missions. Consequently, Hip-Hop is notorious for its extreme love of “niggaz.” The Notorious K.I.M. is likewise known, even renowned, for her comparable, incomparable love of “bitchez.” As an individual artist within the cultural genre, she recasts this word herself in the fashion that Hip-Hop has recast “the [so-called] ‘n’ word,” explicitly and aggressively. As exclusive terms of degradation, these words were invented by white men and women of the West, Europeans. They are reinvented by the Black masses to have many, multiple meanings never before imagined.





Webster’s and other dictionaries would define “bitch” as “a lewd or immoral woman,” “a malicious, spiteful, or domineering woman,” “a generalized term of abuse,” and/or “something that is highly objectionable or unpleasant.” They would define “nigger,” moreover, as “usually offensive,” “a black person,” “a member of any dark-skinned race,” or “a member of a socially disadvantaged class of persons.”10 They hardly have the last word here. A dictionary of Black popular speech would show how what was written in the language of “whitesupremacy” is rewritten—heard loud and clear—in the language spoken in Hip-Hop: “niggaz” generic for “people” in a Black universe of meaning: ex. “Niggaz Bleed” generic for “male persons,” as in “Just me ‘n’ my niggaz” (or “niggaz ‘n’ bitchez”) specific for “partners,” non-sexual, as in “my dawg” or, “That’s my nigga!” specific for “partners,” very sexual, as in “my nigga” / “my man” or “boyfriend.” “bitchez” generic for “female persons,” in a largely Black universe of meaning generic for “people” who are more or less “punks” (and probably “haters”) specific for “partners,” non-sexual (“female nigga/dawg”): ex. “Me & My Bitch” specific for “partners,” very sexual: ex. “Me & My Bitch,” too.11

It is truly remarkable that in a white majority culture which speaks in middleclass terms of “men” and “women,” almost solely, the class of Black people whom Malcolm X hailed as the “grassroots” uses a slew of names and words which may make sexual and non-sexual distinctions without using the terminology of “manhood” and “womanhood” at all.12 “Suck My D**k” raps of “hoez,” “dudes,” “chicks,” “cats,” and “thugs” as well as “niggaz” and “bitchez.” Not once is the European language of “men” or “women” ever employed. Linguistically, HipHop is much more likely to make distinctions between “male” and “female,” rather than “man” and “woman,” and even then these distinctions of sex (not gender) are frequently made as secondary descriptions of other, more fundamental identities. Thus, it is possible to speak of a “male” or “female” rapper, yet never a “rapping man” or a “rapping woman,” while it is emceeing that remains primary beyond sex and gender. While the words “niggaz” and “bitchez” can designate a general distinction in sex, they are so basically flexible as to carry a wide range of definitions—sexual and non-sexual or gendered and genderless, neutral, positive, and negative, depending on the scenario or situation and the speaker. Out of the mouths of the Black masses, this may all make sense when uttered by “males” and “females,” regarding “males” or “females,” whether they are “homo-erotic” or “hetero-erotic” in “sexual orientation.” Therein lies the incredible resource-potential of this “flexible gender system” writ large in the African language of Hip-Hop, especially as it is lyrically mobilized and maximized by Lil’ Kim. She puts into play a series of meanings of a series of words, terms and names in a manner that enables her to address and dismantle male domination as well as the whole institution of gender as it was formed in Europe or the bourgeois



50

51

West. What’s more, it is her absolute pleasure to do so. The politics of her sexuality are as satisfying as the physical eroticism through which it is expressed. There are “bitchez” and “hoez” which are positive when they appear to refer to “females” in anti-sexist solidarity. There are “bitchez” and “hoez” which are “negative” when they appear to refer to “males” who practice a sexist solidarity of their own. The initially gender-neutral, value-neutral meanings of “cat” and “thug” as well as “niggaz” are changed up over and over again to advance her lyrical-political agenda. The result is Lil’ Kim’s radical rejection of textbook anatomy, her radical embrace of a whole new body—a new, whole body—and her signature contribution to language (or modern-day African matriarchal, “mother tongue” eroticism): “Queen Bitch” A Supreme Bitch; A Murder-Scene Bitch; A Kill-a-Nigga-for-Her-Nigga Bitch; A By-Any-Means Bitch; A (Fresh and) Clean Bitch; A Disease-Free: A Hard Core Bitch.

This was “QUEEN B@#$H” as song and lyrical self-definition. Not only is “bitch” no longer strictly negative, it is positive in the extreme. Whether male or female, there are “niggaz” that can be done away with and “niggaz” that she would do anything for; and this is how she conveys what a positively phenomenal “bitch” she represents. She will ultimately illuminate how “niggaz” may be bested by “bitchez” as a rule. For “bitch” can now signify something immaculate, murderous (justifiably, even nobly homocidal) and clean as well as unquestionably supreme. The original articulation of “Ebonics” is important in this regard: Lil’ Kim could not pull off any of these feats in white English; no one could. The language of “men” and “women” would leave her and all of us trapped in rigid gender identification and male domination, systematically. The middle-class objections to Hip-Hop’s grassroots speech are not only more about racist class rule than anything else, including sexism and homophobia, they also resist such revolutionary attacks on sexism and homophobia, racism and classism in their attempts to stop this very African revolution and protect the bourgeois language of gender and sexuality that is at the root of white Western empire. When Robert L. Williams wrote Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks (1975), he did not define it in U.S. terms, or even in terms of the Americas, northern, central, or southern. An umbrella term, Ebonics was the word used to describe any such African linguistics in the Pan-African world, whether the location is in Haiti, Jamaica, Surinam or continental Africa, for example. Lil’ Kim’s language is indispensable to her politics and consciousness—a powerfully sexual politics and sexual consciousness. It showcases a basic structural feature of “Ebonics,” if it has gone long unrecognized by academic critics and linguists (particularly in North America). The way the masses of Black folk use language, culturally and historically, regardless of





situation and regardless of how this language is officially classified, it is marked by a certain African flexibility remarked by Amadiume when it comes to sex, gender or sexuality. This is not just a characteristic of African languages, apparently, which are too often construed as dead or frozen units of analysis, it is characteristic of the way Africans approach language communication itself, worldwide. This is “Ebonics,” the “true language” of Hip-Hop, and who is more fluent in it than The Notorious K.I.M.? The second verse of “Suck My D**k” confirms this much further. She vocally samples a line from “Me So Horny” or 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1996). Its own, stereotypical sample of Asian women cooing (“Me love you long time”) is sent back with vengeance. There are no men quieting women down with “baby” talk in this scene. There is Lil’ Kim’s reversal of the scenario so that this “baby” is not the prey of men who soon fall prey to her instead. She is not looking for love or romance but sex, oral sex, to be recorded for her enjoyment and then the enjoyment of her all-female crew of friends. This sex is virtually indescribable. She “pisses” (or ejaculates) out of her “pussy” with her “girls” watching. They will be pleased to laugh at the latest guy on deck. No rigid opposition between “male” and “female” is kept in play, either, as she proceeds to “take” this “nigga” and his “cake,” a double-entendre meaning his “cash” and his “ass.” The smaller bills are thrown back in his face in a move that simulates a scene in a strip-club: “Queen Bitch” means to show us who dances for dollar bills when she’s around. It is she who “pimps” and he who puts in work, while others can learn how to “mack,” if they listen to the musical lessons she raps. The third and final verse of this song turns it into a track that “talks back” to a song from Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992): “Bitches Ain’t Shit.” Considered a “classic,” it features Snoop Dogg on the chorus that defines “bitchez” as nothing but “hoez” and “tricks,” who can’t do anything for him but “suck [his] dick.” They’re told to get out when done; and, supposedly, he hops in his car to make a quick run. Lil’ Kim closes “Suck My D**k” with a royal reply. She repeats select lines from The Chronic as she flips its sexual script. “Niggaz” ain’t “shit” but they still could “trick.” All they can do for her is suck her “click.” She jumps up after she “comes,” while they’re thinking that they will get “some” (“pussy”) from her but get none. Here Snoop and Dre get tricked themselves, lyrically. The male “nigga” is now the “trick” who gets done, done in or played. These “niggaz” only exist for her oral pleasure, now functioning as drones in her Hip-Hop hive. Since the T-shirt is a common, everyday medium of political expression, what song deserves a T-shirt more? In the course of one single composition, “Suck My Dick” actually becomes “Suck My Clit,” or more accurately, “Suck My Click” as well as “Suck My Pussy” in between. Each version of the statement is at various points heard. The “dick” is no longer the symbol of power, or pleasure, after its appropriation in two verses of this striking propaganda for sexual consciousness and politics. It gets trumped by the “click” of “Queen Bitch” which combines “dick” and “clit” phonetically in this very versatile Black vernacular speech. At the level of language, and lyricism, it is as if this “click” (as in “clique”) can stand alone, completely or holistically, like a synecdoche, for every aspect of human



52

53

embodiment and satisfaction.13 The emcee or rapper’s insistent occupation of each of these symbolic postures at any rate moves beyond any rigid gender or sexual identity (including the anti-sexist face-off of the chorus) toward a liberation of this body from all confinements of gender, sexuality, or sexual repression as this society knows and enforces it. On “All Hail tha Queen,” The Notorious K.I.M. dons a poetic “dildo” again to settle a score. Lil’ Kim’s “strap-on” lyrics are many. After rhyming that she carries a stun gun inside of her hair bun (a conventionally feminine motif), she threatens “hatin ass niggaz” by telling them that she will treat them like a “bitch” (a conventionally masculine motif): “Strap on a fake dick and stick you where you shit—Ha!” To salute this queen of “All Hail that Queen” is to salute a poetic queen who defies gender and the norms of sexual anatomy as a rule. All in all, The Notorious K.I.M. supplies an answer record to three different songs in “Suck My D**k,” revealing how her very purpose in rap is to answer sexual domination at large—not to mention how what Kamene Okonjo calls a “dual-sex system” and what Amadiume calls a “flexible gender system” combine flawlessly in the logic of her Hip-Hop rhymes. While 2 Live Crew and Dr. Dre or Snoop Dogg are dealt with in the foreground, The Notorious B.I.G. is played in the background. A sample of “Me & My Bitch” from his Ready to Die (1994) loops hypnotically for the duration. He says he wants the type of “bitch” who will be with him whether he’s “broke” or rich. He takes a line from Black folklore and a famous Richard Pryor comedy routine: Biggie and Richard and many a Black male may publicly express their desire for a female like so: “She looked so good, I’d suck on her Daddy’s dick!” It is obvious that “Big Momma” Lil’ Kim represents this “thug bitch” whom Biggie rapped about on “Me & My Bitch” (and behind her, sonically, on “Suck My D**k”). It is also obvious that she represents the “Black female” principle in a Hip-Hop duality where the “Black male” principle is represented by Biggie, other male MCs notwithstanding. She is “Big Momma” and he is “Big Poppa.” The Notorious B.I.G. represents for “niggaz,” when this means “Black males.” The Notorious K.I.M. represents for “bitchez,” when this means “Black females.” In doing so they ensure everyone get represented. But other meanings are made which are not bound by sex or gender, even as they resist sexist domination: “Queen Bitch” can embody the duality of this “dual-sex system” all unto her self, thanks to her flexibility vis-à-vis gender and a holistic approach to human identity and embodiment. She signifies beautifully on her beloved Biggie. If “Me & My Bitch” admits that he and other “niggaz” would give a guy a “blow job” in order to get with this “bitch,” and Lil’ Kim is “that bitch” (“That Bitch”) as her “Suck My D**k” insists, then the “dick” they would suck turns out not to belong to “Daddy.” It’s “Big Momma’s” own.14 This is sexual poetic justice. The limitations of sex and gender are eliminated, erotically, with pleasure. A cosmic duality is invoked, assumed and then transcended through an equally cosmic flexibility: The Notorious K.I.M. is the truth of “African matriarchy” (and its “flexible gender systems”), by any given name; and she spits this truth to the masses, “religiously,” with “a strong ideology of motherhood,” “a very clear message about social and economic justice” and “a general principle of love.”




54


Conclusion Obviously, I have not been a slave to intellectual conformity . . . . May this work contribute to a strengthening of the feelings of goodwill which have always united Africans from one end of the continent to the other and thus show our organic unity.

The fundamental thesis of this work, which rests on African matriarchy, is the least given importance and applied . . . . This book will remain a classic as long as there are men and women in this world and as long as the West persists in its history of patriarchy, racism and imperialism. (Ifi Amadiume, “Introduction,” C.A. Diop’s The Cultural Unity of Black Africa [1989])

A number of academic writers from Angela Y. Davis (1971) to Nkiru Nzegwu (2000, 2007) have balked at this particular term, matriarchy, thanks in no small part to its total demonization by the white patriarchal West in modern times. Ifi Amadiume is adamant in her usage, anyway, following Cheikh Anta Diop who was named the most influential Black thinker of the last century along with W.E.B. Dubois at the First World Festival of Black Arts (in Dakar, Senegal), in 1966: Through literature review [and “fieldwork” in Nnobi], I was able to reclaim useful information from already existing anthropological data, re-analyse relevant data and correct false information. I stored the new information in a different vessel (social history), and threw out the bad and the offensive vessel (social anthropology). I did not throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater; I sifted the grain from the chaff and reclaimed what was mine. (Amadiume 1997, 18)

Lyrically, matriarchy would signal desire, not stigma or shame, for Lil’ Kim, “Big Momma/Queen Bitch.” For Amadiume, the selection of terms is less significant than the realities of sex and power throughout the history of Africa before and after European colonization and enslavement. In addition, it is important to remember that Western social thought does not deny the existence of matriarchy. It only claims that “civilization” must “evolve” out of matriarchal “savagery” or “barbarism” in Africa—up to the Mediterranean and on to Western Asia—until it reaches the pinnacle of patriarchal Europe, as if sexual “civilization” is itself a synonym for white and male domination of the planet (Amadiume 1997, 73). It is not that a history of “matriarchy” has to be invented, for Africa, in other words. It is the value-system of patriarchy that must be turned upside-down, in Amadiume and Diop (despite its fear of a Black matriarchal planet), to set history aright, much like Lil’ Kim turns sexual oppression upside-down via Hip-Hop in the Africa diaspora.15 The emcee embodies and thus confirms the ideas of the radical scholar by combining sexual politics with a militant sense of poetic justice in her own work on the mic. Her sexual poetic justice supplies an antidote to the kind of poetry 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


(Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa [1959])

55

and justice that was established in a puritanical tradition by Thomas Rymer in seventeenth-century Britain, for patriarchy and white racist empire. Sexism is more a “vice” for her, and sexual repression is no “virtue,” given her passion for a matriarchy redefined and revalorized. At one point, she could even joke in interviews that she wanted to build a house on her land for each of the men in Junior M.A.F.I.A., so even after they got married and had children they could all remain together always under her umbrella. This would literally be matriarchy, matrilineage, or matrifocality in the narrowest conceptions. The historically African articulation of it for Amadiume means that the symbolics of Africa in Hip-Hop consciousness must entail a consciousness of sexual militancy as African heritage or represent a mistaken Eurocentric consciousness in disguise. The ideas of the radical scholar are confirmed by the work of the emcee on the mic, not to mention Nwando Achebe recently in Farmers, Traders, Warriors and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960 (2005), despite critical tendencies that would separate them and marginalize both for the same status-quo sexual-political reasons. This similarity should not surprise: Amadiume is vocal about her relationship to class, language, and empire. She advocates an “Nzagwalu” literature, for starters: “Nzagwalu is an Igbo word meaning answer back—when you have suffered an insult, you have to answer back” (4). A poet herself, she has authored several collections of verse: Passion Waves (1985), Ecstasy (1995), Circles of Love (2006), and Voices Draped in Black (2007).16 Re-inventing Africa begins with comments on “the Ebonics debate” (Amadiume 1997, ix) in North America. She sides with “the passions and sensibilities of the grassroots” (vii) over “a disrespectful and arrogant elite” (viii), which would parrot “good English” at all costs. She identifies herself as an intellectual and an activist involved in Black-African communities across the world, sounding like a mix of Carter G. Woodson (1933) and Frantz Fanon (1961) in her thoughts on schooling: “In reading these essays, I hope students and activists in the communities will see how they have educated me” (Amadiume 1997, x). This anti-elitist writing of African history is exceptional. She is more interested in “market queens” (or “titled men and women”) than “ruling-class women” (89), or “ruthless” tyrants imposed on Africa from without (97). Oral traditions are at the center of this account. As she moves “away from the tip of the pyramid [or hierarchy] to the base” (100), Amadiume notices how much African history is written out of histories which fetishize literacy or, more specifically, the European written word. Yet among the vast majority of communities championed by her work: “If dictators emerged in the leadership . . . [t]here were devices of removing them through oracular decrees, prophetic movements, the Women’s Councils and women’s movement, use of masquerades or popular mass action. . . . [F]or dictators to succeed unchecked, the evidence shows that they had to have the support of outside force” (103). Elsewhere, the power of the spoken word is increased: “In the indigenous system, pro-female values were encouraged through songs, folktales and myths to motivate, on the one hand, the tender values of love and compassion, and, on the other, competitiveness in economic pursuit, for women fed their children” (150). The values of “positive aggression” and “militancy without bloodshed” give way to “total war” (104) in




56


How was it that illiterate [sic] grassroots women could mobilize and organize crowds ranging from hundreds to over ten thousand women across an area of six thousand square miles, involving several villages and towns, and involving nonIgbo women such as Ibibio and Calabar women? This is something that the urbanbased contemporary national women’s organizations seem unable to achieve. (Amadiume 1997, 125)

This radical appreciation of the oral intelligence of the masses explains why Amadiume could make an important gesture toward rap in the final chapter of Re-inventing Africa, in the face of academic hostility toward it and all serious struggles for Black liberation (205). She directs our attention to the super-abundance of queens—many different varieties of queens—in the vast history of Africa. Her account sets the stage for the emergence of a “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” in Hip-Hop, Africa’s musical representation abroad. This link provides added weight to her position on contemporary politics at home: “Hinterland Africa proper which had such structures which favoured the rule of goddesses, matriarchy, queens, etc. is indeed still present with us today. But, these systems are facing erosion, as elite African men manipulate the new and borrowed patriarchies to forge a most formidable ‘masculine imperialism,’ yet unknown in our history.” The effects of Arab and European imperialism live on via the “copycat” elites of a “new world order” in which sons and “daughters of the establishment” (Amadiume in Diop 1989, xvii) support Western domination as male domination, or the “new gender politics” of pseudo-independent, “neo-colonial” states on the continent (Amadiume 1997, 104). These pseudobourgeoisies betray the “militant women” and “warrior queens” (194) of African ancestry, trading in this history for personal class privilege and white elite status, as do black “bourgeoisies” all across the Americas as well.17 The current, global conservatism of imperialism explains the lack of sexual consciousness in the world where Lil’ Kim rhymes as its “New World” champion. Her lyrical persona is a fresh reincarnation of what Amadiume upholds, albeit in a radically different context, the continuous enslavement, colonization and neo-colonization of Africa and Africans by Europe or the West. Her militant, gun-toting queendom rises to the occasion with a ruthless morality of justice— not the justice of Thomas Rymer or Puritan England, but sexual poetic justice. Here again is “the changing same” of Amiri Baraka in his classic essay on R&B and “new Black music” (1968) and of Deborah E. McDowell’s book by the same name on “Black women’s literature, criticism, and theory” (1995). The depth of this consciousness is far-reaching and revolutionary in its consequences for Black folk, here and there: The Notorious K.I.M. radiates it from the very beginning of her career through every subsequent stage of her emceeing for Hip-Hop, the Pan-African “cultural revolution” where she spits “sexual revolution” in a nearsupernatural, “matriarchal,” and “gender-flexible” fashion.



the Igbo “Women’s War” of 1929. Memorialized in T. Obinkaram Echewa’s novel, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (1992), this warfare prompts Amadiume to pose a biting, pressing question:

Mic “God/dess” . . . Eshu-Elegba: Signifying Divine Freedom— In the Flesh

Eshu is, above all, the messenger of the gods. (Robert Farris Thompson, Black Gods and Kings [1971]) Esu establishes from the beginning the principle of rebellion against every form of convention and opposes all acts of dictatorship by men and deities alike. (Femi Abodunrin, “Esu-Elegbara and the Carnivalesque” [1996]) God sent me into this world on a mission: to touch people with my voice, my presence. (Lil’ Kim, “Who Does Lil’ Kim Think She Is?” [Blender, 2003]) The god of the vanquished became the devil of the vanquisher. (Aimé Césaire, Ex-Iles [1992]) Attibon Legba / Ouvrez bayon pour moi / Attibon Legba / Ouvrez bayon pour moi / Cry Glory, glory to Legba! / Cry Praise, praise to Legba! / Elegba O . . . / Teach us how to fight again / for what is right / give us your spirit . . . / Did you come / did you come again / as . . . and I killed you? (Eintou Pearl Springer, Loving the Skin I’m In [2005])

H

“

ip-Hop is the rhythm. It’s the soul. It’s the people. It’s the dress code. It’s the language. It’s just a blessing from the Creator.” Thus spoke Afrika Bambaataa in the first anniversary issue of The Ave Magazine: A Street Movement in Print, on the thirtieth anniversary of Hip-Hop according to the Universal Zulu Nation (Dre 2004, 70). Condemning global oppression and corporate exploitation, more recently, on AllHipHop.com, this “living, working icon” cautions: “The whole earth better wake up, and get back to spirituality” (Banjoko 2004). Another album would carry on this “Creator’s blessing” in Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light by Afrika Bambaataa and the Millennium of the Gods (2004). Of course, it continues to advance that fifth element of Hip-Hop



3


of which so few outside Hip-Hop are even aware: knowledge—as in “knowledge, culture and overstanding,” “the main element of Hip-Hop that holds it all together.”1 The liner-notes scratch out a serious message for the planet: “RESPECT MOTHER EARTH, SHE IS A LIVING ENTITY, IF YOU DO NOT RESPECT HER, THEN SHE WILL SEND THE GOD OF NATURE TO SPIT YOUR ASSES OUT WITH DEATH AND DESTRUCTION” (Bambaataa et al. 2004, 7). The spirited words of this “Godfather of Hip-Hop” mesh well with the pioneering work of Ifi Amadiume in her Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion & Culture (1997). In the name of Hip-Hop, and Africa, he is fond of pleading to the old and the young: “Get back to peace, love, unity and having fun” (Bambaataa 2003, 130). A long-time professor of religion, actually, Amadiume studies African historian Cheikh Anta Diop and extends his arguments concerning matriarchy as “the basis of our African cultural unity” in this manner: It is in fact this history, this culture that is manipulated in our nationalist rhetoric when we call for peace, love and unity, as opposed to violence. We refer to the moral compulsions of love and unity based on the spirit of common motherhood when we say our motherland or mother Africa. We are thus constructing a collective identity or consciousness based on a matriarchy in spite of our differences and contradictions. (Amadiume 1997, 23)

This sums up most of the original, orthodox definition of Hip-Hop in a nutshell: Amadiume’s redefinition of African “matriarchy” includes a “flexible gendersystem” as well as “a general principle of love,” “a very clear message about social and economic justice,” a “powerful goddess-based religion,” and “a strong ideology of motherhood” (101). A basic “moral-philosophical” connection between Amadiume and Bambaataa also connects the Zulu King and his wildstyle2 to the wildly stylish Lil’ Kim, Hip-Hop’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch.” Simply put, a great Pan-African piece of the spirit realm is heard or felt in her scintillating practice of rhyme; of this there should be no doubt as her African diasporic voicing of sexual poetic justice takes us beyond the patriarchy, gender and JudeoChristianity of the white West. Critical for an analysis of Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop, Carolyn Cooper charts the significance of African “religion” or spiritual belief-systems for Reggae and Dancehall in Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaica Popular Culture (1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004). She writes on the “flamboyantly exhibitionist” Lady Saw, who “epitomizes the sexual liberation of many African Jamaican working-class women from airy-fairy Judaeo-Christian definitions of appropriate female behavior” (Cooper 2004, 99). The deejay is heard and read as a “manifestation of the spirit” of “female fertility figures” found on the continent of Africa and throughout the African Americas: Oshun (“ ‘Goddess’ of Love, Sensuality and Sweet Water,” or “River Mumma”) provides the primary inspiration for Cooper in “Lady Saw Cuts Loose,” along with Oya (“ ‘Goddess’ of Wind, Tempests and Masquerade”). The point is to trace an important, “potent message about sexuality, gender politics” and “the right to



58

59

public space” (123). Some might be tempted to call on the same deities regarding The Notorious K.I.M.’s message in rap. But a different direction is offered nonetheless. Noises in the Blood mentions Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988); and then Eshu appears center stage. Legendary in Black folklore, this “trickster-god” is said to be “clearly related to that other trickster Anansi,” and to supply “a West African model of wholeness” absent from “Western cultures” (Cooper 1995, 148). This divine model of holism is clearly in tune with Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop, the Black working-class creation of music and culture for liberation hailing from the boroughs of New York to contemporary continental Africa and beyond.

Literally Divine: The Spirit in the Body, Her Holiness on the Microphone Who is Eshu, relative to an emcee, a lyricist, such as Lil’ Kim? Esu-Elegbara is the name given this figure, traditionally, among the Yoruba in contemporary Nigeria. It is Legba among the Fon in Dahomey, or the country now known as Benin; Exu in Brazil; Eleggua (or Elegua) in the Santeria practiced in Cuba as well as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic; Papa Legba in Haiti, or Vodun; and Papa LaBas in Hoodoo across the southern states of Afro–North America, not to mention New York and other migratory locales. Eshu is often described as one of the most powerful, important and, currently, misunderstood orisa (“orisha”) or deities. Lil’ Kim is a modern-day Hip-Hop artist and icon—a quintessential diva, if you will, since “diva” is Latin for goddess; and she is known by many names herself: Big Momma, Queen B(ee)/Queen Bitch and The Notorious K.I.M. are just a few and the number will keep growing as she keeps rhyming. On “This Is Who I Am” from La Bella Mafia (2003), she even states that “God” made her who she is today to speak the things that others are afraid to say. There is a striking similarity to behold in these two figures that is especially stunning on close textual scrutiny. It is a politics of sex rather than geography that guides us to Eshu in lieu of Oshun. The “fertility god” is one of the few figures who can be classified as a “goddess” in certain, non-African logics of gender which conventionally define “gods” as male or masculine. It may even seem mandatory that fertility figures be figured as “female” as opposed to “male” in a culture of interpretation where sex socialization is rigid; where erotic life is often devalued; and where men are ranked above women as both human and divine beings. But this is not at all the case when it comes to orisha: Oshun is often falsely gendered “female” by academic scholars, while Eshu is mistakenly gendered “male.” For this “trickster-god” in particular, a statue with an enormous, erect phallus is showcased to the routine exclusion of any other representation. Yet Cooper quotes Gates on Yoruba arts: “Esu is figured as paired as male and female statues, which his/ her devotees carry while dancing, or as one bisexual [sic] figure. Often she [sic] holds her breasts in the female figures. Even [sic] Esu’s sexuality is indeterminate, if unsatiable” (Gates in Cooper 1995, 148). And Gates himself quotes Ayodele



MIC “GOD/DESS” . . . ESHU-ELEGBA


Figure 3.1 Statue of Exu out of Brazil (from Author’s Collection)—Photo by Jonelle Davies


61

Ogundipe: “Although his [sic] masculinity is depicted as visually and graphically overwhelming, his [sic] equally expressive femininity renders his [sic] enormous sexuality ambiguous, contrary, and genderless” (Ogundipe in Gates 1988, 29). Here is the issue at hand. It would be wrong to suggest that the spirit of Oshun or Anansi is confined to “Caribbeans,” therefore, and that the spirit of Eshu or The Signifying Monkey is restricted to “African-Americans” or “U.S. Blacks,” however kin. Indeed, Cooper does no such thing in Noises in the Blood. Eshu and Legba appear to be most appropriate for lyrically engaging Lil’ Kim thanks in large part to their aggressive, articulate refusal of Western bourgeois concepts of sex, gender and sexuality, whether they are depicted as “gods” or “goddesses” or African divinities free of any such earthly sexual schisms. A U.S. businessman, publisher, and professed “high priest” convert, Philip John Neimark describes Eshu in The Way of the Orisa: Empowering Your Life through the Ancient African Religion of Ifa (1993). His introductory remarks read like an explicit introduction of Hip-Hop’s “Queen Bitch.” “Children of Esu will enjoy . . . sex, having fun, large groups of people and parties, travel, good food, wine or liquor, cigarettes or cigars, dancing, brightly colored clothes, costumes, many friendships within their own gender, communications, movies and theater.” Furthermore, he continues: “You will have trouble . . . functioning in confined environments, being monogamous, taking orders, working within a large corporate atmosphere, being on time, being structured, dieting, quitting smoking or drinking, sticking to a formal exercise program, being bored.” And, finally, Neimark concludes: “You will have a highly developed sense of . . . right and wrong, humor, practical jokes, getting even [and] sensuality” (Neimark 1993, 72). For those literate and even those illiterate in Lil’ Kim’s ample, audio verse, this orisha profile fits her lyrical persona to perfection. What’s more, critics be damned, emcees have self-identified as “gods” and “goddesses” for a quite some time. When Nas entitles an album God’s Son (2002), he punctuates an established tradition, as does Jay-Z when he invokes himself as “Jay-Hova” or “The God MC.” Rhyme-wise, Brand Nubian and Big Daddy Kane put a “Five Percenter,” Islamic spin on it along with a slew of others such as Wu-Tang Clan; Ice Cube and Da Lench Mob; Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth; Gang Starr; Busta Rhymes; Poor Righteous Teachers; Digable Planets; and Rakim whom Nas would salute on his double-album, Street Disciple (2004). In a kind of Gospel mix, KRS-One dropped Spiritual Minded (2002) over a decade after Criminal Minded (1987) by Boogie Down Productions. Once, it’s been said, he flatly declared The Notorious K.I.M. a “goddess,” when asked to pass judgment on her sex-radical spitfire, post-Hard Core (1996). There was another artist whose mic-name was Mother Superior. Examples of divine identification in Hip-Hop go on and on, like Erykah Badu and her own word play with Muslim and Fon symbology. While Mos Def of Black Star and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest preach Sunni Islam, or “al-Islam,” Lauryn Hill and Jeru The Damaja have dabbled in “Five Percent” principles and doubled it with Rastafarianism, not to mention other Black spiritualities, very eclectically (or “ecumenically”). Emcees may indeed represent “profanity” embodied in the minds of the racist societies that oppress and malign them. But they represent themselves in a highly spiritual





Figure 3.2 Painting of Exu out of Brazil (from Author’s Collection)—Photo by Jonelle Davies

fashion, if religion (“proper”) is equated with the institutionalized religions of white European imperialism. The Black tradition of Hip-Hop typically expresses itself as a tradition of “gods” and “goddesses,” or a Holy Ghost-having tradition of worshiping beyond the standard denominations of the West. Hence, Bambaataa can sign off Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light, like an Egyptian, as “THE AMEN RA OF UNIVERSAL HIP HOP CULTURE THIS MILLENNIUM.” The former Common Sense says on Electric Circus (2002) that we’ve gone “from Niggas to Gods” and “from Bitches to Earths,” combining in one blow a reference 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


62

63

to the author Akil’s popular book of essays, From Niggas to Gods (1993), and the Islamic “Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths.” But this theology is far too restrictive for Lil’ Kim. Before her debut album, on “Realms of Junior M.A.F.I.A., Part 2,” she rapped as a “terrifying goddess” who “hits dick the hardest” (Mega Man, 1996). On “Good Times,” a recording for The Notorious K.I.M. (2000), she would confirm her “love goddess” status; “Jehovah” is her witness, lyrically, sanctifying her “hard music,” “sassy ass,” and “nasty mouth” with no problem whatsoever. Not one to be confined to fertility, whether spiritually or sexually, she offers another unreleased track from the same period, “Makes No Sense,” which finds her in the middle of a Reggae club laughing at how her “niggaz” they surround her like the Pope: Papal authority and “love goddess” share one and the same body. Later, she covered Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonite” for Urban Renewal (2001), Africanizing the whole arrangement: “Hotter than toast, runnin tha coast / Makin niggaz catch tha Holy Ghost.” “God” blessed her, she contends, as she gives this Holy Ghost herself as only “God” (or a “god”) could do. It is a much older song, though, which may confront the sexual politics of religious repression most. On what might be the first time that she proclaims herself “Queen Bitch” on record, “Time to Shine” begins by shouting familiar greetings, “Peace to all the Earths” and “Peace to all the Gods” (Don’t Be a Menace . . .: The Soundtrack, 1996). Since “men” are deemed “Gods” and “women” are deemed “Earths” by Five Percenter faithfuls, precisely in this order, her pre-rap speech here reverses an order of male privilege before her first verse ever begins. When she does start to rap, she is boastfully anointed: “Blessed by the God[s], so I be tha Earth[’]s / Queen B(ee)-Bitch . . .” She is not mere “matter” to someone else’s “spirit,” or a sexless mother to some religious father. “Mother Earth” is “a living entity,” indeed. The planet becomes her anti-sexist domain, and any agent of male domination in this world is met with her sacred powers at the very least up until they die. Notably, there will be no contradiction in terms between “Gods” and “Earths” or “Bitches” (not to mention “Niggaz”) in Lil’ Kim, from her earliest days in rhyme. Nor is there any false (Euro-Christian or Arab-Islamic) dichotomy or opposition between sexuality and spiritual divinity: “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” presents herself as a divine messenger with a microphone. By contrast, a very sectarian Adisa Banjoko scolds Five Percenters for not giving up certain pleasures of the flesh (e.g., “sex, drugs and alcohol”); and, in the process, he holds up standard stereotypes of “violence and misogyny” in Hip-Hop for Hisham Aidi’s “Hip Hop of the Gods” (2001), as if these plagues could be specific to one religion, faction, culture or genre of music. He is outright embarrassed by Black folk who make “Mothership” connections cosmologically. The critic prefers “al-Islam” as a faith, if “Gods and Earths” in rhyme. In any case, by the time Kool Moe Dee writes There’s a God on the Mic: The True 50 Greatest MCs (2003), the status of lyricists as “gods” is so taken for granted in Hip-Hop that no overt discussion of religion is required. The ex-emcee seems to shock himself with the respect he gives The Notorious K.I.M. (under the rubric “Femme Fatale”): “Lil’ Kim is rhyming her ASS OFF! She is a female wordsmith. You can rarely ever predict where she’s going to go with a rhyme, from line to line. She is also a lyrically visual emcee” (52). If his rankings are questionable, his





analysis is perceptive. Her visual flair extends beyond the writing of rhymes, as an interview for Blender magazine’s illustrates. She was asked to explain an elaborate, extempo drawing of hers reproduced for “Who Does Lil’ Kim Think She Is?” or its monthly “Last Page” (Tannenbaum 2003). The artist’s response unsettles the journalist and more than a few of his assumptions about race, class, sex, intellect, and art: “It’s a queen angel, the highest height of an angel. God sent me into this world on a mission: to touch people with my voice, my presence” (156). This is Eshu’s explanation. Her “Queen Angel” visual art extends her lyrical art and is physically situated in the area where the orisha’s notorious “phallus” would be projected in Judson Baker’s photograph. A remarkably exact sketch of the continent of Africa is also placed at the very center of the world of her drawing in direct contrast to most prevailing schools of European-centered cartography. Outside Hip-Hop, no such talent or knowledge is expected from “rappers,” sexually explicit female rappers least of all. Yet Lil’ Kim had already declared herself (on “This Is Who I Am”): “Dedicated like Muslims makin Salat / People steady try to make me into sumpin I’m not.” Impressively, Common would come to identify the possibility of female divinity via his daughter on the introductory and title track of Be (2005): “And realize I’ma learn through her / The Messiah might even return through her.” More impressively, Lil’ Kim insists her message is no less divine than Islam, ultra-erotic as she is as a devout Hip-Hop emcee; and this is no contradiction in her entirely Eshuesque universe. Beyond Sex and Scholarship: Toward Hip-Hop Exu—The Anthems Elégbá scraped and lived in the streets . . . Elégbá is that innate drive to survive and [s/he] symbolizes those characters who live on the edge of that survival, those individuals who rely on their cunning and luck to secure their daily meals. (G. Edwards and J. Mason, Black Gods: Òrìsà Studies in the New World [1985])

Lil’ Kim is obviously not just any lyricist; and Eshu or Legba is not just any “god/dess.” Ogundipe describes this deity as “the most often misrepresented, most often misconstrued, and most often misinterpreted” in her as-yet-unpublished, two-volume Indiana University Ph.D. dissertation, Esu Elegbara, The Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty: A Study in Yoruba Mythology (1978). The figure is defined by “intelligence, sexuality, power, unpredictability” and, most of all, “divinity” (Vol. 1, 229). She concludes that Eshu is “a link between man [sic] and the spiritual world” (231), “the messenger of the gods, the mediator between God and man [sic], between order and chaos, sin [sic] and punishment, life and death, fate and accident, certainty and uncertainty” (237). When the Fon neighbors of the Yoruba transform this figure into Legba, in Dahomey, the “divine linguist” terminology may be made more explicit. So may Esu-Elegbara’s abundant sexuality or eroticism according to most scholarship on orisha. But misrepresentation, misconstrual, and misinterpretation make generalization tricky indeed: People steady try to make Eshu-Elegba into sumpin “s/he” not!



64

65

While Cooper’s Noises in the Blood stresses wholeness, sexually as well as spiritually, this holism is repeatedly sacrificed by academic writing on African worldviews and divinities. Ogundipe takes “ethnographers, art historians, and anthropologists” (228) to task as she aims to clear the intellectual slate by asking three questions: “Is Esu a Phallic Deity?” “Is Esu the Devil?” “Is Esu a Trickster?” Duly, she answers in the negative on all accounts. She is disturbed by tricksters, seeing them as “numbskulls,” even though they can be “beneficent culture heroes” and “clever deceivers” (191). She sees through the demonization of orisha by white Christian missionaries who replaced “Devil” with “Esu” in Yoruba-language translations of their Bible (177). For as Aimé Césaire puts it in the Americas, “the god of the vainquished became the devil of the vainquishers” (Césaire 1992, 367–368). Ogundipe also recalls artful representations of Eshu “as a man, sometimes as woman, standing, seated or crouched on his [sic] knees,” typically wearing “an elaborately long hairstyle,” although “as a female, the female breasts are prominent” (158). It is a routine repression of Eshu’s figuration as “a woman holding her breasts” (163) that enables Eshu’s misrepresentation, misconstrual and misinterpretation as conventionally “phallic,” or “male.” Ogundipe is sharp as she mocks European talk about “phallic symbols,” which read “phallic interpretations into anything with more length than girth” (164). For her, Eshu’s unconventionally long hair refutes this misguided masculinization, since it functions as a sign of “high birth, status and honor.” It signals birth into a “distinguished or royal household” (171). However, this explanation participates in masculinization itself. Eshu’s styling may function in this way for “male” figures, around whom Ogundipe’s thesis will continue to pivot, but not necessarily in the same way for “female” figurations. She proceeds to generalize in a manner that eliminates these last figures from consideration: Eshu is said to “exude male [sic] sexuality” (230), for example, and to be “the father [sic] of all sacrifice” (235), “no matter how many women he [sic] seduces” (236). This slippage works to undermine her more abstract recognition that Esu-Elegbara is “certainly not restricted to human [sic] distinctions of gender or sex” (172). Of course, “ethnographers, art historians and anthropologists” recognize even less regarding these critical matters of embodiment. Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí explores this exact problem in “Masculinizing the Orisas: Sex Bias in Godly Places,” a section of her “Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and Colonialism” chapter from The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997). There is documented a “Christianization of Yoruba religion” (140) which is simultaneously a “masculinization of Yoruba religion” (141), thanks to the undeniable patriarchy of the Bible and Victorian England (139). Oyewumi argues that the number of orisha ever expands; not all orisha are ever even affiliated with any sex or gender; and some orisha nonetheless “were recognized as male in some localities and female in others” (140) by various populations or interpretations at particular points in time. Still, European colonialism simplifies everything with the logic of male gender domination. If and when “female” orisha are acknowledged, they are acknowledged as “weaker” or “less powerful” than “male” orisha. The ultimate Olodumare (or Olorun) is





Figure 3.3 “The Compound Esu” by Jamaul Smith, Art by Any Means (2008)


67

converted into “Our Father in Heaven.” And “ ‘our ancestors’ become ‘our forefathers’ ” (141). The ramifications of religious colonization in Africa remain to be thought, according to Oyêwùmí, if she never questions the Western concept of “religion” itself (which is a term for an entirely separate sphere of social existence) in the same way that she rejects the categories of “gender” (while somehow preserving those of “anatomical sex,” and heterosexuality). How revealing that it is Eshu, most of all, who raises all these questions, insistently, at any rate. L. H. Stallings would drive this point home in some of her innovative research on Black folklore, such as “Goin’ Trickster: Using the African-American Oral Tradition to Rid America of Traditional Language Taboos” (2001). Reading Ogundipe in The Signifying Monkey, Gates would supplement his description of Eshu as “male” and “female,” “bisexual” and sexually “indeterminate,” with a brief acknowledgment: “Each time I have used the masculine pronoun for the referent Esu, then, I could just have properly used the feminine.” The orisha is “neither male nor female,” but “whole” (Gates 1988, 29). Yet conventional writings on Eshu subscribe to conventional Western ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality and so assimilate orisha to alien and oppressive forms of being. Contrary to the spirit of Eshu, Gates would not disrupt the “masculine” with the “feminine,” linguistically, any more than Neimark’s The Way of the Orisa which quickly notes that “actual Esu shrines in Nigeria consist of both male and female” statues (Neimark 1993, 78). He then goes on to entrench the third-person singular masculine pronoun (“he”) as if it were synonymous with “humanity” and, crucially, African divinity as well. Regardless, Eshu’s erotic identity is neither “ambiguous” nor “contrary,” nor “indeterminate.” Nor is it “bisexual” or “heterosexual” or “homosexual,” neither “male” nor “female” in truth. It simply does not obey the logic of current, colonial classifications that were spread across the globe by Europe in the culture and history of empire. This colossal failure of scholarship is ironic given a gargantuan insight from Stallings of “Goin’ Trickster,” for she observes how sexual holism is cast as a “sacred gift” from “gods” and “goddesses” in African cultures stretching beyond Fon and Yoruba cultures to the Dogon and others.3 If it is nearly “sacrilegious” for academics to challenge these supposedly “secular” categories of gender and sexuality, or sexual domination in and by North America and the West, it is no problem at all for Lil’ Kim’s articulation of Hip-Hop (“just a blessing from Creator,” again, in the words of Zulu King Bambaataa). A picture of Eshu-Elegba literally emerges from her rhymes, potent eroticism intact. What other figure (lyrical “god” or “goddess”) could compose an album, The Notorious K.I.M., which includes a record about her menstruation and a record entitled “Suck My D**k”? “Aunt Dot” is a hard-core chronicle composed in three voices to capture how dangerous it is to “fuck with” “Queen B(ee)” on any given day, especially at “that time of the month.” “Suck My D**k” is, again, an answer-record, of sorts, talking back to sexist “cat-calls,” recycling three “classic” rap songs at once, even renaming itself in the process “Suck My Pussy” and “Suck My Clit” (or “Suck My Click”). This particular pairing of songs speaks volumes. The divine lyricist is as unrestricted as it gets when it comes to sex and gender, whether or not physical sexuality even comes into play. As a





very visual emcee, she consistently brings to mind the “compound morphology” remarked by Juana and Deoscoredes dos Santos in Esu Bara Laroye (quoted in Gates 1988, 29). She embodies the “complete” Eshu4 in Hip-Hop, without gender confinement or male standardization; and she does so through a grassroots “Ebonics” that makes little use of quasi-generic terms like “male” and “female,” while making almost no use at all of English middle-class terms like “man” and “woman.” This specific orisha identification is encouraged by a number of similarities shared by Eshu-Elegba and, arguably, any given Hip-Hop lyricist. Both figures are identified as god(des)s(es) or demi-god(des)s(es), African in origin, outlook and orientation. Both are identified as trickster figures as well, whatever value tricksterism holds for friends and enemies of the art. Both are identified as divine messengers who have an all-embracing relationship to language or communication. Both are identified as powerful and misunderstood manipulators of words, indeed, “kings” and “queens” of double-entendre or multiplemeanings. Both are endlessly demonized as “devils” by white racist empires of Christian colonialism. Both represent some brand of poetic justice, standing outside status-quo, establishment understandings of “morality,” which is to say, unexamined notions of “good” and “bad” (or “good” versus “evil”). Both are charged with wearing “contradictions” like badges of honor in societies structured by dichotomies or binary oppositions instead of holism. Both have been identified as “hyper-sexual,” or ultra-erotic, frequently in phallus-fetishizing fashion. Both clutch their crotches or genitalia (and other erogenous zones), graphically, when cast in human, pictorial forms. Both walk this universe in a uniquely identifiable way: Eshu-Elegba is said to have a pronounced limp because the orisha has only one foot in this world of mere mortals, while keeping one foot in the world of the beyond (Gates 1988, 6); “Lebert Joseph” in Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow (1983) is a fine illustration of such Legba symbolism; and so are rapping emcees for whom this limp would be termed a “pimp” in the “New World” of Africans in the Americas, a fact which brings this extensive genealogy back to the politics of sexuality. If all lyricists of Hip-Hop fit the description of Eshu-Elegba, a lyricist of Ifa among the Yoruba and Fa among the Fon on the continent, Lil’ Kim takes this identification to the next level with her radical rewriting of sex, gender and all kinds of eroticism in the African diaspora.5 She began by creating amazing Eshu anthems together with Biggie Smalls in Junior M.A.F.I.A. Their words are made flesh via Hip-Hop “call and response” on Conspiracy (1995). They invoke an orisha of “opportunity,” in effect, inviting their audience to assume Eshu postures too explicit for most anti-rap tastes. The chorus of “Get Money” is classic: Big Poppa chants “Fuck bitchez” and then the title of this song; Big Momma chants “Fuck niggaz” and then the title of this song in turn. Both chant three times and create a space for the crowd to echo. After he passes on, she will preface this part of their song in concert by announcing, “This is tradition.” The meaning is typically double. We’re told to get pleasure, sexually, and to get our economic “hustle” on as well by forgetting about sexing (even if many or most hustles are often sexual in nature). This is all writ large in



68

69

the same two words. The message is complex: “Get that money it takes to survive,” regardless of gender, on the streets of Black deprivation. As a dynamic duo, Lil’ Kim and The Notorious B.I.G. don’t compose “romantic duets.” They pair up as “alter egos” instead, always crafting a scenario that is never sexually one-sided or one-dimensionally split. They signify the same fundamental essence stored in different physical forms, much like the statues representing Eshu as a pair rather than an individual embodied. Thus, it is “Players Anthem” that compels its audience to take Hip-Hop stances à la Eshu-Elegba; and its chorus is no less legendary: “Niggaz, grab ya dicks if you love Hip-Hop / Bitchez, rub ya titties if you love Big Poppa.” While this voice belongs to Biggie, whose words have us “open” before a vocal sample from Slick Rick unfolds, Lil’ Kim’s verse is sustained in the very same Eshuesque vein. This is the joy of Hip-Hop in the flesh. First, she rejects the idea of her ever making a confession and, still, metaphorically confesses that the “lyrical” is both who she is and what she does. She orders the chorus’s “bitchez” to squeeze their “tits” and its “niggaz” to grab their genitals, as she makes a reference to proteins and minerals in an allusion to the physical-biological material of human sexual climax. She excludes all “subliminals” in her bold and direct speech-act; and this is what will have “Big Willies” and “criminals” as “open” as off of her words as the words of The Notorious B.I.G. in Junior M.A.F.I.A. At the end of her verse, she has female fans lining up to hear her and screaming for an encore, before she reiterates the chorus or its crotch-grabbing yet again in closing. For whoever you are (whether “male” or “female”), “niggaz” should grab their “dicks” and “bitchez” should grab their “tits” if Hip-Hop inspires love in you at all; and when so inspired, we all look like Eshu-Elegba in our excitement, wide “open” off these erotic words of rhyme. The whole rap world looks like a sign of totality—spirited, sexual and spoken—given this orisha-ridden Hip-Hop of “Players Anthem”—which samples or interpolates a song by New Birth, a Funk and R&B group whose name signifies “New Life, Second Wind, Re-Genesis, Renewal, Renaissance, Resurrection, Redemption.”6 How Lil’ Kim begins her piece on “Get Money,” after she and B.I.G. joke in the background about being “Aphrodite” and “Jesus,” respectively, it makes these connections more interesting. Classically, she orders “niggaz” to grab a seat and grab their “dicks” while she and her Hip-Hop gets “deep,” again, “deepa than a pussy of a bitch six feet / Stiff dicks feel sweet in this little petite.” What depth means here is doubly deep: The Notorious K.I.M. can hype “niggaz” up because her verse is deep, or profound; and this depth is also figured as like a “big pussy” that would actually match the big penis or “phallus” pictured on Eshu almost exclusively when Eshu is visually depicted in many books of academic scholarship. We have heard many a tale about such things in Black folklore and Hip-Hop. Field Mob samples a piece of it on “K.A.N.” (“The game like a skinny girl pussy: deep / So deep, you could park a limousine in it”) or From the Roota to tha Toota (2002). The Muslim Common had rapped similarly on “Heat” (“Fake niggaz drown tha deepa tha verse gits / deep as a skinny girl’s cunt, I surface wit a purpose”) from Like Water for Chocolate (2000). Now, “human genitalia” are said to be structurally inverse,





or shaped as if inside/out across gender, or anatomical sex, and therefore proportionate in size. So if a figure that is supposed to be “male” could boast of a six-foot “penis,” then there must be somewhere, someplace, a “female” with a six-foot vagina, or “pussy,” for which that exaggerated phallus would pose no real problem. This image of a non-penile Eshu still does not include those images that cannot be classified as “male” or “female.” However, this is but one metaphor employed by Lil’ Kim in the course of her career. One might even say it’s about one half of her metaphor, overall, except sexuality for her is never strictly genital (or “below the belt”); she is notorious for talking “big” about her body, her whole body. It was instructive then when her “post-pasty” appearance on MTV’s Video Music Awards would place her on stage with a Sopranos “Goodfella” character named “Big Pussy” in 2000. On La Bella Mafia’s “The Beehive,” she took this idea further as she assailed her would-be competition lyrically: “You bitchez ain’t been through shit, ya jus minors / Whut chu know about stuffin half a bricks in ya vagina?” A kilo brick is basically a cinderblock of cocaine. The figurative or metaphorical is made to appear literal, once more, Eshu-style, hyperbolic “pussy” and hyperbolic penis going hand in hand with the mic of her Hip-Hop. On “Hold It Now,” a track from the same album with an old-school sound and a most appropriate title, New York’s Hip-Hop “Queen” pays tribute to New York’s Hip-Hop “King,” again, resurrecting them as a pair of alter egos making music and music history, erotically: “Now all my bitchez rub ya titties if ya love Biggie / And all my niggaz grab ya dicks if you feelin a bitch.” This is “Players Anthem” revisited. Tellingly, she speaks more to “niggaz” and “bitchez” both than her historic counterpart. Her individual verse had incorporated Biggie’s complimentary call, reversing the order of instruction (and importance) as usual. She yells “squeeze ya tits” to “bitchez,” first, and then “grab ya genitals” to “niggaz,” afterwards. Virtually always, Lil’ Kim’s voice spans “niggaz” and “bitchez,” en masse, as a whole, even as she sends a special message to her sisters in struggles against sexual domination. This undeniable appeal would allow The Notorious K.I.M. to brag, on “Suck My D**k,” almost riotously: “Kim got em in tha zone beatin they dicks / even got some of these straight chicks rubbin they tits.” On La Bella Mafia’s “Magic Stick” featuring 50 Cent, she can be heard boasting of having a magic “stick,” a magic “box,” and a magic “clit” (or “click”) as a matter of fact, in the sexually gender-defiant tradition that is hers. No surprise, she also had “a whole bunch a dykes” on “Ninja bikes” on “No Matter What They Say,” in a verse recorded originally for a collaboration with drag queen/performer RuPaul. Biggie’s erotic was never this daring, at least on his official, major-label releases.7 Neither “masculinity” nor “femininity,” nor “heterosexuality” nor “homosexuality” can box Lil’ Kim in. She works to free herself and us from the confines of these concepts, time after time, rhyme after rhyme. In such respects, she goes beyond Biggie and the rest of her crew in Junior M.A.F.I.A., and even more so when she would bless the mic solo. Her writing takes all of Hip-Hop’s orisha ties to new heights, promoting a visibly revolutionary erotic which academic writing on Esu-Elegbara has repressed, rather religiously.



70


71

Call It Legba Music: Rhyming at the Crossroads of Erotic Transformation Run back down to the gravel path, past the julie mango tree and back to the place where the road splits like your legs throwing away a child.

To focus on the Fon figure of Legba in particular is to face this figure’s further mischaracterization, historically, along rigid lines of sex and gender in the West. Ogundipe would make a standard introduction: In the West African kingdom of Dahomey, Esu is known as “Legba” . . . the youngest son [sic] of Mawu-Lisa, the supreme deity . . . Mawu-Lisa’s pleasure is revealed in writing through Fa, the god of divination, and interpreted by Legba . . . Since Legba is the only one who speaks Mawu-Lisa’s language, any messages to MawuLisa must be channeled through him [sic]. (Ogundipe, Vol. 1, 219)

Almost always, Legba stands accused of “gross” sexuality and phallicism by academic scholarship. This doctrine is scorned by Ogundipe for Eshu, but seems to be accepted by her for Eshu’s Fon equivalent; and it leads to a very narrow, if conventional reduction of Legba (sexuality and phallicism) to one type of social body, “men,” as all the masculine nouns and pronouns reveal in English and other nonAfrican languages. Yet Melville Herskovits supplies this classic account of Legba embodiment that should trouble this portrait a great deal: When she reached the drummer, she put her hand under the fringe of raffia about her waist . . . and brought out a wooden phallus . . . This was apparently attached in such a way that it would remain in the horizontal position of the erect male organ, and as she danced . . . toward a large tree where many women were sitting watching the ceremony . . . they ran from her, shrieking with laughter. (Herskovits 1958, Vol. 2, 125–126)

This is Legba as “phallic” yet manifest in a “female” human physical form; and it may function as the most common appearance of Legba in ritual for many accounts. These, indeed, most scholars of orisha are scarcely the world’s greatest thinkers of sexuality, for most are trained instead to keep their status-quo categories of sex and gender intact. It is important to recognize here that “phallic” does not necessarily mean “male,” and even when it does refer to “men” or “males,” it does not only refer to “penises,” exclusively. Legba is spirit, anyway and anyhow, immaterial and divine, not subject to the material confines of “maleness” (or “femaleness”) or “human anatomy” as it is defined by Europe specifically. Ogundipe critiques Herskovits for his lasting description of Legba as an essential trickster, even if this critique emerges from an anti-trickster bias in her own work (which is more alarmed by the identification of orisha with tricksters than with Christian devils). However, if there is a “priestly Legbano



(Marcia Douglas, Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells [2005])


class” who simulates sexual activity during public festivals, or “periods of licensed release from the repression and anxiety of society’s stringent norms” (Ogundipe, Vol. 1, 221); and if Legba’s nickname is indeed Aflakete, or “I have tricked you,” then the relationship between spiritual divinity and tricksterism must be rethought in relationship to sex or gender and sexuality: Herskovits and a host of other “ethnographers, art historians and anthropologists” can and should be criticized on more fertile grounds; and a new characterization of these relationships must call to mind cultural practices in the African diaspora, for instance, such as Caribbean or Brazillian Carnival and Lil’ Kim’s “QUEEN B@#$H” Hip-Hop.8 That Legba or Eshu is today often referenced through The Signifying Monkey by Gates is troublingly ironic. Culturally conservative in terms of race and class, his text was thoroughly confused about Esu-Elegbara’s presence among “AfricanAmericans,” beyond South America and the Caribbean. At the outset, the author dismissed the myth that Africans could be “de-Africanized” by the Maafa, or the “Middle Passage,” “slave ship” experience. He found it “odd” as well as “a fiction” (Gates 1988, 4). This “fiction” was not so much “odd” as central, intellectual political propaganda for past and present white domination in the Americas, especially North America, where Blacks are encouraged to identify as “slaves” or “American Negroes” as opposed to Africans. Nevertheless, Gates would state at the end of “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signfyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning,” his second chapter: “The degree to which the figure of the Monkey is anthropologically related to the figure of the Pan-African trickster, Esu-Elegbara, shall most probably remain a matter of speculation” (88). The myth of de-Africanization is reasserted along with the unquestioned authority of European anthropologists whom Ogundipe would interrogate at every turn as “handmaidens of imperialism.” Despite this rhetoric of his own, Gates will go back and forth on Eshu for the remainder of his work. At one point, the orisha and the Black folklore character (“The [Signifying] Monkey”) are seen as synonymous, since in Yoruba accounts they are constant partners in narrative (if not rhyme). At another point, they are severed for no apparent reason, apart from anthropological mythology concerning Blacks or Africans outside of Africa, again, especially in North America. The “Monkey” is once listed as “one of Esu’s bynames” (17); and later, once in the Americas, Eshu is later locked out of U.S. settler-colonial-national space: “It is as if Esu’s friend, the Monkey, left his side at Havana [Cuba] and swam to New Orleans” (20). “The Signifying Monkey” in Gates suddenly becomes just “a trace of Esu, the sole survivor of a disrupted partnership” (20). The name of the animal is converted from the “byname” of the orisha’s own self to the name of the “son” of the orisha (as “father”) until, finally, it is converted into the name of the mere “cousin” or “kinsman” of an evidently more “authentic” Eshu existing somewhere else. This not only contradicts the thrust of much of the text, it contradicts the spirit of Esu-Elegbara as an agent of transformation itself: Esu-Elegbara is, after all, transformation’s divine sign or symbol. Because of Cuban and Brazillian sources, Gates must concede: “Esu’s presence only has proliferated in the New World . . . If anything, Esu, upon his [sic] emergence from the Middle Passage, assumed more functions and even a



72

73

fuller presence within black cosmogonies than he [sic] did in Africa.” But this concession is met with geopolitical containment, guarded intellectual borders. The orisha is denied U.S. entry in theory, at the level of criticism, despite already dwelling among folk who are kin. As a book, therefore, The Signifying Monkey also reads like “odd” and “fictitious” propaganda, given Esu-Elegbara’s famous (or infamous) disregard for such plantation states: “Roger Bastide, for example, notes that in Brazil, in enslavement, black followers of Esu represented him as the liberator of the slaves and as enemy of the enslavers, ‘killing, poisoning, and driving mad their oppressors’ ” (31).9 Writing from Trinidad, for the Pan-African world, Eintou Pearl Springer is faithful to this image of Eshu-Elegba as liberator in a poem collected in Loving the Skin I’m In, “Attibon Legba” (2005). She calls on Legba or Elegba (and Ogun) as a fighting spirit, one who should teach us how to fight again, beyond “official slavery” now during neo-slavery and neo-colonialism. She asks if Legba has already come back to us many times in the form of Black revolutionaries who have been slain or passed on, such as Maurice Bishop, Walter Rodney, Yaa Asantewa, Queen Nzingha, Bob Marley, Harriet Tubman, Frantz Fanon, Nanny of the Maroons and Marcus Garvey, not to mention Che Guevara. “They have gone / Legba, Elegba / Eshu, Ogun / Now is me and you” (Springer 2005, 80). How radically does this re-signify Gates’s The Signifying Monkey and its gleeful reception in Western academia? A continued scholarly emphasis on Eshu over Legba is significant in this context insofar as it enables an eclipse of Robert Johnson and his “Crossroads Blues” (1936) in North America.10 There is not just speculation but ample folklore about this artist’s “selling his soul,” so the story goes, in exchange for his amazing guitar-playing abilities in the Mississippi Delta. Recently, Angela Y. Davis recalls him in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1999): “Among the many myths surrounding the legendary Delta blues man Robert Johnson is one that has him signing away his soul to Legba, or Elegua, the Yoruba [sic] orisha of the crossroads—represented in the black southern vernacular as a Devil-like figure” (123). There is much confusion about who exactly identifies Legba with whom. The song “Crossroads Blues” actually calls on his “Lord,” not Christianity’s “Devil” (“I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees / Ask the Lord, ‘Have mercy: Save poor Bob if you please’ ”—Johnson’s The Complete Recordings, 1990). Hoodoo saturates Blues lyricism in general and Johnson’s Blues lyricism in particular. The figure that colonial missionaries would call “Devil” is in fact a figure that so many Blacks or Africans would represent as “God,” in translation, or a divine being maligned by colonialism in the interest of its own cultural, economic and religious domination. This is why Black folklore has shown equal respect for what white society would dub “God” and “Devil,” and perhaps why renowned novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (an essay now collected in The Sanctified Church by its editor, Toni Cade Bambara): “The Negro is not a Christian, really” (Hurston 1981, 56). There is no concept of “The Devil” or even a “Devil-like” figure in Yoruba or Fon spirituality. The Black folk tradition knows this much and more.





Whether or not Johnson himself claimed to have “sold his soul” to anyone or anything may be beside the point. His preoccupation with crossroads is musical as well as spiritual. He is not only the subject of Legba legends crafted by his community, “true” or “false,” he is very much the author of lyrics that confirm or communicate with them via Legba or Hoodoo. Hence, if there has been an artificial split between “God’s music” and “Devil music” among those colonized by the West, then “Blues music” should be reclassified as “Legba music” when we reject the artificial, Western division between “sacred” and “secular” realms or values. This shift is made necessary by Johnson’s central place in the history of the Blues as well as Amiri Baraka’s naming of Black folk as “Blues people” in Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963). Shot dead in a Harlem subway station by a New York City Transit Authority cop in 1968, when he was merely thirty-three years old, Henry Dumas wrote short stories and poetry as part of the Black Arts Movement, ultimately studying under Sun Ra and influencing many Jazz musicians himself. His texts are no less rife with Hoodoo and such. There is “Fon” in Ark of Bones and Other Stories (1970), for example. “Fon” is not only the name of the people of Legba located in that place often centrally identified with the deportation of Africans for enslavement in the Americas, it is also short for a “bad,” flesh-and-blood trickster by the name of “Alfonso” in this short story of spiritual resilience and resistance. He and a community of Black ghosts (spiritual Maroons?) in some town of the U.S. South take down a small mob of white would-be lynchers. The short stories that would become Ark of Bones after Dumas’s murder come to music in a sense when Sun Ra and Dumas collaborated on The Ark and the Anhk (2001) in 1966. The Blues sound and sound-systems of Dancehall-Reggae are said to give birth to Hip-Hop if Rapso in Trinidad and Tobago is far too often ignored, historically. All provide pathways for the rebirth of orisha in the Americas, as Cooper’s Sound Clash and Noises in the Blood maintain. John Rickford and Russell Rickford’s Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (2000) supports this connection when they reconnect Blues tunes and “The Signifying Monkey” or the “toasts” of Black folklore. These “toasts” are “long oral epic poems” which display “the continuum of oral dexterity that blurs the distinction between black speech and song” (82, 84): Robert “Legba” Johnson’s music and they combine to make the boasts of Hip-Hop, according to Rickford and Rickford. Their example is a “hoochie coochie man” and a “Blaxploitation” film. For them, a male emcee is “as much a son of Rudy Ray Moore as he is of Muddy Waters . . . the incarnation of a Dolemite chant, or the ranting of a ‘Mannish Boy” in the 1980s” (85). Hip-Hop would toast Dolemite itself in one of its own film texts, House Party (1990), which has Rudy Ray Moore blaring in the background; and Ol’ Dirty Bastard sampled visual clips from the film in his music video for “Got Your Money” (Nigga Please, 1999). Nas would toast the Blues with his Jazz artist father on “Bridging the Gap,” from Street Disciple (2004), his double-album follow-up to God’s Son. Spoken Soul may show an ignorance of Dancehall-Reggae and other genres of music and poetry in the African diaspora. But Rickford and Rickford help expose U.S. society’s continued exploitation of Black language as a vehicle of entertainment even as it vehemently denies that Black language is a vehicle of intelligence in white



74

75

racist fashion. Unlike Gates and a range of other academic critics, Rickford and Rickford are willing and able to contemplate “hip-hop’s ties to the blues, oldschool toasts, or jazz, or . . . as folklore transformed” (87). Sharply, they conclude: “It a tribute to the resilience of a people who resisted annihilation for centuries, then came out swinging, singing and bebopping and now hip-hopping, that they are able, with each generation, to reinvent themselves artfully using the same essential mortar” (88). The thesis of Spoken Soul is confirmed by Nas on Street Disciple when he shouts out the “old-school” and the “new-school” and insists (à la Doug E. Fresh) that no school rules, making Blues and Yoruba one again as a Hip-Hop emcee at work with Olu Dara, his trumpeting father. A cross-generational collaboration, “Bridging the Gap” begins with a refrain that has the rapper’s elder saying the same words to him that Muddy Water’s mother spoke on “Mannish Boy” (1955): “He’ll be the greatest man alive.” That song’s crazy horn and bass-line help mix this track. Olu Dara remembers running wild from Natchez, Mississippi to New York City where his first child is born. Three times he will recycle the “hoochie coochie man’s” line, throughout and at the end, until he sends a “Rest in Peace” to Ray Charles. When Nas joins in for his piece, he declares this song “a history of music on one track,” covering Blues, Gospel, Jazz and Hip-Hop’s rap. The emcee says he’s been voicing his Blues all these years, reflecting on his miseducation by racist teachers who had in his early years made a senseless plea to his “Pops” for sympathy: “Mr. Jones, please come and git ya child / cuz he’s writin mad poems and his verses are wild.” The son may grow up in the projects of Queensbridge, but this is a place his father renames “Little Africa,” after retracing his travels to Saudi Arabia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Paris, and Greece. What’s more, when The Ave Magazine put Nas and Olu Dara on its first anniversary cover, the title of the issue was “The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit.” The article by Saptosa Foster (2004) is also called “Bridging the Gap,” and it reveals the meaning behind God’s Son’s naming: Olu Dara means, in Yoruba, “God is good,” a phrase that lives on the lips of Black folk throughout North America and beyond, day in and day out, all day and every day. Nas’s birth name is “Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones,” or “Son of Olu Dara” (Foster, 52), “Son of [Good] God,” “God’s Son.” In other words, Hip-Hop’s Blues-loving, gap-bridging, “Great Black Hope” emcee is baptized at the crossroads of Legba music’s latest reincarnation. There’s much, much more. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony walked us to this domain with their haunting, most popular song and video ever, “Tha Crossroads” (E 1999 Eternal, 1998). Flavor Flav rocked his signature Yoruba-style dance beside Chuck D at the height of Public Enemy’s militant world appeal.11 Erykah Badu adopts a “neo-Fon” posture as she sings “Orange Moon” on Mama’s Gun (2000), evoking “High God” Mawu-Lisa (a “dual deity,” “androgynous” yet overwhelmingly “feminine,” so to speak), who gives birth to Legba. Tracy Chapman entitled a song “Crossroads” (1989), from her second album of the same name; and she makes it clear that the demons on her trail are the mortal men who make our lives a living hell. The original drummer of The Last Poets was a “Yoruba priest,” as Abiodun “When the Revolution Comes” Oyewole would remind us; and Umar Bin Hassan could have been rhyming for Legba when he wrote “Niggers Are Scared





of Revolution” (1970): “Niggaz are scared of revolution / but niggaz shouldn’t be scared of revolution / cuz revolution ain’t nuthin but change / and all niggaz do is change” (Oyewole and Bin Hassan 1996, 61). Butterfly of Digable Planets speaks “Eshu-Elegba” as he speaks about his Brooklyn style on “The May 4th Movement Starring Doodle Bug” from Blowout Comb (1994). The closing theme of Julie Dash’s classic film Daughters of the Dust (1992) is entitled “Elegba’s Theme” (Dash 1992, 16). These spiritual referents are hardly absent from the Black space of the United States, no more nowadays than in times past. As a result, Cooper’s Sound Clash could consult Carnival of the Spirit: Seasonal Celebrations and Rites of Passage by Luisah Teish (1994), whom she identifies as an “African-American Yoruba Priestess and cultural activist” (Cooper 2004, 103). Jeff Chang describes Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s recording of “Renegades Chant” in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005): Bam let loose with Afrodiasporic refrains and children’s rhymes. He ran through Bronx bad boys Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe’s salsa adaption of a Ghanaian play song, “Ghana’E,” Manu Dibango’s makossa groove, “Weya,” the Black New Orleans Mardi Gras standard “Iko Iko.” “Fanga alafia ashé ashé,” he trilled, the big man from the Bronx offering a child’s welcome in a singsong Yoruba” (Chang 2005, 191).

This is the self-same leader described in Eshu-like language as someone “ready to take people across borders that they didn’t know they could cross” (89). It makes all the sense in the world then when the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement coordinates its Black August International Hip-Hop Project in Brazil with Mama Oseye’s Yoruba Society of Brooklyn in August 2004 and 2006; and when the group of ten Afro-Venezuelan women percussionists and vocalists who go by the name of Elegguá would tour North America themselves in 2007. Concurrently, Ella Andall releases Moforibale Esu (2007), her homage to the orisha, from Trinidad and Tobago. The myth of Black people as “non-African Negroes” is in bad shape in Black popular music, worldwide. What happens, though, when Muddy Waters’s mother (or Mawu-Lisa, Legba’s “God Mother”) is put back into this equation so vividly imagined by Nas? “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” appears to bridge any and all gaps between “Blues women” and “female rappers” or emcees in particular. Lil’ Kim is mentioned once by Rickford and Rickford, who otherwise write on folkloric “bad men,” “Blues men,” and “male emcees,” and it is to gently knock her for The Lox’s “Money, Power, Respect” (1998). This single had featured her as well as DMX, whom they praise along with Nas for some of the same lyrics she is negatively said to epitomize. Spoken Soul ignores the “power” and the “respect” part of her fiery chorus, as do most “middle-class” critics, focusing on the “money” part of the “street code” they fail to endorse or understand. Moreover, Rickford and Rickford compare The Notorious K.I.M. to white pop music’s Madonna instead of her Black cultural foremothers (Rickford and Rickford 2000, 86). For Hip-Hop, she was first hailed as “The Millie Jackson of Rap,” since this singer had a “Soul rap” of her own; and Lil’ Kim’s lyrical raunch had no rival in this latest generation of music. Like the



76

77

“bad women” of Black folklore, she is Hip-Hop’s tell-tale “bad girl” (even though she was never on Bad Boy Records). She declares herself “Sophisticated Bad Girl” on La Bella Mafia’s “Shake Ya Bum Bum,” no doubt a “Daughter of the Blues” as a chapter from Cheryl Keyes’s Rap Music and Street Consciousness (2004) characterizes all the other “unladylike” artists before her. Lil’ Kim even melds the patois of a Dancehall “bad gyal” with a sample of Millie Jackson’s “Phuck U Symphony” (Live and Uncensored, 1979) on her fourth solo project, or “Durty” off The Naked Truth (2005). Didn’t her selection of mic-name say it all? The Blues had “Daddy’s and Momma’s galore,” notes Jackie Kay in Bessie Smith (1997, 10), not to mention “working class Queens” who walk in the footsteps of “Voodoo Queens” from Haiti and Hoodoo (64–65). A Black lesbian poet from Scotland, Kay writes a rich biographical text on “The Empress of the Blues” for “Outlines,” a special series devoted to presumably “gay and lesbian” figures published in Britain. It was Bessie Smith to whom Toni Morrison compares Lil’ Kim, admirably, in her comments on Philadelphia’s Million Woman March in an interview for Vibe magazine (Morrison in Morales 1998, 97). This gives new meaning to the Empress’s final epitaph: “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing” (Kay 1997, 133). Hip-Hop’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” would be the ideal “thirdgeneration” Queen B never imagined by SDiane Bogus’s little-discussed article, “The ‘Queen B’ Figure in Black Literature” (1992).12 A poet and a critic, Bogus upholds a picture of “determined” and “persistent” women (283), maybe “cross-dressing” and “woman-loving” women (280); “musical artists” who are “central figure[s] in the community at large” (282); and “large, ‘masculine lad[ies]’ of nightlife, song, energy, and African spirit” (280). Bessie Smith is its prototype, besides Gladys Bentley, although Ma Rainey (“Mother of the Blues”) should be centrally considered herself. Bogus charts a first generation of “real life” Queen B’s who “sing the blues between the 1920s and the 1930s,” and then a second generation of “fictional” Queen B’s collected from the controversial writings of Ann Allen Shockley (281). They “sing or play popular music such as rhythm and blues or jazz, between 1960 and the present” (281). They are weaker than their Blues mothers, arguably, in spite of their “struggle for every freedom” in fiction, sexual freedom not excluded. While Bogus has a preference for the persona of the “bulldagger,” she must ultimately concede that categories such as “bisexuality,” “lesbianism” and “heterosexuality” cannot begin to capture this brand of Black expression (287). It is clear that this lineage extends beyond the twentieth century North American history of Western empire, especially as Lil’ Kim makes her “Queen B(itch)” formulation more explicit, self-conscious and forceful than any other generation under study in Bogus or elsewhere. Robert Johnson was far from alone in his singing of this Legba figure that Europeans see as “Satan.” Hoodoo is inseparable from the Blues sung by an assortment of artists irrespective of gender. Koko Taylor would be heard many decades later howling answer to “I’m a Man” by Bo Diddley and “Mannish Boy” by Muddy Waters: “I’m a Woman” completes the picture, sexually, and powerfully well in the realm of braggadocio: “My Momma tole me the day I wuz grown / ‘Sing tha Blues, chile, sing em from now on’.” Lyrically, she’s a woman and a ball of fire,





who can make love to a crocodile and sing the Blues, as a woman. She boasts of shaking hands with “The Devil” and making men crawl in the sand, on Queen of the Blues (1990), an album that also includes other titles such as “I Can Love You Like a Woman (Or I Can Fight You Like a Man)” and “I’m a Queen Bee.” This medley blends well with that of another, real life character in Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (2003): “Big Sweet was the embodiment of the blues. She was Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and all the bad and brazen women they sang about rolled into one” (Boyd 2003, 169). Immortalized in Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), this “Big Momma” was a teller of her own tales, crucial as she was to Hurston’s jook-joint carousing and classic collection of Black cultural materials: “Tain’t a man, woman or child going to tackle Big Sweet,” testifies one witness, much like a male co-worker pictures her, most positively, as “uh whole woman and half uh man” (Boyd 2003, 169). Here again is “trickster god/dess” “gender and sexuality” in the flesh. A different Blues woman named Smith, and “Queen of the Moaners,” Clara Smith sang “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil (and My Heart’s Done Turned to Stone)” in 1924, doing serious damage to any notion that “Crossroads” Hoodoo belongs to “Blues men” exclusively (Clara Smith’s Complete Recordings, Volume 2, 1995). The mischaracterization of Legba as “masculine” or “male” has hindered the recognition of orisha characteristics among “Blues women” themselves. Yet Kay’s Bessie Smith portrays her as a “multi-talented and versatile performer” who “appeared as a singer/ dancer and male impersonator in her own show, Liberty Belles Revue” (Kay 1997, 40). The bonds between Hoodoo and “Voodoo,” Yoruba and Fon spirituality and eroticism are broken by neither geography nor gender, as these musical artists persistently and flamboyantly demonstrate.13 Although Nas and Muddy Waters were told they’d be “the greatest men alive,” Lil’ Kim is a non-male trickster who tells us herself (on La Bella Mafia’s “Can You Hear Me Now?”): “Dem boyz ain’t bad and ain’t no bitch greata.” She spits her lines as if ordained to be “the greatest woman alive,” except she’s out to destroy every of concept of gender in the process. Literally, in the insect world of her metaphorical mic-name, Queen Bees castrate “drones,” males who only exist to service them, sexually, while their sister “worker bees” execute the day-to-day work of the beehive. Not only will “men” here die immediately after mating with their Queen—around eighteen at a time, according to some estimates,14 she actually takes charge of their sexual equipment, storing their male genitalia in her own body after mating to become a self-fertilizing organism. Subsequently, she will lay eggs that can be further injected with what is now her sperm. Those that receive a second, extra dose will be classified as “female,” or “worker bees,” while those that do not will be classified as “male,” for Western science, and become drones. But these categories of sex and gender, “male” and “female” as well as “men” and “women,” they all fall down in this scenario and in the scene of writing represented by Lil’ Kim: “Honey Bees” (“Killer Bees”) actually hail from Africa themselves and replicate many a feature analyzed by Ifi Amadiume in Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion & Culture (1997), whose focus on “African matriarchy,” “gender-flexibility” and “goddess worship” compliments this treatment of Legba or Esu-Elegbara.



78

79

This apiary practice of castration can be applied to the “manhood” attached to Legba, inappropriately, by academic scholarship on Africa and the African diaspora in the Americas. The trickster could as a result be seen as an icon or symbol of transformation in general and an agent of sexual or erotic transformation in particular. Even the most conventional work on Aflakete will support this idea. While Legba of the Fon may get intellectually slighted vis-à-vis Eshu of the Yoruba in Gates’s The Signifying Monkey and elsewhere, Robert D. Pelton engages both Eshu and Legba, and Legba even more so than Eshu, in The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Delight (1980). A Roman Catholic priest and Director General of Madonna House Apostolate, he touts Legba as a medium of social change, of “disruption and reconciliation” (75), or “recreative possibilities” (128). This deity unveils “life’s openness” (118), “opening passageways to new life” (84), in sync with cosmic principles, in conflict with structures of oppression. When Pelton underscores Legba’s “versatility” (81), Legba’s “cocksure mulitformity” (128), and Legba’s “independence of ordinary structure, social as well as physical, human as well as divine” (81), this man of the cloth could just as easily be talking about The Notorious K.I.M. She is “That Bitch” with a thousand looks on La Bella Mafia’s “The Beehive.” She is “a chameleon” with many styles and rhymes on its “Can’t F**k with Queen Bee.” And she lyrically puns about how she switches up her flows and her clothes more than Wilt Chamberlain switched up his “hoes” on its “This Is Who I Am.” There is a critical relationship between Legba’s role as an agent or medium of social change and this ability to constantly transform the shape of identity, individual as well as collective, cultural identity. It is thus senseless to try to tie down Legba to a “masculine” form, a “male” body, or any anatomical description, especially as dictated by the West, Europe or North America. Pelton writes in “Eshu and Legba: Writers of Destiny” that they personify “metamorphosis at every level of life—human, transhuman, subhuman, even post-human.” But since, as a rule, they shape and reshape structures, hierarchies and relationships (138), and they do so with an eye toward establishing a new order restored to “wholeness” (144–145), their sacred, ultra-erotic spirit cannot be bound by limitations of sex, gender or sexuality. They represent a revolutionary body politics in their own universe and certainly in the world of contemporary academic scholarship, Western and Westernized. In short, at the crossroads of Legba lay the standing message that there is always a way out of sexual confinement, and back to the blissful fullness of being found in African “god(desse)s.”15 Conclusion For we are all children of Eshu. (Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn [1978])

The radical politics or potential of this orisha persona is supported by Ivan Van Sertima’s article, “Trickster, the Revolutionary Hero,” in Linda Goss and Marian E. Barnes’s Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African American Storytelling (1989),





where he writes that the role of any trickster is, arguably, “related to the profound and often obscure longing of the human for freedom from fixed ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, acting, a revolt against a whole complex of ‘givens’ coded into a society, a revolt which may affect not only an oppressed group, class or race but a whole order—the settled institutions and repetitive rituals of a whole civilization” (Van Sertima 1989, 103). Esu-Elegbara is not just any trickster, but a “trickster-god” of the utmost cosmic significance who stands for “the principle of rebellion against every form of convention and opposes all acts of dictatorship by men and deities alike” (Abodunrin 1996, 53). What more “fixed ways” of “seeing, feeling, thinking and acting” are there in the white bourgeois West than the fixed ways or norms of gender and sexuality? What functions as more “given” than its unexamined and racialized notions of “maleness” and “femaleness,” “manhood” and “womanhood,” “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” as well? Eshu, Legba, and Lil’ Kim signify a revolt against these “givens,” these “fixed ways,” a radical freedom from these and other institutions and all their erotic limitations. They rewrite society or “civilization” as many or most thought they knew it, tricking faithfully for “a new course, a new possibility, a new human person” (Van Sertima 1989, 110), for an African divine at all times and in all spaces. This is the role of the trickster as “god/dess” of rebellion and revolution, globally speaking. Among literary critics, and their established authors of literature, Esu-Elegbara is writ large in Black communities beyond The Signifying Monkey of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Recently, Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure writes “From Legba to Papa LaBas” for Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies and Ali Mazrui’s The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (2001). He reviews the work of novelist Ishmael Reed and “the close association between Voodoo (Hoodoo), music and dance” (359). “Yoruba,” he concludes, “should be seen as a metaphor for African cultures that crossed and survived the Middle Passage [or Maafa] and as a synecdoche for Africa” itself (362). A poet and essayist, Cheryl Clarke engages Eshu (and other orisha) quite extensively in “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005). She does so through resourceful readings of Black, Africana writers from Gwendolyn Brooks to Audre Lorde. This is quite a corrective to male-centered critics discussing male-centered writers and Legba as Papa LaBas. She looks out for Eshu and, via Brooks, “a missing girl child, whom no one has seen” (32), parting ways with The Signifying Monkey of Western academia, bringing a wholeness to the subject of these literary studies that the orisha classically demands. “I look into my own faces as Eshu’s daughter,” Lorde declares in “Between Ourselves” from The Black Unicorn (1978): “for we are all children of Eshu” (114). Moving beyond Western empire’s entire system of sexual categorization in her “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), she pictures herself in the image of Esu-Elegbara in its prologue: I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me—to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered—to leave and to be left—to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our



80


81

This is a divine desire. It might also be Legba’s Mawu-Lisa: “The ideal type of every group in the divine world is a pair of twins of the opposite sex or, more rarely, of the same sex.” Yet, according to Paul Mercier’s “The Fon of Dahomey,” Mawu-Lisa is “described as twins simply in order to express both their unity and their dual nature” (Mercer 1954, 231). Lorde summons Afrekete, Oya, Seboulisa as well as Mawu in “Call,” a supernatural poem of matrilineage and revolutionary struggle collected in Our Dead Behind Us (1986). But Legba is present, too, omnipresent in point of fact. “Mother . . . loosen my tongue / or adorn me / with a lighter burden,” the great poet chants: “Aido Hwedo is coming. Aido Hwedo is coming. Aido Hwedo is coming.” And on the third time, the spirit comes in an undeniably erotic double-entendre. Who is Aido Hwedo? This is defined in a footnote: “The Rainbow Serpent; also a representation of ancient divinities who must be worshipped but whose names and faces have been lost in time” (419). According to another source, Dã Ayido Hwεdo is an “androgynous,” heavenly force who transports Mawu-Lisa “through the length and breadth of the universe,” when the world is first created, and who transports its “animating principle” down to earth every time someone has passed on and a new child is born (Mercier 1954, 227). Calling on Yaa Asantewa, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Winnie Mandela, and Assata Shakur, Lorde is calling for a militant reincarnation, a reincarnation of militants. It is through Mawu or Mawu-Lisa that this call is made as she when shouts (for Aido Hwedo) to break an iron silence as a “holy ghosts’ linguist” (Lorde 1986, 419). “Call” has to call on Legba, by any name: Legba is the only “god/dess” who can speak all of Mawu’s tongues, translating between and among mortals, Mawu-Lisa, and all the other “demi-god(desse)s.” To repeat Lorde, “we are all children of Eshu.” The “divine linguist” Legba is the seventh “child” of Mawu (“Mother” of “The Word”) or Mawu-Lisa; and Legba represents for this “Supreme Being” or “High God” on earth and among other Fon orisha who communicate via the sum total of Legba’s seven languages. Unique among all Hip-Hop emcees, Lil’ Kim is known for rapping in tongues she was not known to know, speak or study; and, true to trickster form, much of this talk is downright “dirty.” It is as “gutta” as her extra-linguistic gutturals, grunts and groans. There are bits of Italian mafioso lingo everywhere, album after album. There was the erotic word play in French from Hard Core’s “No Time” on forward. There is a raunchy line of German on DJ Tomekk’s “Kymnotize” (2002). There is some explosive Russian on “All Hail tha Queen,” which was recorded for The Notorious K.I.M. There is Spanish all over the place. Then, after the pronounced Arabic on Hard Core’s “Drugs,” and Tina Turner-inspired Buddhist chants on “Spend a Little Doe,” there is Jamaica’s Afro-Creole consistently: “Makes No Sense” (featuring Tanya Stephens) has her spitting a whole patois “outro,” for instance, while The Naked



loving. I would like to drive forward and at other times to rest or be driven. When I sit and play in the waters of my bath I love to feel the deep inside parts of me, sliding and folded and tender and deep. Other times I like to fantasize the core of it, my pearl, a protruding part of me, hard and sensitive and vulnerable in a different way. (7)


Truth’s “Lighters Up” and “Durty” work to reunite Dancehall-Reggae and HipHop in North America.16 The same album delivers some “Dirty South” speech, throughout, in accent, grammar, vocab and style. This is all besides her Blackest of “Black English,” of course, which is simply another Afro-Creole itself. There is no other Hip-Hop “god” or “goddess” who rocks such a multilingual mic—except in contemporary continental Africa (perhaps in Senegal, most notably) and among “Afros” in other locales, such as Haitians in Venezuela, where currently emcees can sometimes rap across two, three or even four different tongues.17 Like Legba, representing for Mawu-Lisa, Lil Kim stands for divinity, language, and sexuality or eroticism as “Big Momma/Queen Bitch,” epitomizing all of the above in rhyme. When we hear her brag about her “Ebonics,” explicitly, on “Da Big East,” an unreleased Junior M.A.F.I.A. recording, we might recall once more that what Robert L. Williams meant by the term in his Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks (1975) was not merely “Black English,” so-called. It meant any and all Pan-African expression, regardless of geographical location. Combining with U.S. “African American” and “Jamaican” speech, then, a seventh language is consolidated in Big Momma’s repertoire on La Bella Mafia’s “W-BUZ” radio interlude-skits. The first installment pumps “QUEEN B@#$H” in the background as Lil’ Kim comes on, broadcasting: “That wuz Black Jesus wit ‘Tell Me Whut That Thang Smell Like.’ ” After one caller (“Mikey Meatball”) phones in his request for a “scratch ‘n’ sniff” poster for Hard Core, another caller is introduced as “Nigel from Nigeria.” He sounds suspiciously like Michael Blackson, a continent-born comedian who has appeared regularly on BET’s Comic View and the self-proclaimed “African King of Comedy.” He asks if he can bootleg her “shit.” In response, and between screaming fits of laughter, Lil’ Kim assimilates an apparently Yoruba assimilation of U.S. “Black English” or “African-American” speech: “Try again moddofokka!” She repeats it again, perfectly. The comedian and lyricist trade dramatic “moddafokka’s” in this “Nigerian Ebonics” until “Doing It Way Big” starts to blast as La Bella Mafia’s next track. There may be no one more fluent in “muthafucka” than The Notorious K.I.M.; and as L.H. Stallings in Mutha’ Is Half a Word (2007) observes: “If trickster had a favorite word, this might be it” (24). Lil’ Kim’s gleeful adoption of “moddafokka” alternatively does more than take her back to Africa. It takes us back to that precise area of Africa where Eshu and Legba and Mawu or Mawu-Lisa were born. Once, circa 1999 or 2000, Lil’ Kim would rhyme that she wants a house in Africa—with carnivals in her backyard—on a remix for Puff Daddy’s “Satisfy You” featuring R. Kelly (Forever, 1999). And “The Rap Up” at Rawkus.com was apparently the first to report that she would perform there in December of 2007, playing Lagos, the Nigerian capital—robed in Eshu’s red and black—after proclaiming herself “Ms. ‘Greatest of All Time.’ ”18 The divine Esu-Elegbara is by no means absent from Black traditions in North America. This deity is witnessed in folklore, music, literature and visual art, past, present and future. Hip-Hop is no exception. It is an extraordinary affirmation instead. Its lyricists may embody this figure more thoroughly than any other brand of author or artist to date: Lil’ Kim amplifies and multiplies this



82


83

The Haitian pantheon of anthropomorphized spiritual entities derived mainly from West African and Central African sources. There are electromagnetic forces that “vibrate,” that illustrate principles such as a love, wisdom, justice. These are entities that behave like us in order to teach us. Being pure spirit, they are neither male nor female, but embody aspects of both genders. When a person’s vibration reaches that of that particular deity she or he goes into possession/trance, when the spirit rides its horse, becoming present and apparent in the mortal realm. The physical and the metaphysical become one because they are one. (Bellegarde-Smith 2004, 12)

Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop constantly evokes Esu-Elegbara, even to the point of boldly recasting physical sexual biology or anatomy, so that she reflects the non-physical energy and plentiful pleasures of this powerful divinity. This is her “Holy Ghost,” artistically, and it will not be hemmed in by any conventional gender or sexuality. No Western/European religion can makes sense of such a voluptuous spirituality. Many have called Eshu or Legba a “god” of “uncertainty,” “unpredictability,” “indeterminacy” and the like. But Esu-Elegbara is much more crucially a “god/ dess” of freedom. It is Esu-Elegbara, the seer, the diviner or the reader of signs, who saves us or helps us save ourselves from a predestined fate (i.e., the total lack of agency or “free will”). This all-important freedom in general manifests itself in erotic freedom, in particular, a freedom of the life-force of the cosmos. So when the spirit comes, sublimely, for anyone who dares to call and welcome it, there is divine freedom—in the flesh. As much as she is Hip-Hop—“the rhythm . . . the soul . . . the people . . . the dress code . . . the language . . . a blessing from the Creator” in the words of Afrika Bambaataa (Dre 2004, 70), “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” is Esu-Elegbara. The radical politics of this divine trickster-lyricist produce a revolutionary sexual politics unmatched in Europe or North America, least of all in academia with its various colonial-imperial models of science, humanities, gender and sexuality studies, and so forth. Before Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood would conclude: These far-reaching correspondences . . . suggest not only the continuity of West African ideological traditions in the diaspora, but also the conflict between those traditions and the official Christian morality of the Garden of Eden in which both the suppression of sexuality and the secondariness of woman are institutionalized: Adam (and Eve) hiding from God; versus Esu as the gateway to God (1995, 132).

In a perfectly wicked pun, Cooper describes “Satan” as “the first world pimp” (1995, 132), which brings to mind Lil’ Kim’s immaculate response to a song by rapper Eve on “Came Back for You.” La Bella Mafia’s climactic track demands the utmost respect, telling her that her chances of dethroning her are slim: “Cuz when



rap connection, exponentially, thanks to her fearless exploration of erotic spirituality and socio-sexual freedom. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith comments in The Descent of the Lwa (Journey through Haitian Mythology): The Works of Hërza Barjon (2004):


God made Adam, He shoulda made Kim.” The Notorious K.I.M. lets Eve know that she picked a weak mic-name, for starters, and that she lacks all means to challenge male domination as only “Queen Bitch” can.19 In the “Garden of Eden,” Christianity’s “God” gets tricked by Satan thanks to Satan’s ability to trick Adam and Eve. Poor Eve gets done in pitifully by Satan, Adam, and her God with precious little protest. By contrast, Lil’ Kim faults Europe’s patriarchal “God” for not making her (much like Mawu made Legba) instead of Eve and, further, instead of Adam himself. She could have tricked all parties involved; her “pimp game” is “strong.” This is her argument; and it is “baad-asssss” folklore at its hellified best: “Wild women don’t have no Blues!” Adam and Eve are “innocent” or, rather, ignorant of sex and power. Their “God” promotes Puritanism and a patriarchy whose hypocrisy is exploited by a pimped-out Satan. “Big Momma” is on record: Lil’ Kim pimps pimps and would-be patriarchs with a hard-core sense of sexual poetic justice.20 Adam, Eve, Satan, and Christianity’s “God” are all fair game as she religiously pimps the system of sexual domination instead of letting it simply pimp her. She is no she-devil,” and she is no “sinner.” Her “pimp” is also and again the “limp” of that divine linguist of Africa who walks with one foot in this world and one foot in the heavens. A telltale sign, it has as much double-meaning as the trickster’s “trick.” For tricking is itself linguistic and sexual, verbal and erotic. Doing battle in the “Garden of Eden” itself, “Came Back for You” can undo what Cooper calls “woman’s secondariness” and “sexuality’s suppression,” rhyming totally in tune with African “noises in the blood.” At the level of logic, no “modern” Western model of gender or sexuality has managed to simultaneously subvert the sexist oppression of women, the repression of sexuality and the oppressiveness of gender (for “men” and “women” or “males” and “females”), like Lil’ Kim’s HipHop lyricism: Esu . . . Exu . . . Eleggua . . . Legba . . . Papa Legba . . . Papa LaBas . . . and so . . . Mawu or Mawu-Lisa . . . Olorun or Olodumare, they “echo” in her “bone” (Reid 1983; Cooper 1995, xii; 198).



84

(Black) Consciousness (Reprise): Neo-Soul’s “Baduizm,” African Cinema of Liberation, and Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H”

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone. (LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Black Magic [1969])

T

he reputed “Father of African Cinema,” Ousmane Sembène is perhaps ironically famous for the sexual politics of his revolutionary productions of Black independent film. For example, Mooladé (2004) is about resistance to female “circumcision” or “genital excision.” It makes use of the traditional “right to give protection [or sanctuary] to those who are weaker,” rejecting any practice that would “continue the subjugation of women,” while it makes an appeal to the maternalism of Africa and “our pre-Islamic matriarchy” as well. This tale of anti-sexist resistance was to be the second after Faat Kine (2000) in a trilogy— “Heroism in Everyday Life”—to be followed by The Brotherhood of Rats before the writer and filmmaker’s death in June 2007 at the age of eighty-four.1 Earlier, Emitai or God of Thunder (1971) is dedicated to “all the militants of the African cause” and its militants are a community of women who resist French occupying forces which are robbing the Senegalese village of Casamance of men and rice for world war in Europe. The women hide the rice and defend their traditions and status among the Diola people at all costs. Guelwaar (“Noble One,” 1992) may center on the story of Pierre Henri Thioune, a Christian activist mistakenly buried in a Muslim cemetery, but it also treats the theme of prostitution. The daughter of the deceased Catholic becomes a prostitute or sex worker who is portrayed as a survivor of economic oppression in Dakar, while the colonized elite is cinematically condemned as a political-economic “beggar” or prostitute



4


to “foreign aid,” that is, contemporary colonial imperialism. The closing scene of Borom Sarret (“The Cart Driver,” 1963) suggests more of the same when the cart driver who could not earn a living during the day returns to his wife without money for food. She hands him their child and declares firmly as she makes her exit, in the evening: “We will eat tonight.” The subject of impotence is writ large in Xala or The Curse (1974), a bold parody of the Black middle class of Western empire. The radical daughter of a Senegalese businessman represents the future of Africa and Africans today. The father of “flag independence” (or pseudoliberation) fails by contrast in the realm of sexuality, corrupt politics and polygamous family.2 Thus, mocking chauvinism, Toni Cade Bambara would write of these films: “If a sister had written half the works of Ousmane Sembene, there’d be back-and-forth debates raging about reverse sexism: how come the heroics are always done by women?” (Bambara in Tate 1983, 36). Once again, this is what we could call sexual consciousness, a consciousness of the politics of gender and sexuality—on full display; and Lil’ Kim’s lyricism invites her listeners to invent or insist upon it, what must be a brand new concept of sorts. There is surely nothing new in the notion of “sexuality” by itself. Nor is there anything new in the notion of “consciousness.” It is the combination of these two things that would suggest something new for a world where such things are normally thought to be contradictory, in conflict, completely at odds. The world of music constantly pits “sexuality” against “consciousness” in its commentary, particularly when Black music is the matter at hand; internationally, it divides music with “positive,” “progressive,” or “political” content from “sexdriven” music that is, supposedly, “sensational,” “scandalous,” and “slack.” This line of thinking goes well beyond critics and consumers of contemporary popular culture since, for over 500 years, the Western world of ideas has itself opposed sexuality and consciousness, rigidly, laying the foundation for an entire culture to interpret “eroticism” as a threat to “intelligence,” “bodies” as menaces to “minds,” “sensuality” as an enemy to “rationality” (or rationalism). The European oppression of most of the planet’s population, especially Africans, it continues to use this bi-polar perception to advance an empire of racism that is every bit as sexist, class-elitist, and homophobic as it is racist or white-supremacist.3 Social and music criticism claiming to be “positive” “progressive,” and “political” might want to separate itself from this school of thought, lest its politics be no less identified with white racist imperialism, sexism, elitism, and homophobia. It should want to oppose this system of domination instead of pitting “sexuality” against “politics” or “consciousness.” To write or speak as if sexual politics and sexual consciousness could not possibly exist is to promote a closet, conservative sexual politics itself, either “consciously” or unconsciously, of course. A radical, revolutionary sexual politics is in order, without a doubt, and such a politics of consciousness is passionately showcased in The Notorious K.I.M., a paradigm-shifter and a “lyrical force to be reckoned with,” according to Bonz Malone’s Hip-Hop Immortals: The Remix (2003, n.p.). If Sembène’s sex and gender politics are renowned in and outside continental Africa, his conscientious association with Hip-Hop may not be so well-known. La Noire de . . . or Black Girl (1966) tells the story of a young maid taken to France



86

87

from Senegal to be disabused, exploited, isolated and demeaned to the point of suicide; and it might easily call to mind Donald Goines’s novel, Black Girl Lost (1973), a rap favorite. What’s more, a mic-fiend from Thiaroye, Omzo samples and loops a fiery speech from Guelwaar on “Kunu Abal Ay Beut” (or “The Hand That Gives Is the Hand That Rules”), a song which appears on Africa Raps: Senegal, Mali and the Gambia (2005). The filmmaker would unite with emcees in his country on many occasions, often enough to be given his own Hip-Hop moniker or alias: “Ousmane-la-Hache” or “Ousmane-the-Axe.” This fact should not surprise given his much-cited motive for making films instead of writing more books. He aimed to reach and represent the masses and renounce any elitism of art. Though female emcees may not yet be out en masse on this scene that has produced the likes of Diaara J, Fou Malade, Radical and Pacotille, and Dakar AllStars, this scene is by no means exclusively male, for there are ample sisters in this movement of the Hip-Hop masses. Yet and still, some other features of Sembène resonate well with a lyricism resounding elsewhere. Ceddo (1976) returns his spectators to “the matriarchal era” as Africans struggle against invasion and conquest by Islam: Princess Dior will avenge her father’s death by killing the Imam aiming to usurp the throne. Cool, calm and collected, she shoots him in the genitals to the shock of all. About this climax, the director and author of the script states: “This action is contrary to present ideas and the role that women now hold. And this is the only reason the film has been banned in Senegal” (Sembène in Pfaff 1984, 174). The title character of Faat Kiné is a more “modern,” middle-aged woman who achieves economic independence and, hence, a freedom from a range of sexist sexual constraints. A single mother of means, she and her girlfriends enjoy their sexuality to the max, even affectionately referring to each other as “salope,” which can be translated from French to English as “bitch” (or “slut”); they turn the tables on various men and male privilege in general. These royal themes of sex, power, and matriarchy upheld by “Ousmane-theAxe” in his “African Cinema of Liberation” are clearly in sync with “Big Momma” Lil’ Kim’s “QUEEN B@#$H” artistry or aesthetics of rhyme; and this may all provide a perfect introduction to a productive comparison of her and other “HipHop Queens” in the African diaspora, most particularly Erykah Badu (who is conventionally dubbed “Queen of Neo-Soul”)—sexual consciousness in mind. Both Lil’ Kim and Badu emerge as break-out figures from the mid-to-late 1990s, authoring musical trends that simply did not exist prior to their respective solo debuts, Hard Core (1996) and Baduizm (1997), which was full of Yoruba and Fon references, explicit and implicit. Although many oppose one’s material “violence” with the other’s “spiritual vibe,” Badu’s second studio album would be Mama’s Gun (2000). Her lyrical gun is shot there with outright sexual bravado. Finally, Badu’s searing “gangsta” on Worldwide Underground (2003) will seal the deal. The work of The Notorious K.I.M. from Brooklyn and “Southern Girl” Badu’s “Afro-Freestyle” are in many ways more than compatible. This cannot actually be said of other artists who seek to emulate Lil’ Kim’s “new school,” systematically if superficially, such as Foxy Brown, Trina, Eve, Amil, Remy Martin, Jackie-O, and Nicki Minaj (etc. . . . ) as well as certain older artists who have made themselves over anew, erotically, such as Da Brat and Missy “Misdemeanor”



(BLACK) CONSCIOUSNESS (REPRISE)


Elliot. Now, besides nearly every other female rapper in her wake, even Black radio “shock-jock” Wendy Williams could be said to continue this imitative trend in a ghostwritten book, no less. Her case will be seen to have truly ironic results. And it will be no less ironic for conventional notions of “consciousness” when the words of “Lil’ Kim” or a musical icon of “sexuality” and “Erykah Badu” or a musical icon of “consciousness” are shown to have so much in common despite the media-driven misconceptions of the critical establishment. There is justice in this here. When sexual consciousness is entertained, both easily emerge as “queens of consciousness” and “queens of sex-radicalism,” both, via Hip-Hop. What we call Black consciousness will be reprised and rearranged—positively—as a result.

Ms. Badu (MC): Erykah’s Soulful Hip-Hop “-izm” You don’t have to be-lieve every-thing you think: We been programmed. (Erykah Badu, “The Healer” or New AmErykah, Part One [2008]) I just believe that no matter what kind of flack it gets, Hip-Hop is much bigger than the media; bigger than religion; bigger than politics; bigger than the government: I think it’s the healer. (Erykah Badu on BET’s Rap City [November 1, 2007])

In hindsight, Badu’s image was first cast nationwide in the context of her first single, a Bluesy as much as “Bohemian” number that inspired countless comparisons to Billie Holiday. With The Color Purple (1985) supplying a cinematic motif for the music video, “On & On” would begin spiritually: “Peace and Blessings manifest with every lesson learned / If your knowledge were your wealth, then it will be well earned.” Its chorus anoints Black folk as “Gods” and “Earths” in “Five Percent” Nation of Islam tradition. The “Mothership” can’t save those who are rushing toward destruction, Badu sings, or atheistic intellectuals who aren’t God-fearing but fear Black “Gods” on Earth nonetheless. Later, Black Muslims merge with Kemet (or “[Ancient] Egypt”) when “On & On” is reprised in concert for Live: “Reprise” explicates Badu’s earlier song-text meticulously, after enormous success, breaking it down bit by cosmological bit. Thus, utilizing a call and response, question and answer technique, Badu explains what a cipher is for her audience. She explains that there are all kinds and that ciphers are symbolically represented by circles which consist of 360 degrees. Her cipher-identified self was compared to a rolling stone, so we are told that the atoms of the human body rotate at the very same rate and on the very same axis as the rotation of the planet Earth, a fact that for her (and “Five Percenters,” at least) explains why she and others can be identified as “Earths.” Badu then explains the significance of the signature ankh worn on her hand as a ring. This is when her talk turns more explicitly erotic, and it makes all the sense in the world. She holds up her ring as a hieroglyphic of Ancient Egypt, whose original name was Kemet. This symbol represents “Life” as a whole as Badu further explains which part represents what, exactly. As one part represents the womb, she says: “Sistas, put your



88

89

hands on your wombs.” Another part represents “the male principle,” so she says: “Bruthas, put your hands on your male principles!” The crowd roars. After she factors in the fallopian tubes, terminating her symbology’s measurements, Badu does the math and calculates 360 degrees of completion. Totally in tune with Hip-Hop’s rap “cypha,” therefore, her cipher here on “On & On” and “Reprise” signifies the life of self and community, sexually or erotically and otherwise. In closing, she maintains that she aims to represent this life in everything she does by giving birth to everything from music or melodies to prayers and babies. The physics and metaphysics of reproduction, the pleasure of life-giving organs and organisms are affirmed in Badu as creative (not “crude”) activity and processes. They are not puritanically veiled or avoided. The oneness signified by her ankh which was a huge presence on stage at her early shows recalls the oneness of the orisha Eshu-Elegba and Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop anthems with Biggie Smalls: The Notorious B.I.G. and The Notorious K.I.M. also ask their Black musical audiences on Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” (Conspiracy, 1995) to grab their “privates,” their “principles”—in public, in unison—to “represent” as a collective unit in a classic call-and-response chorus. Sex is an essential part of “Life” for “Baduizm,” too. The Live version of “On & On” confirms as much in another fashion. Badu spits a rhyme at the end of this version. She is not just some “Neo-Soul songstress” when she does. She’s a dope emcee who “cold-hypes” the mic: “Cain’t no weak ass, trick emcee keep up rough with me.” Badu has always said she is HipHop. That she disses “weak ass, trick emcees” and literally shouts out “hard-core” should shock those who think “sexuality” and “consciousness” are incompatible. But, for nonbelievers, she goes on to knock jealously; to talk “shit” in claiming veteran status on the mic; and to verbally strike a pose as a dollar-stacking female “mack,” or pimp. In short, this version of “On & On” leaves Badu “mackin’ ” with her “head-wrap,” literally, “gettin’ money” and rapping in a style that allows no dichotomy or distinction to be made between her and Lil’ Kim, whose remix for “Crush on You” (Not Tonight EP, 1997) supplies the music sampled in the background. Any ambiguity on these matters should have been clarified by “Tyrone” at the end of Badu’s Live or, maybe, at the onset of “Searching” when Badu announces that this is “grown folks music.” BET would use this phrase for a now defunct program of the same name (circa 2003). However, for it, “Grown Folks Music” would not mean music that is “grown and sexy” or sexual. This phrase was misused to refer to an older generation of music that came before “rap” or Hip-Hop, indeed, a genre of music appreciated more by a generational group that can be typically “anti-rap” in the age of Hip-Hop. A surprise freestyle, “Tyrone” famously hears “Ms. Badu” liberate herself from a freeloading man. What happens every time he’s asked for a little cash? “You say, ‘No,’ but turn right around and ask me for some ass.” She rejects the role of “cheap thrill” and reasserts her “realness.” Some may be shocked to hear that this “homegirl” used to pay for her “homeboy’s” everything, every time they went somewhere, anywhere, while sitting in the backseat of her own car, so his own “homeboy” could ride “shotgun” or in the front seat with him. But this “homeboy” is himself shocked when “homegirl” has





eventually had enough. She tells him to pack his “shit,” to call Tyrone (for help in moving out of her house)—on somebody else’s phone. This record became nothing short of an anthem, instantly, although certain people including academic critics continue to mistake Tyrone for the name of the problematic man instead of his partner.4 Interestingly, it had a quite familiar beginning: Badu ask “sisters,” first, then “brothers,” how they are feeling. What Kamene Okonjo (1976) calls Africa’s “dual-sex” system is ritualized in concert performance. The Live crowd erupts again and again just as it did during “Reprise,” when Badu told them to put their hands on their principles, male and female alike. What put the “-izm” in Baduizm after all? The artist’s own “organic,” ghettodriven definition insists it is “what you smoke, it gets you high” (Badu in McIver 2002, 91). It also connotes what “gets you off.” “Baduizm” relates to orgasm, or “ jism,” consequently, as much as anything; and its author’s words are themselves slated to “get us high” and “get us off,” logically speaking, for fifty-eight minutes and twenty-two seconds on or of Baduizm. This erotic gets more sexually explicit on “Booty,” the seventh track on Mama’s Gun. Uptight misconceptions about Badu as “the conscious artist” should fall by the way side, as she opens: “Ya booty might be bigga / but I still can pull your nigga.” Badu boasts over and over again only to announce over and over again that the “nigga” that she can “pull” is in actuality a “nigga” she doesn’t want. She could in theory take him from a woman with a bigger “booty,” a sweeter disposition and a better book-knowledge or a more advanced college degree. But, it is ultimately revealed, she won’t want him in principle if he hasn’t made an arrangement with her in advance. Like “Next Lifetime” on Baduizm as well as Live, “Booty” has a huge problem with monogamy. It makes it strictly circumstantial, rather than “moral,” renouncing it in effect with much respect. The “nigga” that she can always “pull” turns out to be a man (or a “boy”) who is not ready (or mature enough) for the kind of “situation” (or “arrangement”) in which everyone could be satisfied, physically and non-physically. No woman needs him, according to Badu. Nor should any woman want him until he is ready—for sexual respect and non-monogamy. This recasting of one-on-one sexual relationships as optional, voluntary, reciprocal arrangements (not ideal, unquestionable relationships grounded in anyone’s “human nature”) is hardly the stuff of bourgeois family, gender, sexuality or consciousness. Nevertheless, Badu’s “-izm” is no less present, and perhaps even more prominent, on “Booty” and the bulk of Mama’s Gun. “Orange Moon” calls on Fon spiritual divinity through the figures of Legba and Mawu-Lisa, if not Yoruba’s Esu-Elegbara proper. Among the Fon people of Dahomey, or present-day Benin, Mawu-Lisa is the supreme “Sun-Moon” pair or “High God” who gives birth to the supernatural trickster and linguist Legba. Traditionally, or in conventional Western terms, Mawu is thought to represent a “female” (or “feminine”) principle symbolized by the Moon; Lisa is thought to represent a “male” (or “masculine”) principle symbolized by the Sun. Like Eshu among the Yoruba, Legba is therefore Sun and Moon. Legba is oneness, a holism seen in Badu’s ankh and Lil’ Kim’s anti-sexist, gender-defiant, ultra-erotic “QUEEN B@#$H” lyricism. Badu belongs to this family of tricksters, herself,



90

91

highlighting one side of divine completion come together for the time being: “I’m an Orange Moon and I shine so bright . . . / He rules the day [and] I’ll rule the night.”5 Crucially, the “good” of their loving is pronounced “God” or “god” throughout. There is no disconnection whatsoever between the spiritual and the sexual-erotic for “Orange Moon.” The extended Live performance of “Next Lifetime” anticipated this hypnotic composition as it vocally interpolated or sampled “You Don’t Have to Cry” by René & Angela (Street Called Desire, 1985). Badu lets each of her background singers shine. Afterwards, she sings in a slow, haunting, high pitch of her being “moon” and “womb,” “heaven” and “divine,” and how she guesses she will see the object of her attraction again in the next lifetime. The Sun comes to reflect the shining Moon in this song, whereas before the Moon is made orange when joined by the Sun. Mutuality is underscored, once more; and with this melodic trip to the sky, the sensuous philosophical problem of monogamy (pseudomonogamy or “serial monogamy”) versus non-monogamy is left beautifully behind. If Badu does not explain “Orange Moon” explicitly as she did “On & On” for Live, she does explain “Kiss Me on My Neck (Hesi)” which is more than related to her lunar metaphorics on Mama’s Gun: “In Kemet, the neck is the throne for the head. ‘I want somebody to walk up behind me and kiss me on my neck,’ put energy behind me, put me back on my throne, and breath on my neck” (McIver 2002, 189). Pan-African militant and historian Cheikh Anta Diop studied ancient migration patterns to connect these world-views—from Kemet and Yorubaland—in his classic Black intellectual texts, most specifically The Genetic Kinship of Pharaonic Egyptian and Negro-African Languages (1977); and Carlos Moore happens to mention this work in his own biography of Afrobeat’s Fela Kuti, Fela Fela: This Bitch of a Life (1982, 14). It is hence important to recognize that Badu follows Diop in retracing this path studiously from her earliest recordings and performances in contemporary North America. Mama Gun’s was an incredibly reflective sophomore release. “On & On” was reprised yet again in the form of “. . . & On,” where Badu playfully checked herself for pretensions found in many who deem themselves “part of the solution,” proverbially, concerning black oppression, not “part of the problem.” Everyone may need to wake up from some form of unconsciousness. However, Badu puts a brake on one brand of “consciousness” with the chorus: “What good do your words do if they don’t understand you? / Don’t go talking that shit Ba-du, Ba-du.” She tells herself or echoes someone who tells her to stop talking “shit” in a singsong delivery. A “conscious” elitism is mocked as Badu shrewdly pokes fun at her own name. The subsequent “Ba-du, Ba-du” scat becomes synonymous with some “non-sense” that the masses can’t understand. The scat is no longer the cosmic tongue of Jazz. It is suddenly, tactically, just “shit”—the “scatology” of excrement. Jazz was itself “street” speech for “fuck,” and it is on “. . . & On” that we hear Badu get repeatedly profane perhaps for the first time since Live’s “Tyrone.” She sings to hip us to certain “hip” hypocrisies of “consciousness” on Mama’s Gun, scoffing at puritanically self-important postures with pleasure.





To this mix of sexuality and self-critique, Badu adds gangsta to the “-izm” on Mama’s Gun and Worldwide Underground (2003). Sex and guns are far more associated with Lil’ Kim than Badu in the minds of most music critics and consumers of Black popular culture. For those who consider themselves among the “conscious,” even apostles of “consciousness,” this association is normally quite revolting. Even though Black people are warred upon and in need of freedom, by any means, according to the Black militant consciousness of Malcolm X, these critics are loathe to be “positive” about guns pointed in any direction, under any circumstances. This contradiction is not championed by Badu. She unpacks her second studio title with lethal precision: Most of the time, you don’t even know your Mama have a gun—and when she pulls it out, and shows it to you, it’s something serious . . . When she pulls it out, she’s going to use it; she’s not gonna pull it out just to wave it . . . Mama has more sense than that. What this means is that with everything that goes on in our society— children are dying, parents are killing themselves, people’s spirits are just broken— then how about putting this in your holster. Stick this on your lap when you drive. Put this in the seat while you drive. Put this in the small of your back. That’s why it’s called Mama’s Gun . . . I urge folk to use my music and my words as they will, as they should, as they see fit. (Badu in McIver 2002, 204–205)

An early Black Power activist, self-defense advocate and author of Negroes with Guns (1962), Robert F. Williams is merely one Black revolutionary whose “Big Momma” gave him his first gun and taught him how to shoot (Freedom Archives 2005). Black culture and history are full of these images, this legacy. Outside Hip-Hop, it may be most visible of late in the comedy of Tyler Perry or his series of Madea plays and films. Much like Lil’ Kim, “Big Momma/Queen Bitch,” moreover, Badu refuses any reading of society that sees guns as strictly “masculine” or “male.” As a result, the booklet of liner notes for Mama’s Gun begins with a poem of sorts. It is more like a pledge. This pledge is not one of allegiance to “America,” certainly, but a pledge to arms. “The Warrior’s Reminder” is printed, significantly, in the shape of a moon; a crescent placed inside a circle formed by a tambourine. It announces Badu’s creative focus and plan to take out all the demons in her range: “that’s mama’s gun” (Badu 2000, n.p.). Her plush Worldwide Underground project would focus on “freaky” instrumentation, thanks to her new production team for this third studio album (or “EP”): “Freakquency.” Even so, Badu teams with dead prez on “The Grind.” She packs her maternal-lyrical pistol still on “Danger (Other Side of the Game, Part 2),” which blares on about a secret box of money kept under her and her partner’s bed: “We keep this money just in case we need to make a run / Gotta keep a clip in Mama’s gun.” Any doubts about her gun being literal or metaphorical are evidently erased. For good reason, “Danger” is subtitled “Other Side of the Game, Part 2.” That Baduizm song (which concludes, “Peace out to Revolution!”) plays as prelude. An early Vibe magazine review of Mama’s Gun by Aliya King included the following parenthetical remark, unmindful of the meaning of “-izm” in Badu from the very beginning: “Note to all who still believe that head wrap-wearing bohemians are righteous and pious: Badu is perfectly at home



92

93

singing a track that is essentially about the rigors of the drug trade” (King 2003, 148). Already, Badu had shed her trademark wrap by this point, sporting a voluptuous Afro in its place. “I didn’t want to become the head-wrap, candle/incense woman,” she was quoted as saying in Heart & Soul magazine later on in that same year (McGee 2003, 70). She will remain righteous, nevertheless, without selfrighteous piety. “Danger” sings of her or another woman riding shot-gun for her man. The rhymes involve blocks and trunks on lock as well as glocks. Badu wails infectiously as she tells this gangsta’s tale. The moral of the story in the end is not moralistic, per se, in a white or Black middle-class vein. The whole song is about living life “in the zone,” the danger zone that the drug trade represents with a raw adrenaline rush, not to mention dodging police chases. Money is made, but lives are lost; nerves are shot; and heads may get blown off or open, regardless of whether any of it is “right” or “wrong.” The production by “Freakquency” drives her vocal point home furiously. Badu continues to shout out “sophisticated gangsterism” and “pimpism” (along with “b-boys and b-girls”), elsewhere, on Worldwide Underground’s “Woo.” Publishing credits on previous albums had always read “Divine Pimp Pub.” This is another reality legions of listeners overlook. Badu raps again on record (as “MC Apples”) for “Love of My Life Worldwide,” which featured Queen Latifah, Bahamadia and Angie Stone (formerly of Sugar Hill Records trio Sequence, and currently a reputed “Neo-Soul” singer herself). It is an all-female remix of Badu’s spin on Common’s classic, “I Used to Love H.E.R.” (Resurrection, 1994), where “H.E.R.” was Hip-Hop itself. Before her remix, Badu’s “Love of My Life: An Ode to Hip-Hop” had featured Common; and it was the lead single for Brown Sugar: The Soundtrack (2002). The music video was co-directed by Badu herself (“A Story by ERYKAH BADU”). Viewers watch her “up-rocking,” “back-spinning” and “crotch-grabbing” (or ‘b-girling”) with Crazy Legs, “tagging” graffiti-laced buildings, “deejaying” jams and “emceeing” in a neighborhood hallway with MC Lyte (“Well, I’m super cute and plenty bad / 30-26-36 and a half.”). Badu’s Brown Sugar visual was arguably one of the biggest musical statements on television in recent years. Its story-boards walk us back dramatically through different phases of HipHop, each phase marked by acts like Afrika Bambaataa (“Planet Rock”), Public Enemy (“Fight the Power”) and N.W.A. (“Fuck tha Police!”) as well as Black community plagues like crack cocaine and commercial robbery by crooked record companies. By the end, “Love of My Life” shows Badu stage-diving into a parodically all-white audience en route to her escape into the future of Black youth, who ride away on a yellow school bus driven by DJ Kool Herc. And it all began with a spray-painted caption: “Once upon a time on the planet Somewhere a boombastic beat was born . . . Let’s call her Hip Hop . . . [sic].”6 Quite like The Notorious K.I.M. vis-à-vis sexuality, “gangsterism,” guns, drugs, “pimpsterism,” orisha logics and mic-rhymes, Badu and her “-izm” moved further into what Ifi Amadiume (1987, 1989, 1997) calls “matriarchy,” African matriarchy—via Kemet, Yorubaland, Dahomey—when she staged an appearance with dead prez on New York City’s WBLS as part of “The Wendy Williams Experience.” A portion of this interview was poorly transcribed in Honey magazine (October 2003, 109), or its “Wendy’s World” column which was for a time





a regular feature. Before, on “. . . & On,” Badu had proclaimed herself the envy of women and the ruler of men in true braggadocio fashion. Now, mocking rumors about her sex life concerning male emcees—Andre 3000 from Outkast, Common and M-1 from dead prez, Badu surprises and upstages Williams in a bit of guerilla theater on the radio. She tells her that she is actually sexing all three: “I have three boyfriends now . . . It’s a new philosophy. We’re trying to bring it to the United States . . . an African tradition from the Bambula tribe.” To belong, Black men have to go through “Badu Boot Camp” and, if they stay the course, they must obey “42 Laws of Baduality.” (A reference to these “Laws” would close “Amerykan Promise,” comically, in 2008, before “The Healer” on New Amerykah, Part One.) A “shock-jock” in shock and disbelief, Williams asks Badu when was the last time someone “ran up in her.” Badu replies: “Ran up in me? We don’t use those types of terms.” Indeed, as Williams poses questions about marriage, mindless sex, and sending Black children to white schools, Badu scorns them all as an “American way of thinking.” Though Williams claims we are “Americans,” by virtue of being in “America,” Badu insists: “Well, maybe you are. But we not. I’m not. We aren’t.” It’s “an African mentality” that Badu aggressively upholds. Asked about masturbation, she embraces “mind sex” as an alternative: “Well, I don’t have to [masturbate]. Cuz I have a certain kind of mind sex that I use now. I don’t have to do any physical kinds of things. I can just feel good all day, all the time. Actually, I’m coming now” (Badu in Williams 2003, 109). “Mind Sex” is a song off dead prez’s debut album, Let’s Get Free (2000); and both of its members are in the studio to support Badu’s “polyandry” (i.e., multiple sexual or marital partners or “polygamy” for women). Bambula men say what they are trained to say, it is said. They can’t have sex of any kind with anyone other than Badu, while Badu can have sex with anyone she likes, according to her. One of the revolutionary duo, stic.man answers a question about having kids: “I got a million children in Africa that I’m gon free.” M-1 confirms: “We jus support tha Sistas. It’s all love to tha Real Black Girls. We also gon be out here, you know, making sure that we holdin it down for tha souljaz and tha warriors out here. So that when it’s time for us to really be able to hold some real true Sistas down, we gon be able to do it correctly.” Andre 3000 is described by Badu as a mere keeper of sperm—almost as in a beehive. (Her son with him is named Seven, “a divine number that cannot be divided” [Badu in McIver 2002, 69]; she would once state that she will have six more children to make seven overall [139–140], as if to make her Mawu-Lisa incarnate.) There is allegedly an assistant somewhere who keeps records of all the physical sex had among Bambula, but these records are private, Badu reveals—reprising, in effect, the personal life of the late, great Dinah Washington (“Queen of the Blues,” “Queen of the Jukebox”) with her seven official husbands and many, many boyfriends.7 Then, abruptly, Badu informs a dazed and confused Williams: “This is getting boring.” This gossipy “American” mentality is boring. Badu closes this broadcast experience with the same words that began it, for her: “Peace and love, everybody. Peace and love. Incense, candles [finger-snaps]” (Badu in Williams 2003, 109). The transcript of this exchange published in Honey bore this sour subtitle: “Erykah Badu Takes Mind Games to a Cosmic Level” (Williams 2003, 109). At any rate, there is no doubt that the body politics of Baduizm are what



94


95

disturb certain status quo, “American” mentalities here, so dramatically, inasmuch as they disturb, unsettle and negate certain notions of “consciousness” in the absence of a sexual consciousness which may be more readily thought with regard to Lil’ Kim, “QUEEN B@#$H.”

Wendy Williams was obviously thrown off by this unexpected show of raunch. It would have been a different story altogether had this whole display come from The Notorious K.I.M. From her, raunch is expected (and, wrongly, little else). From Erykah Badu, audiences expect “consciousness,” or what passes for “consciousness” in a society that confuses middle-class “respectability” and puritanical hypocrisy for “consciousness.” Theirs is an anti-sexual “consciousness” which conceals, when possible, its own “guilty pleasures” in confined, concealed, privatized spaces. From these spaces, Black and other promoters of Puritanism can emerge to denounce those who are bold enough to renounce or “not give a fuck” about white bourgeois “morality,” to expose it even as immoral itself. It must take such boldness to see Erykah Badu’s brilliant sexuality, to recognize and endorse Lil’ Kim’s carnal, conscious intelligence. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of “bold” that “Wendy Williams” is. This is not to say that Williams hasn’t been enormously influenced by HipHop’s “QUEEN B@#$H,” her consciousness. Indeed, after one good look at her “autobiography” or “memoir,” Wendy’s Got the Heat (2003), which was written “with” Karen Hunter, Williams will prove to be an industry imitator in disguise. The book cover displays a faux-subtitle full of sexual innuendo: “The Queen of Radio Bares All.” On the back of the book jacket, she is dubbed “shock jock diva” and “radio gossip guru” as well as “Queen of Urban Radio.” Writ large, from cover to cover, there is the lyrical narrative that leads The Notorious K.I.M. to La Bella Mafia (2003) as “Ms. [Frank] Whyte,” “Queen of New York,” for her third solo album. Williams is a deejay or disc jockey/radio personality: Wendy’s Got the Heat includes a chapter entitled “Queen of New York,” while Lil’ Kim is an emcee who has assumed this and many other titles on the mic. Still, if the rapper’s Brooklyn street origins are the stuff of urban legends, Williams is proud of the contrary as her publicity demonstrates: Her story begins in a conservative middle-class black family in predominately white Ocean Township, New Jersey, far from the glitz and grit of urban and hiphop culture. Her family sent her to college more with the intention of seeing her become a respected journalist, wife and mom than launch a successful career in one of the most male-dominated and competitive media industries of all.

Williams’s relationship to Hip-Hop is fundamentally ambivalent. Hip-Hop is her niche, what works for her, her trade, her occupation and preoccupation in gossip. It is hardly what she lives, as Hip-Hop artists define it historically. It is far from what she would ever claim or want to live, admittedly, beyond corporate, commercial radio. As a result, Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H” has always been a key



(DJ) Wendy Williams: Shock Jock “Heat” or Smoke and Mirrors?


figure for courtship and condemnation in “The Wendy Williams Experience,” by any name. The opening lines of Wendy’s Got the Heat speak a language dictated by rap emcees, not radio deejays on U.S. or Federal Communications Commissionregulated radio: “BITCHES AND NIGGAS EVERY DAY are practicing to do my shit. Bitches every day are eyeing this number one spot . . .” (Williams 2003, 1). What an irony this is coming from a staunch advocate of “the Queen’s English,” meaning the English of Britain’s royal empire, not Hip-Hop royalty or “QUEEN B@#$H” rhymes: “It’s fine to know all the slang and have all the street language down, but you must also be able to flip it and speak the Queen’s English” (23). Furthermore, Williams is pleased to compare her family to The Cosby Show in “Chapter 1: Wendy from Wayside” (14), “BITCHES AND NIGGAS” notwithstanding. Her “ability” to sound “white” (or “Anglo-North American”) in speech has served her well throughout the years chronicled here; and, today, her big, off-beat voice is certainly her trademark. One article in The Source magazine dubbed it “Valley-Girl-meets-Jersey-Girl ‘White diction,’ ” noting that despite it Williams “misspeaks often” (Marrero 2004, 87). She also seems to invent lingo for rap audiences, rather creatively, like “fabulosity,” for instance (Williams 2003, 10; 91). This is a piece of what can make her routine infectious given a vacuum in the medium of mainstream radio, alongside her fetishizing fixation on sexual scandal. In any case, the colonial cultural values that are inseparable from her promotion of white English (“English English”) show her engagement with Hip-Hop (“BITCHES AND NIGGAS”) to be self-serving and full of contradictions. It is impossible to read Wendy’s Got the Heat without recognizing Lil’ Kim’s signature role in Hip-Hop. A “deejay” to her “emcee,” Williams claims she stands head and shoulders above other women in her male-dominated industry, in “the media capital of the world” (3), so much so that other “bitches and niggas” scheme on her majestic spot; and, unlike her, they will use sexual favors to get it (4). Already verses from The Notorious K.I.M. (2000) resound, such as those from the title track (“Girls say they different but, uh, see . . . / in all actuality they wanna be me”) and “Who’s Number One?” (“tryna take my crown / I ain’t letting that go down”). Cameoing on Black Rob’s “Espacio,” she said of would-be competitors: “[I] listen to they rhymes and say, ‘Didn’t I say that?’ ” (Life Story, 2000). Most famously, there would be her infamous Mobb Deep remix verse for “Quiet Storm” (“Bitchez suck cock jes to git to tha top / I put a hunnet percent in every line I drop”). Williams even says she was a “macktress” in college (31), if none of her detailed relationships suggest this is the truth. Her loud voice was thought to break protocol in broadcasting because she was a woman who “wasn’t talking soft and quiet storm-ish” (148), meaning the late-night radio format rather than Havoc and Prodigy’s Murda Muzik (1999). When the trail is blazed, moreover, “Wendy wanna-bes” are blasted as “cheap imitations” (3). This is the emcee’s tradition, her major axe to grind. By the time we get knee-deep in “Chapter 5: Queen of New York,” the catalogue is complete. That much is clear both before and after La Bella Mafia’s release, its early leaks and official rotation. Both deejays and emcees can “bite” Lil’ Kim’s style, shamelessly.



96

97

How peculiar is it that she is not mentioned much in Wendy’s Got the Heat; and when she is mentioned, thrice, this mention is negative in character? She leads the list of her historic “battles,” first of all: “whether it was me and Lil’ Kim, me and Treach, me and Mary J. Blige, me and Sally Richardson” (149). She rounds out proof of Sean Combs’s power in New York radio before William’s corporate ouster: “If you turned on HOT-97 during any given hour, six of the eight songs played would be songs either produced or performed by Puffy. From Biggie, to 112 to Total to Faith to Mase, to Junior Mafia and Lil’ Kim” (153). Lastly, it is “Big Momma” who gets sniped for being “Lil’ ” when height and weight are an issue: “I don’t have to work nearly as hard as the small girls to get noticed . . . . Big girls need to know it and work it. You will find that your height speaks volumes. You are way more of a presence than Lil’ Kim in some pasties” (228). The deejay not only “bites” the emcee, herself, “practicing to do [her] shit,” but she is even worse—in Hip-Hop terms—a “hater.” The envy or resentment is graphic, if sometimes subtextual or subliminal. A “wannabe” and “imitator” on the mic, she schemes on this other woman’s crown in a separate but centrally related field. This must be why no “QUEEN B@#$H” contemporaries (unlike earlier rappers Boss and Salt-n-Pepa) merit any mention at all in Wendy’s Got the Heat. The deejay’s imitation is far from faithful to the original, however. Its sexual politics are terribly conservative, right in line with her proclaimed Cosby Show background and pride. Upfront, Williams confirms that it was “the gay rapper” rumor which took her popularity to a higher level, even though she insists that mainstream society’s preoccupation with it missed the point altogether: You’re not supposed to sit there and try to figure out who the gay rapper is but learn from the message of the story. But all people cared about was, “Who is the gay rapper?” That wasn’t the question. Because going to industry parties I can point to two handfuls of gay rappers and another five fingers of lesbians. This is so commonplace in the business. (146)

Is she sharper than many of her critics allow, serious shortcomings and all? Williams may distinguish herself from business-as-usual homophobia by repeatedly warning against stereotypes. For her, “femininity” does not characterize the male figures in question. It was the wider, white-dominated society that would reduce “gay rapper” gossip to merely one “mysterious” person. Its fairly obvious fantasies of Black male penises roughing it up homoerotically in music-video porn were no less heterosexist than the “homophobia” it continues to project wholesale onto Black communities in general and Hip-Hop in particular. 8 This specific voyeuristic approach to Black male bodies is no sign of “sexual progress” among the voyeurs, whether Black or white, gay or straight. It is instead part and parcel of historically racist representations of Black sexuality as a whole under the rule of white racist imperialism. Williams fanned the flames of this “gay rapper” sweepstakes herself with both her fixation on “ruffnecks” and her systematic lack of anti-homophobia. In the main, her focus is on “gays,” not “lesbians,” and it is always negative or punitive. She never implicates her own sex in such questionings (consciously, anyway), despite her personal obsession with the bodies





of Black female celebrities and what she calls that nasty affair between her “and the white lady” (59), which is how she describes her longtime cocaine addiction (67–83). Instead, her sexual obsession reads like a complex fed by the pulp fiction of Terry McMillan and E. Lynn Harris. Any Black male desirous of another Black male is only cause for crisis and alarm. It would be entirely neurotic were neurosis not redefined by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as the colonized elite’s anxious assimilation of the sick colonial sexualities of Europe. So where is the absolutely grand transgression of all sex and gender conventions practiced by The Notorious K.I.M. in Williams’s Wayside, NJ, middle-class imitation? The sexual politics of men and women get worse in Wendy’s Got the Heat. “Chapter 5: Big-Body Girl” states baldly: “I’m too strong a woman to want to be the boss at home. I believe the man needs to be the man of the house” (Williams 2003, 232). Williams claims a “Queen of New York” title to bow down before any man who would make her his “wife.” She continues this line of thought in “Chapter 15: Advice Hour,” when she explains: “I have a rule about other men: No hugs or pictures with men . . . who aren’t my father, brother, husband—you get the idea” (240). Williams may even do The Cosby Show a disservice in the end. Even it pretended to be more progressive than this: “In my household we are very old-fashioned . . . I have the woman’s role . . . . And I do my woman’s work. . . . His job ultimately is to make me feel safe and protected. He is the man and that’s his primary job. I am the little woman” (253–254). This is what it means to be “royalty” in her book. While Williams imitates scorn for those who imitate her style, visual as well as verbal, she ignores a key part of this Hip-Hop equation: Lil’ Kim is equally scornful of these imitators’ inability to accurately simulate or even truly understand her erotic art of rhyme. They can only “resemble” on The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Single Black Female.” They are mere “karaoke stars” on La Bella Mafia’s “This Is Who I Am.” On “Hold It Now,” she asks will the “real” Kim stand up because there are “frauds” all around. And on “Can’t F**k wit Queen Bee,” these imitators study her from Hard Core to The Notorious K.I.M. but never master her majestic flow. While these jabs may have been directed at other rappers, Lil’ Kim would later address “that Wendy Williams shit” expressly on The Naked Truth’s “Shut Up, B***h” (2005). Evidently, Williams is not up to the task of any genuine Hip-Hop engagement beyond her professional exploitation of it. Though she tried to play along with Badu’s “Bambula” blitz, which took place on her own terrain around the time of her new book’s publication, she was truly blown away. The title of her next “Wendy’s World” feature (“Erykah Badu Takes Mind Games to a Cosmic Level”) betrayed real resentment; and this was just the tip of the iceberg. She told The Source magazine that their exchange showed Badu “for what she really is—a complete lunatic” (Marrero 2004, 87). Were this true, it would not say much about Williams’s audience or fan base. It would reflect a chronic illiteracy in art, consciousness and politics of sexuality among an audience of naïve consumers, not Hip-Hop aficionados. What’s more, Williams could not disdain Badu in person as she might other artists, for whom she has shown little respect intellectually, thanks to her stock middle-class pretensions. The dignified Badu can



98

99

be a notoriously intimidating interview for those whom she does not respect. This is why Williams has to criticize her after the fact and off the air. She calls her “Queen of the Dirty Backpack Club,” childishly, misreading her “-izm” and ignoring her on-going, sexual-political mutations. For the record, Badu would not bother with much of a response: “What Wendy does is ridiculous . . . . Her whole objective is making the artist look however she wants. No matter what you say, she gonna talk about you anyway” (Marrero 2004, 87). She shows Williams some of the same disdain that Williams shows Hip-Hop overall. Wendy’s Got the Heat even “jokes” at one point: “Note: Rappers don’t read, so nobody tell them what I’m saying, okay? Because I still want to have something to talk about” (Williams 2003, 167). Who is Williams talking about, exactly? The radio deejay makes it clear that her playlist is strictly commercial, as she recycles racist stereotypes about the most mainstream rap possible. Still, she is not supposed to be responsible herself for not playing or knowing any rappers who are not, purportedly, “ignorant” or “illiterate.” How amazing would it be if in reality they could write rhyme after rhyme, supplying her a job in the process, without reading? She claimed not to know who dead prez was when Badu visited her studio with them. So whose lyricism has she studied to relate to books, writings, or literature, literately? Who could accuse Erykah Badu or M-1 and stic.man of not reading? Do they not count as rappers on “HOT-97” or WBLS? How much does Williams read compared to them? What does she read in relation to them? Why would “literacy” in a white “Queen’s English” matter for an African oral art form anyway? On air, Badu corrected Williams when she referred to them as “Americans.” She and dead prez insist on African identity without compromise. In Honey, their “tribe” was transcribed as “African-American” despite their insistent correction (Badu in Williams 2003, 109): Black class politics play out in Black popular culture, predictably. The “mistake” is a result of Williams’s inability or refusal to read, write and think beyond a royal British empire and the racist “American” empire that follows it, while she all but plagiarizes Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H” brazenly in a book co-written or ghost-written by someone else.9

Sex-Radical Royals ~ Royal Sex-Radicals I come from a long line of matriarchs. (Erykah Badu, “Getting Spiritualized with Neo-Soul’s Boho Big Mama” [2008]) I’m a queen, and I can’t say I’ve come across a full-blown king. (Lil’ Kim, Maxim: “Lil’ and Loud” [2002])

White Western imperialism is well-known for depicting African rulers as “ruthless” and “despotic,” while enshrining their own, often incestuous monarchies as “divinely” ordained if not “democratic.” These concepts of monarchy and democracy are culturally specific, extremely repressive—indeed, racist,





class-elitist, sexist, and so on. As James Boggs would insist in “Integration and Democracy: Two Myths That Have Failed” and “Democracy: Capitalism’s Last Battle-Cry,” chapters from his Racism and the Class Struggle (1970), Western “democracy” has oppressed more people globally than any other political system in world history. Whether “Ancient Greek” or “Modern European,” it has rested on slavery as well as other forms of social, economic and political domination. For colonial slavery and neo-slavery as well, Western monarchy would create “African” “kings” and “chiefs” in the image of European despots or tyrants as a way of maximizing and justifying white racist rule over nonwhite populations in and out of Africa. Crucially, anti-imperialist historians and scholar-activists, Cheikh Anta Diop (1959, 1960) and Walter Rodney (1969, 1972) have exposed this mis-representation of African politics, unearthing a far more populist or people-oriented set of institutions than previously recognized after the onslaught of Europe. Oba T’Shaka even affirms a “royal democracy” on the continent in Return to the African Mother Principle of Male and Female Equality (1995). For also unearthed are institutions of matriarchy and “mother-right” erased by the West’s invention of “kings” and “chiefs” in Africa for white-supremacy and patriarchy. This history and “herstory” are epitomized in all the work of Ifi Amadiume. She refers to Africa as “that continent of matriarchy,” writing against class rule and continued Europeanization: “Hinterland Africa proper which had such structures which favored the rule of goddesses, matriarchy, queens, etc., is indeed still present with us” (Amadiume 1989, xvii). This reality cannot be reduced to the image of wicked despots created in and for white racist imaginations, especially since “kings” and “chiefs” regularly consist of “queens,” “market queens,” and “queen mothers,” before conquest and its “making of men” as documented by Oyeronke Oyewumí, for example, in The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997). An Ivorian writer and painter, Véronique Tadjo employs just such Pan-African vision to draw a radically different picture of “royalty” in her children’s book, If I Were a King, If I Were a Queen (2002). The tale begins by capturing dreams of power based on self-centered, if not infantile, social desires: “If I were a king, I would have a huge palace and a big treasure. Many people would try their best to please me.” “If I were a queen, I would sit all day long doing nothing and drinking fresh coconut juice.” This is the contemporary, prevailing image of monarchy, of course. Yet an egalitarianism of gender is suggested, or promoted, as male and female monarchs alternate, structurally, forming a complete sexual composite: “If I were a king, I would not have to go to school anymore. I would just wave my sword and order everybody around.” “If I were a queen, I would be as tall as my mother. Nobody would dare tell me off! I would have anything I wanted.” Then, all of sudden, mid-story, the desire for royal status shifts toward dreams that are based on politics of change or transformation; and these desires are more selfless than selfish: “If I were a king, I would fight to protect nature and I would respect the animal kingdom.” “If I were a queen, I would paint cities with bright colors. I would let flowers grow and create lots of parks so people could dream and play in the grass” (Tadjo 2002, n.p.).10



100

101

These politics are outright revolutionary by story’s end: “If I were a king, I would abolish poverty. There would be no street children, no more beggars.” “If I were queen, I would immediately stop all wars.” This is not the contemporary, Western image of monarchy at all. For anti-colonialism, it could call to mind a Black monarch such as “Queen Nzinga” who fought off Portuguese slave-raiding in the 1600s in Ndongo or what we now know as Angola; or Yaa Asantewa, “Queen Mother” who led the Ashanti against British imperialism in Ghana of the nineteenth century; or Kentake Amanirenas, “Queen Candace of Nubia,” who turned back “Alexander the Great” from Kush, Ethiopia—atop a war elephant, ahead of her greater military formation—around 332 BC.11 Of today’s Côte d’Ivoire, Tadjo illustrates If I Were a King, If I Were a Queen herself with enchanting portraits bearing captions such as “A king from Dahomey” (then Morocco, South Africa, Congo, and Uganda) and “A sultan from Nigeria.” There is “A queen from Ghana,” Gabon and Egypt as well as “A princess from Rwanda.” A king and queen from the Ivory Coast grace the cover of this text that climaxes with great imagination: “If I were a king, I would ask children to be friends with one another and I would ask grown-ups to do their best to stay united.” “If I were queen, there would be no North nor South, no East nor West. There would just be one nation, one world” (Tadjo 2002). In the end, to be regal, majestic or royal is to be revolutionary, Pan-African and humane: If I Were a King, If I Were a Queen therefore compliments the general treatment of love, desire, and passion found in abundance in the writing and painting of Véronique Tadjo. In the African diaspora, among the masses in particular, Black rhetorics of royalty trump “democracy,” and slavery, whether colonial or neocolonial, repeatedly. For such a people, who experience no “democratic freedom” in the West, a “sovereign” is often neither a despot nor a head of state, but it can be everyman and every-woman in a new formulation that clearly draws on older, African conceptions of politics and social being. This royalism is not class elitism, necessarily; nor is it uniformly patrilineal or patriarchal. One Lil’ Kim statement made in a conscientiously anti-homophobic context (for an interview with Next Magazine: The Hippest Guide to Gay New York) is quite typical: “At the end of the day we’re all queens and kings anyway, so why not celebrate it?” (Lil’ Kim in R.L. Davis 2003, 13). Despite the English language terminology, the original repressive logic of monarchism (proper) is literally subverted as queens come before kings in her “QUEEN B@#$H” matriarchy (her “Big Momma” “motherright). Unlike the more or less rare European queen, this queendom would not rule over a patriarchy of kings or princes as some sort of substitute-kingdom, succeeding on an incidental, individual basis until the next male heir is imposed. Many an African queendom boasts a radical sexual politics instead. This queen is a queen because she runs things in the interests of other queens anointed in and by the massive: Lil’ Kim insists that she is “Queen of all queens” (on “I’m Human,” from The Notorious K.I.M.) because she represents for her sex like no other in a maliciously male-dominated world. The blue-blood, patrilineal, and patriarchal, Western individualist conception of royalty folds in the face of such Black popular expression.





As for Erykah Badu, crowned “Queen of Neo-Soul” at the outset of her career, she confronts a particular set of problems more and more, the more erotic and less “conscious elite” her artistic performance gets. There is no “King of Neo-Soul,” revealingly, and he isn’t dead. “He” simply never was. Even Wendy Williams refuses to be a royal sidekick in broadcasting, as much as she fails to grasp or reproduce the sexual politics of Badu and Lil’ Kim. Badu would return to her brief radio stint in “The Learning Curve,” a feature in Vibe magazine scripted and photo-shot with a classroom motif. The article’s “Lesson #1” quotes her, comically: “I start rumors about myself, like, I got some breast implants, or I got a wig snatched off my head in public. Getting in the news helps move units. Maybe next I’ll tell people that I eat rocks or something. You have to keep them wondering.” Her WBLS appearance was still on gossip minds: “I went up there with the idea of saying things to be entertaining and fun . . . . But people took what I said seriously” (Badu in Green 2004, 96). Few seemed to recall that the event took place amid promotion for Wendy’s Got the Heat, not just Worldwide Underground (on which a script encircling Badu’s album cover image reads, “ ’Freakquency is born and Neo-Soul is dead”), when Williams was spreading “freaky” rumors which Badu suddenly claims to have started herself. XXL Presents Hip-Hop Soul picks up where Vibe left off, although it darts back in a sensationalist direction. Its feature, “Let’s Get Serious” asks if Badu is “a heaven-sent angel of righteousness or some sort of voodoo sex goddess” (Thompson 2004, 51). As usual, “righteousness” is opposed to sexuality in a visibly racialized fashion; there is “heaven” for “angels” (or puritans) and a “voodoo” slur for everyone else. So much for the Haitian Revolution at XXL. Then, there is the table of contents which is where the narrative of sexism begins: “Ask yourself: ‘Who is Erykah Badu?’ No, really. Who is Erykah Badu? Is she the Mother Nature of neo-soul or a sex goddess who feasts on the hearts of MCs?” (9). “MC’s” are male, by definition, for them; and females eat at their hearts like “savages.” This pretends to be “Hip-Hop” journalism. It is not Badu’s “intellect,” art or music that attracts these questions; it’s her “personal” life. The Williams rumors were about her allegedly “pussy-whipping” some famous male rappers, in short. Badu says it’s just a “big misconception,” before continuing on: “It’s cute, though: I’m a pimp. . . . And I’m not telling my secret of how I turn these men out, because other women will do it. So I’m going to just let it be. Good work, Andre, keep on ‘spreading.’ Common, you know how I feel. Remember what I told you” (Badu in Thompson 2004, 51).12 She both acknowledges her like for “hundred-dollar billers” (52), or hustlers, and having “brought consciousness in” as a “trend” (51). This is stated with something like regret since that trendy notion of consciousness is clearly flawed. Pimpstress and hustler-connoisseur, Badu is adamant: “Nothing has changed about me. . . . But I don’t know if people know that, because there are so many different things. I’m the queen of hip-hop soul, I’m the queen of neosoul, I’m the queen of something . . . something . . . something I don’t wanna be. Well, if I’m the queen of all this, then give me some money” (52). Critics cannot get it right, for her, whether or not her own account is somewhat revisionist. This “Get Money” talk is familiar; and if the singer may downplay her former complicity in this situation, she nevertheless moves on.



102

103

In “Let’s Get Serious,” superficialities of “consciousness” were cut up even further in retrospect: “I think in 1997 when I came out, certain people were looking for a savior in the music industry, a savior for their spirits. So when I decided to do what I felt, to naturally change how I look, I figured out people weren’t actually looking for a savior, they were looking for someone who looked like one” (Badu in Thompson 2004, 51). This is key. Visually, Badu is presented in a series of photographs in which she sports a hat as well as hair of varying lengths. “The Learning Curve” was also accompanied by a segment entitled “Hair Wars: Vibe Takes a Look at Badu’s Most Famous Dos and Don’ts.” The cover of Baduizm is pictured with a description of her as “queen of the head wrap community.” A picture of Badu at 2000’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival is set by a description of her “dread weave.” A picture at a Central Park Summer Stage concert in 2001 shows her with a “smooth,” shaved head. From “Love of My Life’s” music video, there is a shot of Badu with “blue-tinted [cornrow] extensions.” There is commentary on the old controversy over her “dread weave,” as the cornrows get an interesting stamp of approval: “No problem here. After all, braids are accepted as fake.” Finally, we see the artist accepting her Grammy in 2003 with her dead prez T-shirt on and a “mile-high Afro wig” (Dawson 2004, 97). This segment may be pretty mindless, and typically so. Still, it makes Badu’s point about how “saviors” are identified by appearance, not substance, even when the substance is there; how “certain” people want the look of “consciousness,” the “trend” of it, rather than what would be the substance of “consciousness” itself; that is, Badu’s point is made about how completely unconscious the “conscious” routinely are when it comes to their notions of consciousness, musical and non-musical, Black, white, or otherwise. This would certainly explain why The Notorious K.I.M. could not be seen as a savior by the critical establishment or its status-quo, especially outside Hip-Hop and no less so for “Hip-Hop Soul” elites. Hers is not the “look” of “consciousness” or pseudo-consciousness championed by bourgeois and pseudo-bourgeois spectators of Black popular culture. Her look blinds these critics to the substance for which she spits and stands, as a lyricist, no matter how revolutionary her consciousness may be, because her material is so conscious in its revolutionary assault on their sexually conservative notion of consciousness and its commitment to elitist repression in the white bourgeois West. This class subject was addressed in the premiere issue of Honey with Tanya Pendleton. The interview’s title is, provocatively, “When and Where I Enter: The Lil’ Kim Story.” It recalls Anna Julia Cooper, an eminent, nineteenth-century Black female scholar-activist, if not Paula Giddings’s book, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984), although neither Cooper nor Giddings would fail to be scandalized by Lil’ Kim, her musical foremothers and most of Black working-class culture as a whole. Under an equally provocative section title, “Mary, Erykah, Lauryn, Janet, Faith, (Not) Charlie,” Lil’ Kim speaks with patience, diplomacy and persistence: I think I want to work with Lauryn. She does what she does and that’s her; I do what I do and that’s me. I love her music. . . . You know every woman needs that;




104


The R&B-oriented artists for whom these emcees provide a constant, puritanical contrast are pinpointed for a common political cause,13 even if these more commercially acceptable artists might object to her analytical identification—out of fear, shame, etc. Although sex is frequently said to be a “quick” and “shallow” road to riches, according to countless, “conscious” commentaries on Hip-Hop and R&B, it is important to note that singing actually sells more than rapping about anything, sex included, among Black female artists in particular; and this is no less the case for singers who claim to be rappers or emcees who sing secondarily. As female artists who rap exclusively are not adequately promoted, let alone easily enriched, by the North American music industry and its contradictory investment in very specific categories of rap and rappers. Lil’ Kim is far from more “commercial” than the singers she names, who have “sold” and, arguably, “sold out” more than “conscious” criticism could possibly, legitimately allow. The anti-sex line hurled at her (and others) is a hypocritical falsity. And utterly exposed again is this notion of “consciousness” that is simply about specific politics of race, sex and class, politics which are systematically hostile to her sexual consciousness and its Black revolutionary promise. The Lauryn Hill reference deserves further discussion. On her MTV Unplugged 2.0 (2002), she offered some soul-searching self-scrutiny and self-critique which her “conscious” audience would have never provided without her. However, this shift does not call for a Lil’ Kim comparison à la Erykah Badu. For all of her movement away from artistic postures associated with her first solo album, The Mis-Education of Lauryn Hill (1998), not to mention her work with The Fugees, this movement steers her into ever more strict, Christian-Biblical postures, sexually speaking. While she can mobilize a fierce, Black spirituality to condemn the immorality of “Babylon,” its empire, this moralism does not free itself from Western Puritanism or sexual oppression. She would denounce Catholic sexual scandal at the Vatican, in concert, bravely, but never the cultural code of repression that is its foundation. Moreover, Hill had misused Carter G. Woodson’s classic, anti-elitist concept of “mis-education” to suggest it was the “streets” that threatened to miseducate (which was to say, sexualize) her, as a young girl, not so much “Babylon” schools of white racist imperialism. Unfortunately, hence, there is not much of a sexual-political difference between “old” and “new” Lauryn Hill, as of yet. There is a noticeable degree of confusion, too, as she goes back and forth between in Trace magazine: “When I was wearing tight, short clothes, when I was younger, it wasn’t to tempt men. It was the expression of art, and how we felt about the history of the body.” An ambivalent, relatively guilt-ridden desire for recognition leads her to claims of fame that may affiliate her with The Notorious



the world needs that . . . . That song “Doo Wop (That Thing)” is cool, because she’s putting us onto these men. “Women, you betta watch out.” That’s not so much of a different record than what I talk about. She can sing—If I could sing like her, I’d be selling four or five million records. What’s the difference in Lil’ Kim singing “Queen Bitch” or Foxy with “Ill Na Na”? It’s the same thing. We’re just more street with ours . . . I don’t see why people always downgrade us. We just approach things different. (Lil’ Kim in Pendleton 1999, 58)

105

K.I.M. after all: “I think my contributions, and what I projected through my own identity, changed a lot of things. I remember wearing a skirt on stage, and that was absolutely illegal in hip hop” (Hill in Grunitzky 2005, 94). This connection is every bit as important for a later, extremely poignant observation on hard times: “I was young, gifted and black in a world where you’re not supposed to know so much, and that brought out the hatred of others. I felt like Bob Marley in Trenchtown, a royal seed in the hood” (97). What’s most striking about Lil’ Kim’s commentary in Honey on both Hill and Badu is her self-consciously scrupulous handling of this matter of negative competition and comparisons scripted for these three watershed, “young gifted and Black” musicians, all bursting forth in the same period of time. It is the openly, affirmatively sexual artist who is savvy and ethical enough to be respectful of other styles of female artists who may show no respect to her because of their attitudes or anxieties about sexuality, which is routinely and wrongly identified with anything but savvy and ethics. Interestingly, Irene d’Almeida speaks on the Ivorian Tadjo (not her If Were a King, If I Were a King, but À Vol d’Oiseau or As the Crow Flies) in Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (1994): “Writing has allowed women to speak the unspeakable, to utter words, ideas, concepts that are forbidden to them within the conventions laid out by patriarchal society. Sex, desire, passion, and love are topics that women are expected to pass over in silence” (d’Almeida 1994, 162). So what happens when the “African woman writing” is a young “Black female” writer of rhymes in an oral tradition placed in the diaspora, broadcasting her “unspeakable” ideas on sex, desire, passion, and love (romantic or non-romantic) well beyond those spaces affiliated with “great [bourgeois] literature,” or its confined study in Western academia? The answer in the case of The Notorious K.I.M. is unambiguous. Her sexually militant HipHop lyricism is met with extreme resistance and puritanical outrage by certain “men” and “women” alike, most especially in the “middle-class” which claims to appreciate “literature,” “free speech,” and “social justice.” Lil’ Kim destroys their emptiness of silence, regardless. Relatedly, Werewere Liking is another writer discussed by d’Almeida who is no less relevant to such royal sex-radicalism, given her whirlwind of a text, Elle Sera de Jaspe et Corail (Journal d’une Misovire): Chant Roman (1983) or It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral (Journal of a Misovire): A Song-Novel (2000). The fictive author of this fictive journal presides over the rantings of two male characters who represent “macho civilization” (48), and a most wretched, “macho” colonization, at once. A “misovire” (combining Greek and Latin as a new coinage) could be defined as a “man-hater,” since a misogynist is a “woman-hater” and a “misanthrope” is conventionally defined as “a hater of mankind.” The fact that Liking had to invent such a term is a sure sign that society as we know it cultivates men who hate women but cannot imagine or legitimize women who hate men, in turn, for their systematic oppression and exploitation of women. But this is not how Liking defines “misovire.” For her, she is “a woman who can’t find an admirable man” (d’Almeida in Liking 2000, xix). This is certainly in line with the idea of a “female misanthrope,” if “mankind” signifies a male-dominated society defined by “misogyny.” It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral is drafted to imagine





“the next humankind” (Liking 2000, 69), a new race of beings in Africa. This “race” is not characterized by “skin” or “region.” It refers instead to a “community of Vision and Aspiration” (14). The visionary “misovire” is our leader in this revolution in mind, body and soul. She should help move us away from a place where men “have no balls” and women “are real shitfaces” (3): “the men were oozing with shame with fear and with heat . . . . They will pour these out into their women who will swallow them with nauseated revulsion disguised as an orgasm and this will turn them into misovires . . .” (62–63). Liking’s is a struggle beyond what she calls the hollowness of “equality emancipation feminism” (67). The “fiery dream inside” the “body” (4) of her “misovire” is about humanity and a divinity connected to “a desire for life, a desire for art, the art of desire” (46). She commits herself to the “fight” to “taste true pleasure again” (90–91), a divine pleasure and art officially incompatible with gender and all established “-ism’s.” This text is for a time when, as Liking imagines it, “I am no longer a misovire and there are no more misogynists” (112).14 And in her “Song-Novel” this means, voluptuously: “The Lover of the next thoroughbred generation is choosing consciousness” (92). The “literary” Liking who broke ground as a Black woman writer in French-colonized Africa of the 1970’s started her career at sixteen as a singer (d’Almeida in Liking 2000, ix); and like Hip-Hop, It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral rejects any boundary between “oral” and “written” traditions (xxi) and the elitism that this boundary more often than not inscribes. As a matter of fact, Liking is a multifaceted artist defying description. She writes plays and poetry in addition to various forms of fiction. She paints. She is a theatrical and cinematic actress and a director of theatrical plays. She writes on art and literature as a critic or scholar, proudly unschooled by French colonial mis-education. She also makes jewelry from materials gathered across all Africa (ix). This extreme versatility that is familiar to a host of Hip-Hop artists manifests itself in “Ki-Yi Village,” a cooperative community in Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire; it involves actors, costume designers, dancers, musicians, painters, puppeteers, and sculptors. While Liking is Bassa woman from Cameroon, this is a Pan-African community that caters to African youth of far from privileged backgrounds. “Ki-Yi” means “Ultimate Knowledge,” moreover, as in “the fifth element” of Hip-Hop according to the Universal Zulu Nation. Her work constantly mocks academic egos in favor of traditional and alternative modes of thought expressed, for example, by her singing group: “Les Reines Mères” or “The Queen Mothers.” The “consciousness” chosen by this “lover” of a “thoroughbred generation” is not the puritanical class “consciousness” of the Western bourgeoisie, patriarchy or the royal rulers of white-supremacist world domination. Conclusion Hip-Hop! Rap! I love rap—in the national languages. What they say is found neither in the press nor in books nor in film. From the point of view of musicality and the use of instruments, they have reinvented something. Yet rap is not a new thing among us. We have a lot of names or appellations for it, one of



106

107

which is the Kébétou. In the Kébétou, as soon as people get together, there is one or two who start to speak and then the others respond. But, actually, rap is the best of the musics listened to by the youth. They started calling me “le vieul jeune,” “the old-young man,” because I am in it—among them. They nicknamed me Ousmane-the-Axe! Also, there are the texts of my films that they sing—Guelwaar and all the others. Rap is a music of the future. But the people who are older than I am, politically, they don’t want to listen. If you speak Wolof or Toucouleur or Bambara—whew!—it’s the baddest of what anyone could ever say on matters of democracy and expression. I prefer rap in the national languages to French. It’s a music that should enter the university, as a part of the curriculum. The mixture of sounds come calling from different musics of different cultural horizons and the intonations of the respondants come from different cultural horizons as well. (Ousmane Sembène, “African Cinema,” Dakar, Senegal [2005])15

Whether “misovires” precisely or not, “Hip-Hop Queens” come to mind again as these cultural and political links across writing, visual arts and music get increasingly profound: Werewere Liking appears in a caravan of poets traveling from Gorée Island in Senegal to Timbuktu in Tara: Search for the Word (2000) by Fatou Kandé, who also films True School (2008a), a documentary on rap in Senegal with Waru Studios, even as it is her mentor and Hip-Hop enthusiast Ousmane Sembène who is hailed as an original architect of “African Cinema of Liberation” along with Haile Gerima of Ethiopia and Med Hondo of Mauritania. These pioneering filmmakers represent a trinity of sorts on the continent much like DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash represent a pioneering trinity of “Hip-Hop Revolution” in the Americas. Sembène’s sexual politics are well-established, work after work. In “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” Toni Cade Bambara writes of Gerima’s sexual radicalism on celluloid or in classics such as Bush Mama (1976), an urban political drama set in Watts, California (Bambara 1996, 89–138). Hondo is most well-known for his epic adaptation of Abdoulaye Mamani’s novel, Sarraounia: Le Drame de la Reine Magicienne (1980), a production that speaks marvelously to many of the stances of Lil’ Kim and Erykah Badu, musical icons and matriarchs.16 In sum, despite false separations—based on a falsifying rhetoric of consciousness, Lil’ Kim and Badu both speak rhetorics of royalty for serious, sexual-political ends. In the African diaspora, they call on material reaching far beyond monarchies born in Britain or Europe. Their musical queendoms are collective and corrective in spirit, by definition, neither exceptional nor individualist when compared to the kingdoms of patriarchy. They are by no means elitist in some blue blood-driven sense of family or divinity. Their whole purpose is to effect transformation among a people subject not to their own will, but to an altogether alien and racist-sexist rule. The reign of racism is one of sexism as well. The empire of “white-supremacy” is an empire characterized by sexual racism, white “manhood” and its erotic dominion. These Hip-Hop artists embody a logical practice of matriarchy that makes them “sex-radical royals” as much as “royal sex-radicals.” In song, they are artful queens who obviously bow down to 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas




no king, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, their opposition to patriarchy in general is absolutely majestic in its aesthetics. They bring sexual militancy to and from the masses in an African orality at once contemporary and historical in its communal voice. Regal indeed, both Lil’ Kim and Badu stand out in Black popular music, standing among Blues foremothers and Dancehall-Reggae sistren in the Americas, international in their global African significance.17 Allusion to an “African Cinema of Liberation” is far from out of place in this context. The elitist conceptions of art and literature that would wrongly rank cinema far above Hip-Hop are the very elitist conceptions of art, film and literature that are loudly condemned by the likes of Hondo, Gerima and Sembène. They all turn to film as a medium in their struggle to reach the masses of Africa. This is why Gerima develops the idea of “triangular cinema” which involves “1.) the audience/community; 2.) the filmmaker/storyteller; and 3.) the activist/critic,” equally (Gerima 1989, 68). As writers and filmmakers, or artists, they strive to create art that is thoroughly informed by the culture of these Black masses, African oral traditions, music, and overall systems of knowledge. They do not imagine their audience at home or abroad to be mindless, non-creative consumers of work produced by individuals above and beyond the community. This would be a Western bourgeois conception that would leave them alienated from Africa and Africans; and it is this conception that would deny or ignore the assorted, abundant links between their creativity and the creativity of Hip-Hop artists all over the African world. Cheryl Clarke highlights the intimate, historical relationship between Black poetry, or literature, and music—especially Black female vocalists—in “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005). She would quote Sonia Sanchez’s “for blk/wooomen: the only queens of this universe,” which would appear as a dedication page for her We a BaddDDD People (1970). If, after the Blues, as Clarke maintains, these Black Power poetics “marked the first time Black women poets opened a public discourse on sexuality” in North America, rejecting “Western values” and “Victorian middle-class morés” (Clarke 2005, 71), then there are lyrical poets in Hip-Hop—“Big Momma/Queen Bitch” chief among them—whose verse kicks down the door opened by Sanchez, Clarke and so many others coming before them.18 This music of the black masses is so potent, so magical, and such big business on a planet ruled by white capitalism, middle-class culture fiends aim to exploit it at all costs, which is why Wendy Williams from Wayside suburbia could base her whole disc jockey career on a bastardized version of it. She is compelled to imitate The Notorious K.I.M. even as she crudely casts “rap” as the creation of “illiterates” who are somehow “beneath” her. Paradoxically, she can’t read Lil’ Kim well at all; and she mis-reads Badu. This correspondence is vital: Badu has been pigeonholed as an artist of “consciousness” while Lil’ Kim has been pigeonholed as an artist of “unconscious” sexuality, puritanically. Continuing her “-izm” work beyond Worldwide Underground, Badu performed as Afrika Bambaataa at VH-1’s Hip-Hop Honors in 2006, and released New AmErykah, Part One (4th World War) early in 2008—to be followed by another live album, Lowdown Loretta Brown, and New AmErykah, Part Two (Return of the Ankh)



108

109

soon thereafter. She continues to break free of a constricting persona she never really, fully embraced.19 Artwork for New AmErykah, Part One (4th World War) by Emek included a nude image of Badu adorned by speaker cones, the largest of which blared in 3-D from her crotch—hard-core; and this is not to mention a promotional photo shot by Marc Baptiste of Badu clutching her breasts while wearing nothing but an Afro and jewelry. When she says, “I don’t read music, but I feel and understand it” (Badu in Green 2004, 96), some readers may not be surprised to hear that she “sleeps with books in her bed,” if they are likely to be surprised by another statement: “I don’t read that much, but I feel like I get information from things I hear, [and] books confirm my experiences” (Badu in McGee 2003, 70). The more or less musically recognized intelligence of Badu could be recognized because it is thought to come from books, not her people, albeit books on Africa written in European languages, perhaps by white or Western writers or scholars. As soon as she says her knowledge comes from her environment, a collective heritage of experiences, this is the second her mis-readers are confused by their conventional, non-African assumptions about “consciousness” or “intelligence.” This kind of reader cannot fathom Lil’ Kim’s brilliance for this reason, no matter how monumental it is. She is too erotic to be typecast as a “bookworm” at this point in time by such a narrow notion of “consciousness,” even though Badu would sound more and more like her as time goes on; and even though it is The Notorious K.I.M. whom Williams and others have to study to succeed in a world now hijacked by Hip-Hop orality, if not by any means always on its own terms. Along with LeRoi Jones a.k.a. Amiri Baraka’s Black Magic (1969), Sylvia Wynter would argue for a new “order of consciousness” in “Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture,” a powerful article published in June Givanni’s Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (2000). She notes that more than any other concept in European philosophy, it is the concept of “consciousness” that has defied adequate definition in the West, Europe and North America. She pinpoints its mind/body split, its basic split between “rationality” and “sexuality” (or “sensuality”) as a central part of the problem. Yet how much of great cultural and political value remains outside of our consciousness, or “unconscious” (e.g., ancestral connections, the Holy Ghost, African cosmologies), and thereby completely devalued by the rationalistic, bourgeois, individualistic notion of “consciousness” upheld worldwide now as a result of white racist imperialism? And this is why “consciousness” calls to be completely rethought in revolutionary resistance to oppressions and repressions of all kinds. A contradiction in terms for the dominant society, the concept of sexual consciousness, so militantly and passionately personified in Hip-Hop by Lil’ Kim’s “QUEEN B@$H” aesthetics, it can go a long way in this direction toward the subversion of “Western Man” and the creation of a new world order that is neither racist nor sexist nor bourgeois or class elitist nor homophobic. This would be a Black consciousness worthy of its name despite a brutally anti-Black, anti-African system of power and pleasure as well as knowledge.







“First Female King”: The Art of Morph and Monarchy in La Bella Mafia’s Beehive

I’m tha reason this rap game is unisex! (Lil’ Kim, “Heavenly Father” [La Bella Mafia, 2005])

F

amed art historian of the Black Atlantic world, Robert Farris Thompson would write “Pillar at the Crossroads: Eshù-Elégba” as the opening section of Faces of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas (1993). The principal Yoruba deity is in focus. There is a reference to the collision or combination of Kongo spiritual militance and Yoruba protocols of spiritual worship (or candomblé) in Bahia, Brazil, if this stereotypical opposition between Kongo militarism and Yoruba spiritualism should be done away with in advance. The avatar of Eshu can be cool or afire. Unfortunately, Legba might be problematically and stereotypically tied to the male phallus, exclusively, when Eshu is provocatively described as “a lover on a grand scale.” For the orisha’s love is praised in Ifá tradition’s translation as the “strongest of erections, hardest-of-all-hard-ons.” This is erotic. This is power. But not every phallus is male, necessarily, or “the quintessence of maleness” (176). Nor is every avatar, icon or embodiment of Eshù-Elégba male, or simply phallic. A “woman Exu,” one who is saluted twice in song at the close of Ella Andall’s Moforibale Esu (2007), Pomba-Gira is recognized and examined in Rio de Janeiro at the close of “Pillar at the Crossroads,” accordingly: “Some would interpret the rum and cigarettes as purely masculine gifts, for a male avatar. But the floral offering feminizes this midnight altar, made by a person in search of love and continuity” (180). Need the spirit of love on a grand scale be enslaved to anatomy, or gender, whether in Faces of the Gods or elsewhere? Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Regard Thompson’s Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA (1976), whose fourth chapter is entitled “Trickster.” There, Eshu is associated with “a mind inflamed by sexuality” (CH 4/2), someone who repels all manner of dichotomies or false oppositions. This “god” (or “goddess”) of the crossroads teaches that “all is not what it seems to be.” Eshu appears as a “king,” a “simple musician” and/or a 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


5


very young “child.” Eshu may embody social ideals as well as social taboos, making them one and the same as both a noble and an “enfant terrible” (CH 4/4). It is said that Eshu threw stones at the rich and, when merely a newborn infant, walked as a full-grown child, stating immediately after materializing on earth: “bring whatever food you have, bring it to the cross-roads, that those less fortunate can eat” (Thompson 1993, 177). When Aje Shàlùgà, the “god of money,” and others contributed in abundance and brought cowries to the crossroads, allowing everyone to feast, animals and humans alike, Eshu made a cape out of these cowries to be worn as a special, signature garment. Around the world, this money- or cowrie-cape is draped around the shoulders of altar icons of Eshu, who would become known as “Lord of Riches, King of Coin” (178). Yet, majestic and selfless, Eshu is unconfined and unrestricted by binary divisions, including those dividing “male” and female,” “king” and “queen,” if Thompson does not highlight this fact enough in his writing on Africa and art history: “Eshu is a seeming child in king’s clothing, a woman with manly calabashes of power and an elder capable of childishness.” The trickster Eshu is neither male nor female, in actuality. “Above all, the messenger of the gods,” Eshu is “humanity,” divinely incarnate (Thompson 1976, CH 4/4). All is not what it seems, no doubt, and we’ve seen it all before. This much is royally showcased in Lil’ Kim, her sexual consciousness and lyrical showcasing of Hip-Hop. Coin, money or modern-day cowrie shells are no doubt a central part of her symbolic display as much as generosity, sacrifice and a ghetto-centric sort of noblesse oblige. She is grassroots come-up, so much so that “Whoa” will claim that she showed the “hood” that the world is not just made for “rich folk” (The Naked Truth, 2005). As a musician, an “enfant terrible” who flaunts all manner of taboos, and a virtual altar to her fans, she is a monarch of gender defiance and a sexually potent anti-sexism which is part and parcel of this gender defiance, for sure. The crossroads in her case is revealed to be a crossroads of sex and gender freedom, a zone where a freedom of self-definition is practiced and propagandized time and time again in rhyme. It’s cosmic. Systematically transcendent, she can surround herself with rum, cigars or cigarettes and flowers, along with Pomba Gira (i.e., a “woman Exu” in Brazil), without any crisis of sexual or gender “confusion” at all. Sometimes “phallic” and sometimes not, a lover who is childishly little and undeniably grand, the trickster emcee will embody this orisha profile once more on La Bella Mafia (2003). It may be her most Eshuesque album to date. This Hip-Hop of hers takes freedom of self-definition, sexual definition and redefinition to new heights; and none of it should come as a surprise from the mic “god/dess” who would proclaim herself “First Female King,” after the death of The Notorious B.I.G. The “beehive” of her old Junior M.A.F.I.A. narrative becomes in this text a new place of artful metamorphosis and majestic transformation—for a regal socio-sexual or sexual-political agenda, of course.

The Black Female “Kingdom” of La Bella Mafia Besides “wild” Blues women, who made bawdy “Legba music” themselves, “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” has other symbolic foremothers, as in author, activist and



112

113

singer-songwriter Elaine Brown. It is appropriate then that “The Jump Off” from La Bella Mafia shouts: “We tha best, still there’s room for improvement / Our presence is felt like tha Black Panther movement.” The notorious Ms. Brown was and is the only woman ever to lead these Panthers as the party’s “Chairman” and de facto Minister of Defense during Huey P. Newton’s three-year exile in Cuba from 1974 to 1977. This is the story she tells in her autobiography or memoir, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (1992). She might also be read as a “Queen B(ee)” figure, herself, especially since she could be wrongly identified with a doctrine of “Pussy Power” once popular among some in her Oaklandbased Black Power organization. She rejects gender, too, in principle. On the contemporary lecture circuit, she often begins her speeches by capping on chauvinist critics of her historic leadership. Such critics accuse of her “sleeping” her way to the top of the Black Panther Party. They accuse of her of “sleeping” with BPP co-founder and Minister of Defense Newton, one-time Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver as well as Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, Deputy Defense Minister of its southern California chapter. However, Brown snaps back brilliantly. “First of all, I never slept with Bunchy . . . ,” she replies matter-of-factly with pregnant pause. She starts off her retort with comedy, a comedic refusal of any puritanical de-sexualization of her militant political intelligence. If Brown never got to get down in this way with Bunchy, she continues, it is not because she didn’t want to get down. After all, “Eldridge Cleaver slept with half of the women in the state of California. Huey P. Newton slept with the other half. None of those women ever became ‘Chairman’ of the Black Panther Party.” “So either I was qualified for the job,” Brown concludes, “or I had the best pussy in the state!”1 Serious, incisive humor aside, this is the same sister “off the block” who recorded two albums of music as a Panther; and her lyrics are hard-core: Have you ever stood in the darkness of night screaming silently you’re a man? Have you ever thought that a time would come when your voice would be heard in a noon day sun? Have you waited for so long ’til your unheard song has stripped away your very soul? Well then believe it my friend that this silence can end We’ll just have to get guns and be men! (Seize The Time’s “The End of Silence”—Words and Music by Elaine Brown, 1969).

For humanity, or “mankind” in an imposed colonial English, here is her lyrical gun fired in a song of freedom long before rap would get knocked by conventional North American critics of “violence” (which is to say, violence not condoned or perpetrated by the U.S. state and white bourgeois society at large). In



“FIRST FEMALE KING”


Figure 5.1

Table-Image of La Bella Mafia (2003) by Jonelle Davies


115

resistance, for revolution practiced by men and women as well, Elaine Brown helps pave the way for a Hip-Hop rendition of both her Black musical politics and her Black sexual politics as well. There are many respects still in which Lil’ Kim could appear to stand alone, on the shoulders of Black historical giants; and one involves her verbal assault on the very language of “men.” In the realm of music in general and rap lyricism in particular, her listeners can hear words never before uttered, recorded, or circulated in any popular commercial format. The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Aunt Dot” (2000) may bring this trend to a climax with its wicked menstrual flow. But there are many, multiple climaxes. Who had ever heard lines about testing a “bulletproof dress,” designed to keep bullets from putting holes up in the chest, before “Backstabbers” by her Junior M.A.F.I.A. (Conspiracy, 1995)? Next, there is her reference to gun fire bursting like “hymen,” as she put it for Intro’s “Funny How Time Flies” remix (New Life, 1995), pre–Hard Core (1996). Her rhyming of “uterus” and “true to this” on the remix for the Isley Brothers’ “Floatin’ on Your Love” (Mission to Please, 1996) forecasts a similar rhyme scheme found on her solo debut’s “Drugs.” The Notorious K.I.M. would later disdain fools who want to “run up in” her like a “Pap smear,” as she claims to school them year after year on its “QUEEN B@#$H II.” Calling herself a “Jean-Paul” (Gauthier) “dime” who keeps her hair done all the time, she also boasts of keeping a manicurist in the booth while she rhymes on La Bella Mafia’s “Shake Ya Bum Bum” (2003). On “Tha Beehive,” there is metaphorical mention of a “yeast infection,” and Monistat 7, when she describes the minor irritation of other jealous, hateful female rappers screaming for her attention. Is it possible that a certain generation of folk could learn what the word “clit” (or “click”) meant while listening to Lil’ Kim? How often is the term “Pap smear” heard in public, outside of a doctor’s office, let alone in a song? When is speech like “hymen” or “uterus” employed beyond rather boring, un-erotic “sex-education” classes in school? If Hip-Hop is allegedly so inherently masculine, why is its Queen B(ee) happy to have a “nail technician” or manicurist in the studio while she is “murdering” a track—with her hair done as “tight” as her rhymes, possibly sporting a bulletproof dress no less? She may have used “wife” as a verb first on “Magic Stick,” where she raps that men want to “wife” her and give her a ring or domesticate her in male-dominated marriage. She riffed on this idea in “Back Together,” a posthumous, unreleased recording with Biggie Smalls, where she swears she has “that thing” that just makes them want to sing, as a sample of Jagged Edge’s “Let’s Get Married” (J.E. Heartbreak, 2000) is mixed into her verse. Remorselessly “married to the mob,” now La Bella Mafia, Lil’ Kim sees “wifing” for what it is and refuses domestication every time. This does not mean she refuses the actual wedding ring, which lyrically she seems to always abscond with nevertheless. The marriage proposal under male domination becomes a stick-up for sexual poetic justice instead. Relatedly, “Time to Shine” took this gender-reversal further earlier (on Don’t Be a Menace . . .: The Soundtrack) in 1996; taking pot-shots at “womanizers,” it announced that people love her for her style and that “niggaz” go wild





and want to have her child. She doesn’t have their babies; these “niggaz” (whom she seems to “wife,” interestingly) are screaming to have hers. She strives to earn her reputation for “gangsta” as she popularized another new expression, “gangstress,” a word heard on the remixes for “Funny How Time Flies” and The Notorious K.I.M.’s “How Many Licks” as well as Hard Core’s “Spend a Little Doe” and in a documentary on female hustlers by Harry Davis, Gangstresses (2000), for which Lil’ Kim is interviewed as a celebrated authority. Outside her songbook, her career has made necessary the production of new industry-based terminology designed to capture who she is or what she does, particularly as others seek to follow in her footsteps. Today, it is therefore fairly common to hear language such as “rapstress” and “femcee” in addition to “gangstress” in various communications of Hip-Hop. What’s more, this explosion into public life of conventionally “female” lingo coexists in Lil’ Kim with an aggressive and gender-neutral or gender-nullifying appropriation of lingo conventionally assumed to be “male.” No guy raps as hard or as much about sports and drugs, cars or “whips,” “crime,” jail, guns and physical violence as “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” herself. She can do so in both extremely “masculine” and “feminine” modes, as it were. This is to say that Lil’ Kim is always confined by neither, never restricted by either. Her aesthetics of sexual freedom, versatility or flexibility was no doubt apparent on “Lil’ Drummer Boy,” an extended song-skit introducing The Notorious K.I.M. It features Cee-Lo (formerly of Goodie Mob, currently in Gnarls Barkley) and Redman. The scene is set in a courtroom where the spitter of Hard Core has been put on trial. Cee-Lo is her defense attorney. Hilariously, Redman is “Judge Funk Doctor Spock.” The prosecution speaks first, after a prolonged and suspenseful spate of music (forty seconds, to be precise): Lil’ Kim is officially accused of being a “menace to society,” showing a blatant disregard for “the law,” and killing six “fine” police officers “in the line of duty.” She testifies on her own behalf in verse. She approaches the bench to counteract character-assassination, comparing her case to the case of Larry Flynt, the legally embattled publisher of Penthouse magazine: “I may be hard-core but I’m not Jeffrey Dahmer.” Her critical identification here is most deft. Blacks in Hip-Hop are demonized nationwide (in nation after nation), and doubly so if they are Black females and unabashedly, affirmatively erotic (or sex-radical). But white cannibals who feed on Black flesh can roam dangerously free and, as in the case of Dahmer, even receive witting or unwitting assistance from police officers in their cannibalistic sex offenses. Magnifying the hypocrisy, marvelously, the Hip-Hop defendant will maintain that she acted out of self-defense. She was ambushed by those whom her Black Panther predecessors denounced as “pigs.” She strikes back without a pause, pulling out a “molten can” and blowing these cops off their toes, laying them down “like dominoes.” While Cee-Lo as attorney appeals to the reputed conscience of the court, Redman intervenes dramatically and unexpectedly in his capacity as judge. He dares to exercise a kind of “jury nullification” from the bench. 2 His pronouncements eventually expose conspiracy, grand jury tampering as well as essentially fascist federal surveillance: Lil’ Kim was “bait,” he deduces, declaring her the new “Enemy of the State” (in a wry reference to the Hollywood film



116

117

that had cast Will Smith in its lead role). Finally, Judge “Funk Doctor Spock” jumps trial with his homegirl defendant. This is not the biggest revelation of “Lil’ Drummer Boy,” however. That comes from Lil’ Kim, herself when she explains why this government wants her dead and gone; she’s got to save the world: “Tha first female King and they mad cuz I’m a girl.” The noble enfant terrible of “Lil Drummer Boy” turns out not to be a “boy” child after all. Oxymoronic for many, if not most, today, a “female king” will make perfect sense in Lil’ Kim; it makes sense in her universe and system of values as an antidote to the world she wants and needs to save via Hip-Hop. Its royal portrait might have to look like Eshu-Elegba, moreover, with majestic breasts and phallus, all at full attention. The title of “Lil’ Drummer Boy” reinforces this logic of the spirit. When leaked on the mix-tape circuit, the track bore a different, makeshift title: “Self-Defense.” Redman’s “Judge Funk Doctor Spock” vocals were not yet part of the equation. The official title continues to puzzle many a fan and critic, despite the drum-line beating time in the background. Its bass does recall the traditional Christian/Christmas song, “Little Drummer Boy”—or “Carol of the Drum” (Katherine K. Davis, 1958). The drum in question clearly becomes an African one for Hip-Hop. Once, listening to a Salif Keita remix for Bobbito’s “Sound-Check” column in Vibe magazine, Lil’ Kim would respond: “I like the African percussion on here. That can take you to a deep emotional state. I would get off on this record if I was high in a club!” (Bobbito 2003, 68).3 The Notorious K.I.M. begins by beating its ancestral drum to proclaim the newly born. The pa rum pum pum pum’s of “Little Drummer Boy” accentuate this message: “Come, they told me / a newborn to king to see . . .” The newly born is a newborn king for whom this drum or drumming is a sign and gift. The king in question becomes female in Lil’ Kim, a sacred daughter, not a father’s son. She is reborn, not successfully crucified, after persecution: “Little Drummer Boy” becomes “Lil’ Drummer Boy” for her (“Lil’ Kim”), a divine emcee and newborn king in Hip-Hop after the death or murder of The Notorious B.I.G., who was the selfanointed and much-respected “King of New York.” This is how a “Lil’ Drummer Boy” can very well be a girl or a “boy/girl” (a whole person). This is how The Notorious K.I.M. is a “King/Queen” in the non-Christian, African tradition of Eshu-Elegba. This is how self-definition and redefinition burst forth across and against gender in her art. The one and only Lil’ Kim is known by many, many names. She has lyrically been, just for example, in no particular order: The Notorious K.I.M.; Big Momma and Baby Girl; Queen Bee and Queen Bitch; The Black Ericka Kane; Bad Girl, Bad Bitch, Sophisticated Lady, Sophisticated Bad Girl; Black Queen and Black Bitch, even; The Lieutenant; That Bitch, The Queen, Queen Sista and Ms. Queen Bitch Forever; Black Barbie, Cover Girl and Rap Supermodel; Kimmie, Kimmie, Kimmie; Tha Problem in Prada; Rap Mae West and Rap Josephine Baker; Gangstress of the Year and The Female Mack; Heavyweight Champ Female MC; The Wicked Bitch of the East; Honey Girl and The Widow; Boss Lady, Head of La Bella Mafia, Boss Bitch and Leader of This Million Bitch March; Ms. G.O.A.T. as well as First Female King. This is beyond what others would try to name her; and the list goes on and on.





She consistently gives credit to Biggie for her crowning, for her initial “Queen B(ee)” moniker. This same name had a prominent place in Dolemite (1974), a movie often identified as a “Blaxploitation flick,” starring Rudy Ray Moore. He is typically seen as a modern forerunner of Hip-Hop’s rap with The Lasts Poets, among others, thanks to his folkloric “spoken word” and hyperbolic boasts. If some scholars or critics recall Dolemite and his sexism with rap’s more recent origins, few if any recall his “right-hand woman” despite her centrality to his story and its packaging. The film is said to “introduce” her: “Lady Reed as ‘The Queen Bee.’ ” Under Dolemite in its advertisements still is a line that has it read, “Dolemite . . . with his all-girl army of Kung-Fu killers!” Rudy Ray Moore may be the star, but it is this Queen Bee who trains these female killers during Dolemite’s time in prison. It is she who springs him from prison as a matter of fact, having created the conditions for his release and having held down their fort in the interim. “When you were doing time,” she informs, “I put your girls through karate school.” Somehow, this is rarely remembered in subsequent academic criticism along with Dolemite’s street recital of “Shine” (of Titanic fame) or his “Signifiyin’ Monkey” performance at a club called “Total Experience.” This performance is preceded by an elaborate African dance routine: Eshu-Elegba comes full circle beyond the sanitized, colonial middle-class monkey of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (The Signifying Monkey, 1988). In cinematic dialogue, Dolemite rhymes: “Man, move over and let me pass / fo they have to be pullin these Hush Puppies out your muthafuckin ass!” Queen Bee’s female killers then move in to execute this violence. They are martial artists who double as sex-workers and who appear to castrate corrupt white men every chance they get. How can they not be foremothers of Hip-Hop as well? In the end, Lady Reed will be shot at the club in her worried defense of Dolemite. This Queen Bee may pass on with her Kung-Fu army in full swarm. Her actual death, nonetheless, was by no means clear. At any rate, Dolemite’s “female king” seems to be overshadowed by her man even as she supplies Biggie and his protégé with one, immediate Black cultural framework for female dominance. Off screen, Lady Reed would record an album of her own; and it will be Lil’ Kim who lives on when her “male king” is unceremoniously killed. The “female kingdom” of The Notorious K.I.M. is made primary, as a result; sex or gender distinctions are made null and void; and, we are told, no one will ever take away her throne. A lot is to be noted by analyzing her album titles or concepts from her Junior M.A.F.I.A. days on forward. Conspiracy represents the doings of a Black mob, her Black mob, those junior “Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes” (“M.A.F.I.A.”). She is “The Lieutenant,” second-in-command to group mentor and “General,” Biggie, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, as the “only female in her crew” of nine, she is “Queen B(ee).” The song “QUEEN B@#$H” would emerge on High School High: The Soundtrack (1996), a sneak peak at her forthcoming Hard Core, which represents her as “the female Biggie” when he was at the top of his game or at the top of the rap game as a whole, after Ready to Die (1994). Her signature logo is emblazoned in a hot pink font across this and every other subsequent release (until The Naked Truth in 2005). She represents hard-core Hip-Hop, at its absolute hardest, as much and inasmuch as she represents hard-core for “females” and



118

119

hard-core sex or sexuality; hard-core sexual politics; hard-core sexual freedom. It is important to recognize in this context as well that when The Notorious B.I.G. and The Notorious K.I.M. got together on a track, the outcome was never a traditional R&B type of pairing; for posterity, they present themselves as Eshuesque alter egos in rap rather than a romantic couple in song. Aside from “Get Money” and “Player’s Anthem,” this is even true of “Another” on Biggie’s Life After Death (1997), where a quasi-romantic pairing occurs on record only as a prelude to a break-up tune which still has them both assuming the same posture with regard to romance and its dissolution. Biggie was obviously, and from the very beginning, heavily invested in having his “female” alter ego by his side (“Still tha center of attention / I’m by his side wit da chrome fif playin my position,” she’d rhyme in 1999 on his posthumously released Born Again’s “Notorious B.I.G.”). The “female Biggie” theme is later extended by her in tribute and in self-affirmation/ self-amplification; and it is a just, complimentary comparison or identification as long as Biggie is logically seen as a “male Kim” in turn without any sexist or heterosexist anxieties of gender. For those who would bury her in him or with him, by contrast, failing to see their relationship as a dialectical back and forth, or a partnership in intelligent “crime,” La Bella Mafia was made. With this third solo album, her highness would be hailed in a brand new way. Although the follow-up to The Notorious K.I.M. was rumored at one point to be titled “Holly Hood,” and may have been for a time, the artist cleared this matter up in an interview with Rebecca Walker in Russell Simmons’s One World magazine: This new album is called La Bella Mafia. It’s basically like, when you cut men off, then you prove to the world that you can do it yourself. For those who don’t know who the Bella Mafia is, it was a group of women whose men were the heads of a Mafia gang and some of [the men] got killed and some of them went to jail and some of them just got knocked off and the women had to take over. I’m looking to recruit. (Walker 2003, 66)

The title is taken from a little-known film of the same name, David Greene’s Bella Mafia (1997). If Lil’ Kim is looking to recruit, for a basically all-female crew of Mob leaders at this point, then the disappearance of these male heads is by no means merely an accident or tragedy in her Hip-Hop reinscription. That much is made plain elsewhere, emphatically, in the wake of serious life and artistic changes: “Biggie is dead. [There’s] no Puffy, no Junior M.A.F.I.A.—this is my chance to prove to the world that I’m [T]hat [B]itch. I know what I’m doing and I always knew, and I don’t know need any punk-ass mothafuckas telling me how to run my life and make my music.” She parts ways with Junior M.A.F.I.A. after her sophomore solo effort; and she continues to reflect on her career’s progress to date in “Queen Bee Is Back: The Queen Bee and the Head Honey Talk Straight about Money, Power, Respect,” another interview for Honey magazine: I always feel pressure to reinvent myself, but it comes natural. First album, I was Lil’ Kim but Baby Girl also. I was Baby Girl because I was young but I was from the ’hood so it made me [T]hat [B]itch. Second album, I was Kimberly Jones and




120


Leaving Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s male members behind, post-The Notorious K.I.M., “Ms. Whyte” connects two film texts, Bella Mafia and Abel Ferrara’s King of New York (1990), to create her own anti-sexist Hip-Hop text within a mythology that gives full birth to this “First Female King.” La Bella Mafia would be a “real Mob” by keeping it “gangsta” and spreading love as well as joy and money, according to the lyrical definitions put forth by “The Jump Off.” Beforehand, The Notorious K.I.M. told Vibe magazine that if she got an island one day, money would be love on this “Queen B(ee)” island of hers (Morales 1998, 98); and, consequently, this would completely disintegrate the current Western middle-class politics of materialism which today she challenges by symbolically subverting the current monopoly of economic material (power, wealth and privilege) structured along racist, sexist as well as classist lines in North America and the whole wide world.4 In other words, “Ms Whyte” of La Bella Mafia would preside over a communal, Hip-Hop, matriarchal “Mob” of justice, despite a host of superficial, bourgeois and nonetheless pro-capitalist critiques of “materialism” made against Hip-Hop in general and her lyricism in particular. The Notorious B.I.G. was quite fond of calling himself “the Black Frank Whyte.” The white “Frank White” was a character played by Christopher Walken in King of New York, or what Vibe magazine’s “Props” page would describe as “Abel Ferrara’s crack-era gangsta classic” (Meadows-Ingram 2003, 186). The movie costars Wesley Snipes and Laurence Fishburne as well as David Caruso and Steve Buscemi. Maybe setting the stage for Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City (1991), it makes another rap-related comparison in its commercial packaging: “Where Scarface left off . . . King of New York begins.” A great deal of rap can be viewed or heard as an external soundtrack for Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), as is demonstrated by Def Jam’s Music Inspired by Scarface (2003), where Lil’ Kim appears with The Lox. King of New York had its own hard-core soundtrack on film, even if a record soundtrack was never actually issued or formally released. Its climactic scene bursts forth in sync with Schooly D’s “Am I Black Enough For You?” (Am I Black Enough For You?, 1989), which was itself a “gangstafied” remake of an old Soul song by Billy Paul (360 Degrees of Billy Paul, 1972). Author of Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the ’Hood and Beyond (1997), Todd Boyd observes in The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (2002): “a distinct icon of contemporary Blackness, Biggie would appropriate his name from a White character, who had, of course, appropriated his whole being from Black masculinity” (Boyd 2002, 120). We might recall here that the Italian Al Pacino played Cubano in Scarface itself. We must recall as well that “the Black Frank Whyte” was just one of Biggie’s bynames, Boyd’s entirely male-centered analysis of Hip-Hop or rap aside.5 For being labeled the Black “copy” of some white “original” would be racially insulting; it is more often than not a reversal of the true order of things culturally and historically. Legendary folklorist and novelist, Zora Neale Hurston



Queen Bee. Now I am Kim Whyte, Queen of New York. Frank Whyte is gone and I am here and I am going to hold it down. (Barnett 2003, 86)

121

sharply examines the complexity of Black people’s adoption of such labels in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) and “My People, My People,” a chapter from her “autobiography,” Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). There is definitely much more to Biggie’s self-naming than mindless appropriation. The white Frank White’s entourage or crew was almost entirely Black and Latino, or Afro-Latin, a fact that (along with King of New York’s soundtrack) calls his very “whiteness” into question. He is posed as an “urban Robin Hood” who “donates his ill-gotten funds to a hospital for poor people” (Meadows-Ingram 2003, 186). Why not ask how come he was pictured as a white character in the first place? Is this not a tale that Biggie rewrites in Hip-Hop? Why must the white man always be king? Didn’t Malcolm X say something similar about the sickness of Tarzan’s being “King of the Jungle” in Africa, via Hollywood? The “jungle” in King of New York is “the urban jungle” and the white man is a “benevolent” minority, yet still “king.” This is how we should read Biggie’s forceful reclaiming of Frank White’s name, in Black (“Frank Whyte”), for Blacks. Then we can understand Lil’ Kim as she asks, forcefully, in so many words: “Why should the king always be male, Black, white or other?” How does she succeed? She would mount the throne as king and queen—of New York, Hip-Hop, and so on; and not through marriage. She becomes Ms. (or Miss) Whyte, not Mrs. White. Matrimony is not her way. Her monarchy is not derived from a husband. While she and Biggie had a relationship, a relationship is not only thinkable in terms of romance. Lyrically, she was him and he was her; hence, one says of the other: “That’s my bitch, my partner; she gon represent for me always” and “That’s my dog, my nigga” (The Best of Luke’s Freak Show, 2000). After he passes on, physically, she reverses yet another role in “Queen Mutha,” a cover story for Nylon magazine, where she maintains: “Biggie Smalls is still my muse” (Rotter 2003, 96). A muse may be defined as a source of creative inspiration for art. More often, it is taken to mean a female object who merely inspires a male artist, the only real creative subject in this line of thought. But “Ms. Whyte” is the artist according to “Queen Mutha” and “Frank” is her ancient guiding “goddess,” or muse. Lil’ Kim’s royalty radically rewrites sex and gender, repeatedly, on and off the record. In truth, The Notorious K.I.M. has always rapped it more emphatically and extensively than The Notorious B.I.G. He was Hip-Hop’s King of New York. She is Queen, end of story: Queen Bee and Bitch and King. Biggie never officially released a single song (on any album) entitled “King of New York.” Her repertoire boasts of “QUEEN B@#$H,” “QUEEN B@#$H II,” with a potent remix, and La Bella Mafia’s “Can’t F**k with Queen Bee.” This is not to mention “All Hail tha Queen” (also known simply as “Tha Queen”), yet another unreleased recording for The Notorious K.I.M. Virtually every Lil’ Kim song echoes this title in intros and outros and verse as well as in cameos, bar after bar after bar. Biggie’s “King of New York” claim was notably more restricted in scope. Her claim to highness or majesty is almost never restricted to Hip-Hop, let alone a single cinematic reference. Rhetorically, it takes flight from the apiary, the chessboard, the heavens, arachnology, state monarchy, etc. It ultimately assumes the Black Frank Whyte’s kingdom without ever bowing down. She is her own “Queen,” the “female king”





of a world much larger than New York City’s drug trade and rap scene. Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Lieutenant” must have never meant to stay second-in-command to anyone within or beyond their once close-knit group. The self-definition and redefinitions of La Bella Mafia confirm as much as a whole. This “female king” title does not mean to suggest that she is king of females alone, crucially. La Bella Mafia’s “Intro” loops an old interview with The Notorious B.I.G. in which he testifies to her talent, hunger and skills (writing skills, to be exact). Resurrected in audio, he tells us why it was the lone female member of Junior M.A.F.I.A. who rose to fame and infamy after its founder and leader. Soon enough, the first official track of this album, “Hold It Now” self-consciously invokes Lil’ Kim’s historical place in Hip-Hop. She has a little story to tell about this “first rap bitch” to “rock Chanel” and to dole out tips on “riding cock” as well. She then lays claim to Biggie’s once undisputed crown by saying Frank Whyte taught her how to play “the game” and, after a shouting out “La Bella Mafia,” by stating that she plays to reign. Her assumption of his throne will be respectful since the former King of New York was her mentor; and he remains her alter ego and muse. Hence, “Doing Way It Way Big” pays a double-mouthed tribute to him after “Hold It Now’s” musical nod to old-school scratching and emceeing. “This Is Who I Am” proceeds to declare that she is the “legacy” of B.I.G. herself, when all is said and done, despite any other comments to the contrary. Later, “This Is a Warning” makes its “woman’s threat” in the wake of a rite of succession, as she mock-sings a “Mafia tale” about “Big Poppa” who was shot “a long, long, long, long time ago,” a murder that left her with the throne (and a trail of people who are out for her blood). The reign of Ms. Whyte is now long-established in this present tense narrative account, however much the haters of this reign may protest the fact of it. Her rule is proposed to be strong enough to make all other rules a thing of the past. Triumphantly, therefore, “Can You Hear Me Now?” explains that she might start her day at Piaget or with a Mafia meeting at the Brooklyn Café, thus announcing “a new day” in which Lil’ Kim is firmly in charge (and reaching for the stars). Before La Bella Mafia closes with “Tha Beehive” and “Came Back for You,” appropriately enough, Lil’ Kim’s verse for “Get in Touch With Us” is exquisite as it breaks down the sexual poetic justice of her majestic rise to power by way of Hip-Hop: “Biggie left me tha torch so I’m holdin it now / And you sick cuz I’m a bitch and I’m holding it down.” Respectful, Styles P (of The Lox) is left to overhear this decree as they tag-team a third verse together. Her “female kingdom” is poised and posited to tower over him and all others. According to its cover art, La Bella Mafia is formally entitled La Bella Mafia Starring Lil’ Kim. This movie motif absorbs and outdoes Ferrara’s King of New York with its limited politics of race and sex. A self-sufficient soundtrack, her audio-cinema also outstrips The Notorious B.I.G.’s appropriation of that film as well as that film’s appropriation of Black bodies and Black music, including Black “masculinity” and Black “gangsta” (as in Schooly D’s “Am I Black Enough for You?”). Biggie had flipped the script on wax, snuffing Christopher Walken as some sort of colorless doppelganger, a Black man in pale face who would turn him and his brothers into sidekicks or a sideshow. Biggie’s actual other self in rhyme, The Notorious K.I.M. accomplishes more. A little known flick until her



122

123

lyrical appropriation of it, Greene’s Bella Mafia fades further in significance before her Hip-Hop recasting. Lil’ Kim scripts an oral cinematic text of her own which raps beyond Scarface (both De Palma and Def Jam versions) and King of New York (both Ferrara and The Notorious B.I.G. versions) by presenting herself as “Ms. Whyte” or, as she spits it for Gangs of Roses in 2003, “Tha Brooklyn Female Al Pacino.” This same verse would pronounce herself the head of “this Mob shit” and, adding to her monikers, “Made Girl Don Bitch.” Not in verse but as the hostemcee of her show, Lil’ Kim sets up “Came Back for You” by recounting a series of her aliases—“Tha One and Only Queen B(ee),” “Ms. Whyte,” “Head of La Bella Mafia”—before sending a personal message to Victoria Gotti and “Tha whole Family.” Henceforth, Lil’ Kim is no longer a gangsta, or gangstress in her lyricism. She represents herself as Tha Gangsta/Tha Gangstress, by any of her many mic-names. Hence, “Ms. Whyte” brings the heat (in her own words) on “The Beehive” with this characteristic, chameleon claim that she’s “That Bitch” with a thousand looks who “comes through” with a thousand “crooks.” She is That Queen who could and would become King, “First Female King” from The Notorious K.I.M. to La Bella Mafia. In “Heavenly Father,” she would finally address Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s break-up after the murder of The Notorious B.I.G. Its music is at once gospel, gritty and orchestral. The introduction and background amount to a hymn sampled and sped-up with an undeniably hypnotic effect; a voice humbles itself to the throne and prays for love, joy, peace, and happiness. The O’Jay’s “Prayer” from Message in Our Music (1976) is the source as an older female voice chants a refrain from start to finish. “M.A.F.I.A.” males were far from loyal, we find out, which is absolutely immoral (if not “criminal”) in this world. Yet with them she would split twenty percent of what she’d “make” and half of what she’d “bake,” while risking the loss of all her “bread” when bailing them out of jail and putting a roof over their heads, according to “Heavenly Father.” Metaphorically, two kinds of “cakes” are being baked here, one generally identified with “men” (“drugs”) and the other with “women” (food or “dessert”), to make different kinds of “bread” (“money” and “pastry”): “Big Momma” Lil’ Kim deals in both and more, as usual, washing her hands of the dirt and the men in one fell swoop. Music by The O’Jays had originally inspired “Back Stabbers,” her only solo song on Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s Conspiracy. It is fitting to return to them for “Heavenly Father,” another record about betrayal, one much closer to home. In her “Last Page” interview with Blender magazine, Lil’ Kim pictured herself as a “Queen Angel” and replied “God” when asked by a clueless interviewer if there was any “man” with whom she would like to trade places (Tannenbaum 2003, 156). Power is rarely if ever physically “male” in her linguistic imagination. She recognizes this god imagined by others as a “man” merely to reimagine godliness in her own terms. The “male” god cited on his throne in prayer by “Heavenly Father” signifies a “fatherhood” that she herself now symbolizes as “female king.” For she is La Bella Mafia’s “Big Momma” and “Big Poppa” and certainly a “god/dess” on the mic. She prays on “Heavenly Father” but only as she reduces others to prayer, compelling them to bow and pray to her. It all ends (in spoken word) with a new and optimistic beginning that





slyly harkens back to her Hard Core beginning: “La Bella Mafia . . . 2003 . . . Tha Beehive . . . I’m Comin!” Her storied career began as “Lil’ Kim a.k.a. Big Momma” who became “Queen B(ee)” in Junior M.A.F.I.A. before she became Hard Core’s full-blown “Queen Bitch.” Her lyrical status as lieutenant was always outstretched, however, by this notorious queendom. A “Queen B(ee)” cannot be an assistant, secondary monarch. She is first and foremost, at the top of the heep, or hive, lording over the male sex and its labor, neither of which exists except to please her; to satisfy her every desire, whether sexual or economic or both and more. There is no “king” who is not female in the apiary: La Bella Mafia was always waiting to happen then, even as The Notorious B.I.G. groomed her for this role as Hip-Hop’s Frank Whyte. The Notorious K.I.M. has been quoted as saying, “I’m a queen, and I can’t say I’ve run across a full-blown king,” and the interlocutor for this Maxim magazine exchange concludes: “she’s a woman we’d gladly give the royal treatment, and with her deceptively petite frame, you know you’ve got a long way to go to kneel before her” (Caramanica 2002, 134). This is a Queen who is wifed by no king. Colonies rise and fall with her royalty. When “Queen B(ee)” morphs into “Queen Bitch,” its most supreme form, La Bella Mafia makes further “Big Momma” sense. There is no longer a lone female who heads a predominantly male crew. There is in La Bella Mafia a crew of females who consolidate to commandeer all such crews; and, no longer “junior,” Lil’ Kim emerges or reemerges as their collective leader. Still, males don’t totally disappear from this picture at all. She creates a new structure in “Tha Beehive,” which includes an army of “a thousand crooks” and recreates her old “Queen B(ee)” hierarchy minus any history of male leadership. She becomes “Boss Lady,” who holds it down for her “babies,” matriarchally. Recent affiliates Reeks, Bunky S.A., Vee, and Saint each get their turn to rhyme on “Tha Beehive.”6 Their boss’s former tutorship under Biggie Smalls fades away further and further, as if it were but a prelude back in a progressively disappearing past: La Bella Mafia takes her “Queen Bitch” posture to the extreme as she takes male mafiosos down a peg. They are lyrically disbanded and replaced to form a more faithful and loyal band of baby mobsters who labor under a layer of “godmothers” led by Lil’ Kim, Mafia “Big Momma,” “First Female King,” “Queen Bitch.” This is how she has exercised a radical freedom of self-definition and redefinition as an artist in Hip-Hop, through sexual definitions and redefinitions that are “avant-garde,” without restraint or constraint by sexism or gender—so very much like the trickster-god(dess) EshuElegba, traditionally noble and divine. From a History of “Female Kings” in Africa as Example: A Sample So I guess Queen B gon be da ‘Man’ o’ dis shit. (Lil’ Kim, “I Get It” [Ms. G.O.A.T., 2007])

The typically gender-rigid language of “kingship” is a privileged one in the West and its conceptions of monarchy, as it generally excludes female persons



124

125

from its conceptions of leadership at the level of the state, organizations and society at large. Like others of the African Diaspora, Elaine Brown disrupts this equation when she is named “Chairman” of the Black Panther Party against the grain of patriarchal male authority in the strictest sense. The logic of the status-quo is bent, just as it would be if Eshu-Elegba were recognized to be a “female king” (in certain guises) as well as a Black “god” or “goddess” “him” or “herself.” The apt author of Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987), Ifi Amadiume writes to recast European understandings of monarchy accordingly in Re-Inventing Africa (1987): “Buganda, another bureaucratized slave state had three kings—the king’s mother, the queen sister, and the king himself. This was a common matriarchal tripartite system of power and kingdom sharing between mother and her children in ancient African political systems which had grown into kingdoms, or more correctly, queendoms” (Amadiume 1997, 97). Insofar as Lil’ Kim’s genderflexible “kingship” is a “first” for Hip-Hop and “modern” times, her lyrical reign and its rationale emerge from this history of Black female power in the politics of continental Africa. Hatshepsut (1473–1458 BC) was hailed by Cheikh Anta Diop in The Cultural Unity of Black Africa as “the first queen in the history of humanity” (Diop 1989, 103), if later scholars might theorize that she was preceded as pharaoh or “King of Upper and Lower Egypt” by another woman, Sobekneferu. Queens such as Merneith and Nimaethap had ruled if not as pharaohs, while Nefertiti, Neferneferuaten, Meritaten and Twosret may have ruled as pharaohs, possibly. Cleopatra VII would be the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, but in a foreign or non-indigenous dynasty. So successful that she is thought to have been the first and most famous “female pharaoh,” still, Hatshepsut was the fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty; and Diop describes her in some detail: Now Queen Hatshepsut, according to Maspero, derived from her mother, Ahmosis, and her grandmother Akhotpou, rights of succession superior, not only to those of her husband and brother Thothmes II, but to those of her own father, Thothmes I, the reigning pharaoh. Here matriarchy can be seen in operation: it is the greater or lesser nobility of the mother which supports the right to the throne to the exclusion of the father, who, even in such cases as this, can be replaced by a heavenly father (104).

Hatshepsut’s reign lasted twenty-two years of peace, on the whole. Women in Ancient Egypt could own land, inherit and defend their rights in court, while pharaohs were envisioned as men who had to marry the royal blood of women in order to rule themselves. So, when all heirs were too young to occupy the throne, after the death of Thotmes II, Hatshepsut soon crowned herself pharaoh, formally. She began to wear a kingly costume and headdress, including a symbolic beard that remains a permanent part of her iconic image. Hatshepsut (which means “Foremost of Noble Women”) also dropped the “feminine” ending (“t”) from her name so that she would be officially known as Hatshepsu—a “Foremost Noble Woman” transformed into a “female pharaoh” or “King of Upper and Lower Egypt.” Tiye or Queen Tiye (1398–1338 BC) was the “Great Royal Wife” of Amenhotep III; and she would preside over Kemet (or Ancient Egypt) officially as “Queen Consort”





and “Queen Mother.” Her pharaoh ensured that in all political symbolism she was portrayed as the equal of a king, not as half his status as was custom. A revolution in art is attributed to her reign by Simone Schwarz-Bart’s In Praise of Black Women: Ancient African Queens (2001, 54), not to mention a revolution in marital relations of monarchy. She is celebrated as the first ever Secretary of State for either her political leadership during her husband’s ailing health or, subsequently, during her son Akhenaten’s period as pharaoh when he focused more on his religious conversion to monotheism than anything else. Renamed Amenhotep IV, her son would marry Nefertiti and apparently model their marriage on the political symbolism of his mother and father. Grandmother of “King Tut,” Queen Tiye was thought to be a Nubian commoner who rose to be the standard of beauty in the ancient world and the matriarch of the Armarna family from whom many members of Kemet’s royal family would emerge: “Queen Consort” or “Queen Mother” categories aside, Tiye ruled for half a century with the power and status of a “female king” alongside both Amenhotep III, her pharaoh husband, and Akhenaten or Amenhotep IV, her pharaoh son. The role of a royal “consort” or spouse is distinct from that of a “regent,” a king or queen who rules in his or her own right with all the powers of a “king,” whether male or female. So Eleni (or Helena) would serve as “Queen Regent” for three generations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (AD). A Muslim princess from Hadiya, she wedded the Emperor of Christian Ethiopia, Baeda Maryam, to become Empress while reportedly acting as a co-monarch with him on the throne. She would govern as a regent for two royal sons and her grandson, it seems, Lebna Dengel, as well. Eleni would also author two books of theology and function as the major political actor in her country’s international relations with Turkey, surrounding Muslim states and Portugal, until her death around 1522 (AD). The reign of this Empress extends beyond the role of a royal “consort” or surrogate into the regencies of “kings,” or monarchs whose rules are not conventionally constrained by gender. King Ahebi Ugbabe of twentieth century Nigeria is another story. She is described as “a prominent female king” from Enugu-Ezike and “the only female warrant chief in all of Nigeria” by Nwando Achebe’s Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960 (2005, 215; 260). The kind of kingdom that she represented was not Igbo, or African; it was European, or British. For refusing a ritual of sacrifice as a young girl, she was exiled from Enugu-Ezike to Igalaland, where she practiced a traditional form of sex work to survive, before she moved to trading and traditional medicine after much economic success. She would return to Enugu-Ezike with British invaders and was declared a “warrant chief” or a “chief” of their local colonial-imperialist system. Sustained by Europeans, she decided to declare herself “Eze,” or “King” in Igbo. However, her will to power over Enugu-Ezike was expressed in a nonIgbo notion of “kingdom,” where the “king” is not “owned” by the community but is more of an individual tyrant with absolute monarchical powers (209). Interestingly, she took wives and concubines, sometimes by force; she had female servants galore; she could not have sex with any man without having him killed afterwards, ritually; and she was carried everywhere she went by a party of four



126

127

men, aloft on a hammock (209–211). Her defiance of gender was not controversial in and of itself; it could be sanctioned historically and ideologically by Igbo culture or society. The alien, self-centered and harsh character of her rule made her “the most notorious woman in all Nsukka Division” (200), according to folk tales and songs. The masses of men and women revolted against her form of European, British-sponsored rule just as the British betrayed her. As a result, King Ahebi Ugbabe would be “the first female and last king ever” of Enugu-Ezike in Igboland or present-day Nigeria (215). Idia N’Iyesigie by contrast was the first Iyoba of Benin after she secured by every means necessary the title of Oba or “King” for her son, Esigie, who went on to reign for almost five full decades (1504–1550 AD). Iyoba may translate as “Mother of Oba,” but she was more than this might suggest. Hers is “the most widely known face of an African royal woman after the Egyptian Queen, Ahmose-Nefertari or Nefertiti,” argues Nkiru Nzegwu in “Iyoba Idia: Mother of the Nation and Hidden Oba of Benin” (2005), thanks to the ivory mask of her image used by FESTAC ’77 or the Second Festival of Arts and Culture hosted by Nigeria in 1977. Yet many have assumed this face to be that of a man, not the woman who led an army to war to put Oba Esigie on the throne in Benin Kingdom and the woman who was in many respects the power behind this throne or “the dominant power of the period” (54). Contemporary royal rites and festivals dramatize as much along with the importance of the permanent political (and spiritual) office of Iyoba founded originally for her. Some could claim that she was accorded a “masculine” status, a wife as well as a court of officeholders and a harem of young boys, while others will insist upon the superiority of her station vis-à-vis the Oba of Benin. In any case, Idia N’Iyesigie reigned as Iyoba at the same time that she orchestrated and on occasion administered the rule of her son, which is why she could be classified as a second Oba, “a hidden Oba,” “a shadow Oba” (63), or a “female king” herself. Amina Sukhera (1533–1610 BC) of Zazzau or Zaria in Hausaland would never bother to marry, coming from a family of royal women. Trained as a warrior, she studied military arts as a child under the rule of her mother, Bakwa Turunku, whom she is said to have succeeded in 1535, perhaps after her brother, as queen in a reign thirty-four years. An expert rider (horsewoman) and archer, she led Zazzau to expand in size, power and wealth until it was the most formidable Hausa state. The warrior queen would conquer or reconquer other kingdoms, or formerly lost territories, kingdom after kingdom, leaving many of these towns to bear her name, thus providing safe passage for Hausa traders. En route, her conquests were as sexual as they were geopolitical. Legend has it, “Every city was a lover and ever lover a city: such was Queen Amina of Zaria” (Schwarz-Bart 2001, 158). Like a Latrodectus or “Black Widow,” or a true Queen Bee, she allegedly beheaded these male lovers after every erotic episode. Unlike some, Amina Sukhera (or Aminatu) would not know monarchy through marriage of any type, preceded on the throne by her mother and then followed by her sister in a matrilineal line of royal women whose power was supreme with no necessary need for royal males in Hausaland. Njinga Mbande or “Nzinga” (1581–1663 BC) may be the most famous of African monarchs for her resistance to the European Slave Trade, as “Queen





Nzinga,” but she is not so famous as “King of Ndongo.” She is that king, or ruler. Her family of royals spent ages opposing Portuguese slavers in this region today identified as Angola. Upon the death of her father and suicide of her brother, and the mysterious death of her nephew, she assumed the throne in 1623, when fortyone years old. She spent almost all of her entire adult life opposing Portuguese slavers, once retreating eastward to the neighboring region of Matamba, a “kingdom” which had a tradition of rule by women and which would supply the basis for her resistance movement. From there, where she was forced by the Portuguese after failed negotiations, she invited Black soldiers of these Europeans to desert or defect in response to her promise of land and freedom. This was in the spirit of the Maroons, and Haitian Revolution, as a work such as Robin Walker’s When We Ruled (2006) would be radical enough to recognize. She changed a law so that she was anointed “King,” or “Ngola.” She had a harem of young boys as “wives,” writes Annette Madden in In Her Footsteps: 101 Remarkable Black Women from the Queen of Sheba to Queen Latifah (2000, 10). Like Hatshepsu(t), she could adopt the attire of men, particularly for battle, deploying so-called masculine and “feminine” strategies depending on the situation. Crucially, in power, she assigned many other women to central political and military positions. Her signing of a treaty with the Portuguese in 1659 when seventy five years old was without a doubt reluctant. She renounced the Christian name that she had taken as a tactic in earlier dealings with her enemies, “Dona Ana de Souza,” and she worked to resettle formerly enslaved Africans back to her Africa. Njinga Mbande led a long, brilliant and fierce resistance to slavery and European imperialism as “Queen Nzinga” and “King of Ndongo,” it is important to remember. The typically gender-rigid language of “kingship” is a privileged one in the West and its conceptions of monarchy, as it generally excludes female persons from its conceptions of leadership at the level of the state, organizations and society at large. There is an alternative, long-historical example of royalty found in Africa and ultimately in the African diaspora of Lil’ Kim, “Big Momma/Queen Bitch.” She calls herself “Cleopatra” on Hard Core. She strikes a classic pharaonic pose on the cover of The Notorious K.I.M., where she is “First Female King.” She even wants her regal body “held” in a museum of chiefly African art after death on La Bella Mafia.7 So it is no surprise when Lil’ Kim raps that she will be the “Man” of this “shit” in 2007, for an anti-sexist reign in the specifically grassroots context of Hip-Hop. She would be “Head” of “La Bella Mafia,” after all, in more gender-neutral nomenclature. The gender-flexible nature of an otherwise patriarchal rhetoric of politics in her and Black Panther Party “Chairman” Elaine Brown’s hands is a fact and feat of African heritage. Highlighting this legacy or birthright in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Ifi Amadiume writes—mostly in favor of “market queens” rather than “feudal queens” in Re-inventing Africa: “In matriarchy, the matriarchal structure of kinship, manifested in the matriarchal triangle of power, was reproduced in African queendoms as the tripartite power-sharing system. The names of the queens were uttered jointly with those of the kings on the throne to be occupied” (Amadiume 1997, 151–152). The English-language or Western understanding of “kings” as well as “queens” cannot convey an egalitarian or equal-opportunity approach to monarchy without



128


129

the major ideological shifts effected in the lyricism of Lil’ Kim and Eshu-Elegba, both of whom are antislavery, anti-feudal hierarchy and anti-male/gender domination in their profoundly pro-justice conceptions of life and embodiment.

Besides writing in academia on art history and the orisha, or African deities, Robert Farris Thompson wrote “Hip-Hop 101” for Rolling Stone magazine in 1986. The topics are all literally related. A genealogy or family tree of musical-cultural connections can be provided with ease: “James Brown begat soul. And soul begat George Clinton and the funk movement. And James Brown and George Clinton and others, in combination with cultural forces including jazz, salsa, and reggae (dub and the sound-system style of record playing more than the music itself), begat Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation—in short, the hip-hop revolution” (Thompson 1996, 212). These relations extend well beyond the twentieth century and the Americas as a result of their cultural ties to Kongo, “an ancient and distinguished black civilization in central Africa” (212). They are shared by five populations of African descent converging or climaxing, ascending in the generation of Hip-Hop: “English-speaking blacks from Barbados,” “black Jamaicans,” “blacks from Cuba,” (with “Afro-Cuban conga drums”), “boricuas” or “Puerto-Ricans” and “the North American blacks whose music was jazz and soul and funk” (213–214). The cross-currents of Pan-Africa make sense as well as sound and motions of dance. A great number of Kongo and Angolan peoples endured and survived the trade in African flesh for enslavement; and they would make a tremendous impact on popular music, worldwide. There is the colossal significance of Congo Square in New Orleans, “the city of jazz,” in addition to Rumba in Cuba and Samba in Brazil. “Both rumba and samba are Kongo words for certain dance moves” (215). It was a conga drum break that DJ Kool Herc extended to make “break music” before it was ever called Hip-Hop; and the “uprock” style of dance that dominated break-dancing before back spins and such is “not unlike nsunsa, a fast-moving Kongo battle dance—a sport, really—that’s also one-on-one and also very popular with men” (218). This connection is commonly made by many vis-à-vis capoeira in Brazil. The art historian has more to say about dance than “graf” or “aerosol art,” “turntablism” (record-spinning or “scratching”) and the lyrical art of rhyme. If he offers much to recast simplistic New York-centered tales of Hip-Hop origins by noting developments in Fresno, Los Angeles, Cleveland and South Carolina, he did not think to reconnect emceeing to the “flagrant orality” of Eshu-Elegba (Thompson 1984, 32), as “Kongo militarism” and “Yoruba spiritualism” combine through Hip-Hop in the African diaspora. In Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1984), his most celebrated work, it was written that Eshu is “the very embodiment of the crossroads.” What’s more, Eshu is a messenger or the messenger of a most divine message, embodying the principle of change routinely in the guise of “a royal child, a prince, a monarch” (19). Very much about balance, Eshu’s idiom or discourse is nonetheless one of “extremity” (43). While poetic



Conclusion


and playful, Eshu does not play when it comes to cosmic justice. Gifted by the supreme Olurun with áshe, the power to make things happen, Eshu warns those who do not recognize these truths that they will be bent “like a string upon a bow” or pounded “like a shell” (18). This message should not missed, especially by more aesthetic or spiritualist perspectives on the orisha. Yet even in the most academic characterizations of the white West, Eshu almost always sounds like the dopest emcee. On the subject of royalty, Maude Dikobe makes an interesting connection in her research on female calypsonians in Trinidad.8 She conducts an interview for The Diaspora, “Calypso Rose: The Grand Dame of Calypso” (2003), where the art form is characterized as Caribbean folksong, “the people’s newspaper” and, in more current terms, Soca. Before her conversation with the artist born McCartha Lewis in Bethel, Tobago, Dikobe recalls that Calypso Rose in 1978 was the first woman to win Trinidad and Tobago’s world-renowned “Calypso King” competition, a win which led to an immediate rechristening of this contest which is now known as the “Calypso Monarch” competition. Calypso Rose would come to call herself a “juju warrior” (following a special visit to Liberia, where an elementary school is named after her) and Soca Diva as she represents for female calypsonians and, in effect, underscores some global riffs on kingdoms, queendoms, gender and monarchy in Black popular culture (Dikobe 2003, 3–4). Carole Boyce Davies in “Caribbean Griots/Rapso Djeliya: The Power of the Word/The Politics of Place” (2007) makes these connections herself with an analysis of Rapso, Calypso, orisha worship and the Djeli (or “griot”) function of various oralities in Trinidad and Tobago and across the African Americas.9 Undeniably Eshuesque in her occupation of a kingly and queenly position in Hip-Hop, Lil’ Kim is a monarch who could boast on La Bella Mafia, “I’m tha reason this rap game is unisex!” She makes it whole. She can stand for this whole body of Hip-Hop with the radical freedom of a revolutionary icon and iconoclast. Nothing may illustrate such a historically African approach to identity, power and politics more than her cover photo for King magazine (May/June 2003). The art work for La Bella Mafia had included an amazing photograph shot by Vincent Soyez which pictures her as a painting framed on a throne in an adamant African warrior pose.10 Charlie Langella’s cover photo for King becomes similarly spectacular when contextualized by Lil’ Kim’s lyrical persona and overall presence. Each month, King presents itself in no uncertain terms: “The Illest Men’s Magazine Ever!” Its cover models until now were normally “cheesecake” fare, “good girls” in a rare state of undress for men who might think of themselves as “kings” in consumer mode. This is the scenario destined to be turned around by The Notorious K.I.M., who commandeers the space of this magazine to present herself as “king” to an audience of men and some women. The color scheme is mostly red and black with some white lettering or trim, the tell-tale colors of the regal EshuElegba. Almost everything else is brown, deep and dark and golden, especially her body which has the air of a statue or idol. She is crouching in a stance which is routinely that of Eshu in plastic arts. Her hair is similarly long. Her facial expression could be elderly or childish. Her breasts are graphically prominent, as if full



130

Figure 5.2

131

Lil’ Kim’s Cover of King magazine

of excitement. In black there is what might be termed a “dental floss” bikini. In red there is the King masthead in big, bold, capital letters and her outstretched arms give the impression that she is holding up this kingdom—which is hers, no longer that of the monthly male readership. Since she is a monarch in the tradition of Eshu (not aristocratic, patriarchal England), a white, perhaps diamond cross hangs around her neck and dangles down her body to a place just above her crotch. This is a crossroads. If in Western Christianity a cross at the





crotch would be sacrilegious, what could be further from the truth for Lil’ Kim and Eshu-Elegba? The cross whose meaning is transformed by this deity of the crossroads says that what lies there is blessed; it’s where the secular and the otherworldly meet. The caption under her name in gold reads: “Lil’ Kim . . . Harder Than Ever!” She is coming as “hard” as she did on her classic Hard Core, whose promotional poster pose is what is reproduced here, seven significant years later. The narrative-struggle continues. Her “hard-core” refers as usual to her rhymeskill as well as her entire lyrical persona which exudes a hard-core sexual independence and gender-defiant freedom of self-expression at every turn. Hence, having proclaimed herself “First Female King,” “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” is able to transform the meaning of King, thoroughly; and, in the process of this morphing, she gives an extraordinary, Eshuesque credence to her claim as Black monarch of La Bella Mafia’s renegade Hip-Hop hive.



132

It’s the Lyrical Sex Pistol: Or, A Rebel Music that Rewrites Anatomy— Rhyme after Fiery Rhyme

Lord, I’m bound for Black Mountain, me and my razor and my gun: [I’m] gonna shoot [my man] if he stands still and cut him if he run. (Bessie Smith, “Black Mountain Blues” [1930]) [I]n this white-man world you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun! (Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones [1959]) As though their entrance had been a signal, one of the lesbos [sic] leaped atop her table and began doing a frantic table dance, as if spraying the audience with unseen rays from a gun hidden beneath her mini-skirt. The skirt wasn’t much bigger than a G-string. It was in gold lamé, looking indecent against her smooth chamois-colored skin. (Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol [1969]) A lyrical gun dat di people have fun / fi gyal jump up an just a rail an bomb. (Shabba Ranks, “Gun Pon Me” from As Raw As Ever [1991]) Play private airports, Fashion Week I’m on tha runway / Fedz tryna tie me to all sorts a gunplay. (Lil’ Kim, “Who Shot Ya?” [2004])

T

he category of “Rebel Music” comes to us from Bob Marley, of course, chanting down police states forcing roadblocks and curfews on the Black masses in the African diaspora in Jamaica and “America” at large. We hear Tuff Gong lyrically wailing on record: “Why can’t we be what we want to be? / We want to be free!” The song appeared on Natty Dread (1974) and Babylon by Bus (1979) before Rebel Music (1988), the album. To speak of Babylon, U.S.A. along with Maria W. Stewart and Black Power rebels in addition to Rastafari1 is to



6


separate from standard Anglo–North American rhetorics of rebellion. The rebel in this popular media is a cliché. He is white, male and “wholesomely” racist. There is the “rebel” of the southern Confederacy, fighting to uphold plantation slavery, or at least its flag, downpressing Africans in the name of “Dixie.” Then, there is the “rebel” of 1950s nostalgia on film, James Dean and the like, who readily admits that he has nothing to rebel against. Hip-Hop replaces this Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 1988). Later, the self-proclaimed “Black Panther of Rap,” Paris supplied a similar message on “Escape from Babylon,” a track from The Devil Made Me Do It (1991). The Black rebel is treated like any “Third World” rebel by the West. This rebel is not positively portrayed. This rebel is demonized, typically with a sexual twist. The romantic “rebels” of “white-supremacy” in North America come from periods famous for sexual as well as other kinds of repression. They are no “sexual rebels” nonetheless, not even in pretense. Nor are most contemporary, self-professed revolutionaries, Black, white or other, it seems. But sexual rebels are necessary, especially so in a society based on sexual racism: Why can’t we be free sexually, since we want to be free? How can we be “ free,” in fact, if we are not erotically or sexually free? To champion “Rebel Music” more fully, we might consult Carolyn Cooper’s insight in “Virginity Revamped: Representations of Female Sexuality in the Lyrics of Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks” (2000). Her contention is that despite “invidious” comparisons between “reggae ‘culture’ ” and “ragga ‘slackness’ ” (347–348), Ragga’s Ranks provides a “much more egalitarian gender politics” than Reggae’s Marley (356). Sexual politics are essential to “Rebel Music,” which requires that we break free from mental enslavement to the Victorian erotics of “Judaeo-Christian” Europe (351). Such a task could not be accomplished by a mere “gun moll” and, contrary to a lot of commentary on Hip-Hop, a “gun moll” Lil’ Kim is not. Normally defined as the female companion or “girlfriend” of a mobster or “American gangster,” during the 1920s and 1930s, a period which also gave birth to much wilder Blues women such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, the “gun moll” is not known to be “notorious” in her own right but is “notorious” because of her notable association with a “notorious” gun man. The “moll” in “gun moll’ is thought to derive from “Molly,” furthermore, a diminutive for “Mary” and a British euphemism for “prostitute,” or “whore.” A “gun moll” may carry or conceal a gangster’s guns, but she does not bust them herself; and she certainly doesn’t wreak havoc on the sexist logic of the system that conventionally defines her and her relationship to both sex and violence.2 This is why Carl Hancock Rux is correct to remark in “The Girl with Balls” (2001) that Lil’ Kim is “not the gangster moll, she is the gangster” (Rux 2001, 63). She is the outlaw, the rebel, the wielder of the weapon, the gunner herself in Hip-Hop. So how might The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Rebel Music” reimagine body politics and fire power, anatomically and polymorphously, for revolutionary freedom? What power, knowledge and pleasure might be found in her artful violence, despite selective phobias concerning violence encircling and towering over Hip-Hop art and artists in “Babylon,” North America, and elsewhere? How can



134

IT’S THE LYRICAL SEX PISTOL

135

Gun Shots Cooper’s Noises in the Blood would introduce the vital concept of “erotic maroonage,” and “verbal maroonage,” to describe the “oral/sexual discourse” of Jamaican Dancehall (Cooper 1993, 161–163). Elsewhere, with regard to Hip-Hop as well, this discourse is interpreted as a “lyrical gun”—a “metaphorical” gun in the musical place of a “literal,” “physical” gun—in what for many critics are much less gratifying terms (Cooper 1994, 2002). Yet Maroons go for guns just as much as “gangstaz.” Do critics of Hip-Hop expose themselves and condemn Hip-Hop, Dancehall and Maroons in one fell swoop? These Africans flee European plantations, setting up free communities in rural areas, often with “Indians” in some parts of the Americas, returning as a rule to attack slaveocracies in the spirit of African liberation. The related concept of “erotic maroonage” (Cooper 1993, 161) makes us picture similar activity—of Africans who must flee, reject and attack sexual slavery, Black enslavement to white sexual rule, or Western ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality. The current social ideals of “proper” “manhood” and “womanhood” must be at the center of this resistance. Sylvia Wynter tells us how new and narrow, white and ruling-class these taken-for-granted notions are: “[From the early decades of the sixteenth century] we see these categories emerging that had never existed before—whites who see themselves as ‘true’ men, ‘true’ women, while their Others, the ‘untrue’ men/women, were now labeled as indios/indias (‘Indians’) and as negros/negras [‘Negroes’]” (Wynter in Scott 2000, 174). The same must be said for the new and narrow, white and middleclass concepts of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” which don’t formally emerge anywhere in the world until Europe’s nineteenth century. Writing on contemporary Caribbean crusades against so-called slackness, Cooper remarks: “Undomesticated female sexuality—erotic maroonage—must be repudiated: it has the smell of prostitution” (1993, 161). For Europeans and their colonized Black elites, especially, prostitution is the only possible existence outside patriarchy’s heterosexual womanhood. This is why they harass Africans with this accusation, historically, whether guns are involved or not. This must also be why Lil’ Kim, a sexual rebel if there ever was one, while accused of “melodic prostitution” (Cole 2000, 150), always distinguishes her erotic practice from this Western bourgeois point of view. On Hard Core’s (1996) climactic cut, “Fuck You,” she said: “I fuck to buss a nut / Lil’ Kim not a slut.” She was no less dismissive of the category of “slut” in her cameo on Jay-Z’s “I Know What Girls Like” (In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, 1997). Having said she is not



her lyrical imagination and its incessant gun play far outstrip more academicintellectual attempts to rethink the human body, its politics and possibilities, in recent decades from Western colleges and universities? And what perfect sense it will make when the meaning of “polymorphous” (“having, assuming or occurring in various forms, characters or styles”)3 is reflected not only in general matters of sex, gender, and sexuality but in The Notorious K.I.M.’s particular “Rebel Music” of choice.


a “prostitute” but a speaker of “truth” on “Off the Wall” from The Notorious K.I.M.’s (2000), she helped remake “Lady Marmalade,” LaBelle’s classic “hooker” anthem from 1974, for the soundtrack of Moulin Rouge (2001): “We independent women / Some mistake us for whores.” Still, she asks why she should spend hers when she can spend yours, vowing to pimp-out or out-pimp men who structurally exploit women. And boasting on “Magic Stick” for La Bella Mafia (2003), she said: “Lil’ Kim not a whore / But I sex a nigga so good he gotta tell his boyz.” She is relentless and belligerent in her resistance to domesticity, to the state of being sexually bound. Further, when she “busts off” as a Hip-Hop emcee, we get guns that her enemies couldn’t begin to imagine, erotically and otherwise. While Cooper writes of the concern that some Dancehall and Hip-Hop weapons are too often pointed in the wrong direction, lyrically, this does not mean that most Black music critics want to see these guns pointed in any direction at all, lyrically or physically. Whether or not one calls upon Ogun, for instance, or the orisha of iron, steel and justice in the tradition of Eshu-Elegba, it is possible and even urgent to bust these guns right for African maroonage of all kinds. With Lil’ Kim’s rebel-erotic consciousness, we can revel in the noise of her “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” guns of sexual-poetic justice. For her many guns are shot against male domination and gender confinement, Puritanism, economic deprivation, and sexual domestication, over and over again. Besides wholesale accusations of sexism or misogyny, which ignore or repress the existence of female artists and their response to sexual oppression well beyond the world of music, the overarching piece of propaganda against “Hip-Hop” (or “rap”) is about “violence,” or “gun violence.” This is hypocritical and revealingly so. It is after all the violence of Western empire that spawns the socioeconomic conditions conducive to Hip-Hop’s emergence, as a Black culture of resistance in the African diaspora. However, this large-scale violence is not subject to the same level of criticism as music among critics of “violence” associated with HipHop. Obviously, violence is only so “terrible” in Black hands, in Black music and in Black music videos, unlike the violence in white music or white music videos, white Hollywood or the white politics of the White House in Washington, DC. There is a “Jim Crow” policy of violence here, a separate and unequal access to its usage, as Robert F. Williams once noted of U.S. social attitudes in Negroes with Guns (1962): “Whites Only” signs adorn all guns evidently in the minds of protectors of the racial-political status quo. Critics who condemn “violence” in Hip-Hop rarely if ever condemn state violence or even police terrorism in Black communities, no matter how murderous or epidemic or centuries-long, even as they ritually if not hysterically condemn rappers, their records, and their reputed lifestyles. Nor do they distinguish between the different uses to which actual, real Hip-Hop violence might be put, whether it be in the service of much-needed revolutionary change or not, for example. The hypocrisy of this school of criticism is identical to that of the sexual discourse which conjures up images of “sexual violence” as an automatic response to Hip-Hop while having very little to say about the white middle-class sexism, misogyny, and homophobia that governs the globe. The lyrical gun of Hip-Hop is



136


137

Sex Shots Despite confusion spread in Isaac Julien’s documentary film, The Darker Side of Black (1994), there can be no hard and fast division between “gun lyrics” and “sex lyrics” in Hip-Hop given verses such as hers on “Gangsta Shit” (Puff Daddy’s Forever, 1999).4 It is a guest performance and grandiose statement of scenestealing complexity: “Nobody load a clip like me / cut, poke and flip like me,” she raps; and when her gunshot peels, she continues, it’s a “one-shot kill.” The emcee boasts there is no one like her in short thanks to her capacity to spit raps; work the erotic; get riches; and hold “4/5th” firearms. When she insists that she makes “hit after hit,” and that she is a hit herself, the “hits” in question may be musicrecords; sex shots; gun-murders; or all of the above. Her “Queen Bitch” mantle is assumed as much as for her ability to “give head,” or her oral skills, as for her expert “marksmanship” (even though she’s not a “man”). She is as good “in bed,” moreover, as she is at earning and breaking bread with her family of “gangstaz.” Established genre distinctions aside, not to mention the narrow, still mainstream discussions of gender or “masculinity” found in another, more recent documentary film, Byron Hurt’s Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), any division between “gun lyrics” and “sex lyrics” must be deaf to this rap and everything Lil’ Kim represents as “Queen Bitch” of Hip-Hop. As Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s figurative “Lieutenant,” she was always extra-fluent in gun talk. A number of unreleased, post-Conspiracy (1995) freestyles and mixtape releases illustrate as much: “Get Up, Stand Up” hears her rhyming about her “itchy” trigger finger, her ever-ready bullets in the chamber and clip; and it hears her rhyming “Uzi” with “Louis” (Vuitton). On “Grimey,” her word-play would be similarly semi-automatic when she rhymes that we will never catch her with a “semi” (so-so) flow; that we might always catch her with “semi” “doe” (money—to buy guns); and that with one call out to her we can watch all of her “semi’s” (semi-automatic weapons) “blow.”5 These rhymes would only advance those from the remix of “Get Money,” where she had delivered a rhyme scheme in which “gat” and “poonani” coexisted with ease in the same line, suggesting her crotch was secured with chrome. The gun does do double-duty in Hip-Hop and Dancehall as lyric and penis, figuratively, as Cooper observes in “ ‘Lyrical Gun’: Metaphor and Role Play in Jamaican Dancehall Culture” (1995) and in Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004), while other academic critics balk at this association without fail and without cause since there is a whole lot more to this story in Lil’ Kim in particular. For she not only possesses the lyrical penis herself, every possible double-entendre intended, she figures her “pussy” as a sharp-shooter as well. Rarely does the possibility of “female ejaculation”



supposedly more cause for concern than the literal, physical guns of white power, Western imperialism, neo-colonialism, or the supra-national “security” state, at least for those who would ignore or repress Lil’ Kim’s lyrical gun violence (along with any militant sexual or non-sexual politics), out of conservative ideological convenience.


present itself in public discourse anywhere in the bourgeois West. However, these orgasms were hardly a mystery or novelty on Hard Core. Nor are they necessarily figured or gendered as “male” or “female,” exclusively, anywhere in the general Hip-Hop corpus of The Notorious K.I.M. Her solo debut included “We Don’t Need It,” which she closes with a cunning shout-out to Jeru The Damaja. A Rastafarian emcee and martial arts-enthusiast who calls himself “The Perverted Monk,” “intellectual” Jeru is neither asexual nor exactly nonviolent. His premiere album, The Sun Rises in the East (1994) is considered a Hip-Hop classic; and it includes two consecutive tracks showcasing very impressive lyrical guns. The opening words of “Mind Spray” hit hard: “I annihilate as I articulate . . . / You lay face down . . . when my mind spray.” We see perfected in Jeru what poet Saul Williams proposes much later: “I say let ’em shoot / My tongue is my gun aiming for the truth / They got their silencers aiming straight at the youth / And all their talk of terrorism’s nothing but a spoof ” (“No Man’s Land Radio,” The Source [July 2003], 105). But this “Spoken Word” gun is fairly asexual, if gender-specific, quite like Public Enemy, Paris, and many others conventionally characterized as “conscious” in Hip-Hop. Jeru The Damaja followed up “Mind Spray” with “Come Clean,” bragging repeatedly: “Your nine spray / My mind spray.” He’s “The Mack,” so he doesn’t need a “Mac,” or gun; and still he blows up spots like the World Trade Center, before “September 11th.” Despite common critical fears, or phobias, as Cooper’s Dancehall arguments demonstrate, this lyrical gun seems to substitute for literal guns. Sexual and intellectual, Jeru “The Mack” maintains he is neither sexist nor racist. However, it is far from clear that this “conscious” male emcee could accept a comparable sexuality (or sexual intellectualism) in a female emcee or lyricist. On The Sun Rises in the East, he appears unable to handle a female who is not a “queen” or a “bitch,” but “Queen Bitch” instead. This is why it was a scream when Lil’ Kim scripted a Hard Core song that shouts out this “Perverted Monk” and fellow Brooklynite. Bemoaning premature ejaculation in men, and demanding oral satisfaction from them without exception, she finishes “We Don’t Need It” like “The Mack” with a Macmillan weapon herself. After she raps, “You wanna steal tha pussy like a thief,” she orders, “now twist tha lips without tha teeth,” so she can “nut” and “come clean” like Jeru himself. She licks shots and “comes clean” with a complete set of lyrical, sexual guns in her extensive arsenal of rhymes. This was true all over Hard Core. On “No Time,” or one early version of it, she would kiss her partner’s inner thigh and “come” all in his eye. It began on “Big Momma Thang” when she counted how many times she wanted to “come,” twenty-one and then some, or over and over again. “Dreams” and “Not Tonight” kept it going. Next, on The Notorious K.I.M. (or “How Many Licks?”) she would recall a guy from “down South” who liked her to spank him and “come in his mouth.” On “Rockin’ ” (Funkmaster Flex’s The Mix Tape, Volume 4: 60 Minutes of Funk, 2000), there would be a stutter-stepping self-portrait of this woman who is sweet and petite, who packs oversized “heat” and who can feed folk with “skeet.” The “heat” is simultaneously that of a sexual discharge (“skeet”) and a discharge of firearms, an extra-large firearm. The “golden showers” of The Notorious K.I.M.’s



138

139

“QUEEN B@#$H II” would be an “ejaculation” or “shooting,” too. This might turn deadly on its Dancehall-flavored remix. With a wicked verbal sample of “Murda Dem” by Ninja Man (Anything Test Dead, 2001), Lil’ Kim intones: “If you got love for B.I. then buss one in tha sky / Haterz watch ya back we might buss one in ya eye!” The double-entendre punctuates the murder-threat with her sexualorgasmic humor. Album after album, her meaning moves back and forth with consistency from her “busting gun shots” to her “busting nuts” because without any cliché “sexism” or “homophobia” one is explosively metaphorical for the other and vice versa. She therefore speaks in triplets on “Biggie” (The Notorious B.I.G.’s Born Again, 1999). Here she threatens to cock back and squeeze her “Desert E’s” (i.e., Desert Eagle, a semi-automatic hand gun), lyrically boasting that her bullets move in threes. These shots could include (1) gunfire; (2) rhyme flows; and (3) orgasms, “male” and/or “female” (or those not quite confined by either “female” or “male” social categories of gender). The Notorious K.I.M. customarily supplies an equal opportunity of blasts. Moreover, the mouth is sometimes a weapon beyond both gender and guns. Moving to La Bella Mafia, on “Get in Touch with Us” (featuring Styles P.), “Ms. Whyte” dares you to sleep on her (as “Baby Girl”). If she seldom frowns, she’ll spit a “shank” out of her mouth and “bust you down.” On “Tha Beehive,” it gets even nastier; she has “dogs” in the East and “dogs” in the South, who will stick you with an “AIDS needle” and “piss in your mouth.” These pretty phallic protrusions come from the mouth of an emcee who is “female,” if those “dogs” who must follow her orders may be “male” (or “female”), in actuality. There is in addition “This Is a Warning,” a song/skit spoofing R. Kelly’s “A Woman’s Threat” (TP-2, 2000) in the same vein that The Notorious B.I.G. spoofed old-school R&B on “Playa Hater” from his Life After Death (1997). Biggie sang to an unsuspecting victim as Puff Daddy informs in the background: “This is a robbery remix!” Lil’ Kim’s threat on “This Is a Warning” is equally comical, yet stern. It is aimed at all those seeking this Queen’s throne after the “King of New York” has been shot dead. But unlike on Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Back Stabbers,” where Lil’ Kim was haunted by hallucinations of violence at the hands of ever-present “haters,” this time we find her preemptive and purposefully singing way off key: “Bitchez, please!” She informs them that if they don’t stop what they’re doing, someone is going to find them dead; poison their food; put tags on their toes; creep in their house; and put something sounding like a “gun cock” in their mouths: “This is a woman’s threat!” This “woman’s threat” is not that of a scorned woman, hurt and handicapped by an uncaring man; it is the threat of someone who will stick her big “gun-cock” down your throat and make you “blow,” interestingly enough. Before “Suck My D**k” on The Notorious K.I.M., she had already said as much on “It’s All About the Benjamins” with just one line: “If it’s murda, you know she wrote it / German Ruger fo ya ass, bitch, deep throat it!” (Puff Daddy & the Family’s No Way Out, 1997). The “foreplay” and the gun play go hand in hand, and mouth to mouth, beyond physical human genital relations alone, systematically, for “Big Momma/Queen Bitch.”




140


Lil’ Kim’s ecstatic ejaculations enable the lyrical gun as “penis” to double as “pussy” as well, while keeping a legion of literal guns in lyrical tow; and some visual, photo shots punctuate this point. A Native American photojournalist and a member of the Universal Zulu Nation, Ernie Paniccioli has published a collection of three decades of Hip-Hop photography, the title of which is Who Shot Ya? (2002). The book title samples song titles by both Biggie Smalls or “Who Shot Ya” (Big Poppa, 1995) and LL Cool J or “I Shot Ya” (Mr. Smith, 1995). (Lil’ Kim would later “freestyle” a remake of The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Who Shot Ya” herself.) As a result, Paniccioli helps us picture visual or photographic guns along with verbal ones, although his gun is apparently cocked to shun certain kinds of concrete physical violence. Chuck D and Jeru The Damaja, apart from Saul Williams, if not Paris, for instance, all seem to share this aversion or conform to it. In a similar if not identical vein, Tarrus Riley sings powerfully of “shottas” (or their “unconsciousness”) on Parables’s “Beware” (2006). He laments not only that “the enemy” can put their shots “on the shelf,” but also that the “shottas” have “shot the sheriff” à la Bob Marley and “a come fi di deputy”—unlike Bob Marley. Is this total, pacifist aversion to all violence not a political liability for would-be “revolutionaries”? Their objection to non-verbal firearms is not about direction—or at whom Black barrels are pointed, specifically. “Let’s point our heaters the other way,” pleaded Digable Planets on Blow Out Comb’s “Dial 7” (1994), alternatively; and Immortal Technique would more or less concur on The 3rd World (2008): “Lick shots, lick shots, lick shots, lick shots for tha revolution / but watch where tha fuck you shootin.” While many so-called conscious emcees and critics of Hip-Hop remain at best ambivalent on the matter of “Negroes [or Blacks] with Guns,”6 sounding more akin to Martin King than Malcolm X, Lil’ Kim knows better than to reject gun violence in Black communities as a whole, when gun and other violence continues to be dominated by white racist (and male) powers in and outside Black communities. She has complicated its use instead with “rhyme-shots” and “photo-clicks,” as she aggressively defies traditional Western politics of sex and gender as well as white and Black elite doctrines about violence, non-violence and the Black masses. On “Single Black Female,” The Notorious K.I.M. took lyrical note of her graphic significance, speaking bluntly of her symbolic status: “Copped tha presidential suite for weeks, y’all gits tha day out / One-ass picture in magazines, I gits a lay-out.” Her pictures are not only more abundant than other rappers, whether “male and “female,” but her whole lay-outs are also concept-driven and, accordingly, very much in tune with her lyricism or lyrical persona. Ebony magazine’s “5 Questions for: Lil’ Kim” (2003) elicited this response: “My clothes and image are a direct connection to my music. For as many people who have issues with it, there are even more who love it” (22). The lyrical relationship between music production and image production is cemented when she adopts another new name, “Lil’ Kim a.k.a. Cover Girl” on “Custom Made,” after she appeared on an unprecedented number of magazine covers (for a Hip-Hop artist in particular) between Hard Core and The Notorious K.I.M.



Photo Shots

141

For her King magazine feature, promoting La Bella Mafia, the lead photo pictures her in an explicit lyrical gun pose. Posted across from the title of the article (“Killer Bee”) and an introductory blurb (“After a three-year break from the game, Lil’ Kim is back—and she’s deadlier than ever”), there she is with a tiny black gun held tight to red, glossy lips. Her mouth blows on it, as if to cool the firearm, as if her mouth itself might need to be cooled, hypothetically, after a piping hot rhyme. The little pistol’s heat could be cold then, when compared to her very own fire—the arm that is her mouth. The picture is one of relative symmetry. For one gun is used to blow on another, thereby confirming the power of each, as two guns come to literally kiss each other as effective twins, metaphorically, or mirror images. The orality of this “Killer Bee” must be a deadly weapon indeed, said the photography shot by Charlie Langella for King, before there is a chance to read the “Killer Bee” article by Keith Murphy (2003). One Hard Core–era spread produced photos of Lil’ Kim wearing a red thongbikini, high heels and jewelry. She is posing with a huge, heavy pistol, black in color. The first shot shows her gripping the gun with both hands, the barrel pointed towards her mouth, as if she is ready to swallow it whole. It is as if the power of her mouth is in fact the larger force between them. The second shot in this series photographed by Terry Richardson shows her standing, legs cocked, holding this huge pistol in her crotch with a single hand. This time, it is pointed away or outward. Both times, there is a big gun caressed perhaps like a “dildo,” phallic if not necessarily penile. True to form, her look is as usual one of total self-assurance, pleasure and confidence. Her gaze in the photo is a central part of the photo. Her fiery subjectivity or control is visibly highlighted over and against any possible objectification. A different photo shoot for Manhattan FILE magazine carried on this theme to promote The Notorious K.I.M. She is pictured in a white T-shirt, denim jacket, designer boots and “hot shorts.” The shorts are basically blue panties worn with a Noir belt; and the belt has a pinkish gun as its buckle, poised at the very top of her crotch. It points sideways to face us, the viewer, framed by Danielle Levitt, the photographer. The accompanying text is C.H. Rux’s “The Girl with Balls.” However, this pink-and-blue motif (which includes the lyricist’s long, blue hair) calls our attention to The Notorious K.I.M.’s commitment to more than merely male genitalia. It is never a question of “either/or” for her when it comes to “boys and girls.” She explains to those who cannot comprehend, joyfully: “ ‘I feel like I have male hormones,’ laughs Lil’ Kim. ‘I have that hard hard side—and I have that feminine cute, little girl, playful side—I can balance it out like that’ ” (Rux 2001, 63). A promotional single was mailed to members of Lil’ Kim’s fan club on the eve of her sophomore album’s much-anticipated release. The song was “Suck My D**k,” which was heating up mix-tape circuits with its message. Visually, a black-andwhite photo by an unidentified photographer was used as a makeshift cover. The artist was dressed in full dominatrix gear. The clothing is all black and leather. The hair is a big platinum wig. This shot appears elsewhere as a poster, beyond this special package. It graced the wall of BET’s Rap City: Tha Basement, for several years, even after newer posters became available. The Notorious K.I.M. holds a gun in this pose, again, if the weapon is concealed somewhat (or censored) by





the graphic title itself: “Suck My D!#k.” These three words are placed along the length of her “piece” which is positioned just as it was in those previous shots with the red thong-bikini, downward and out from between her legs. Photos of this female emcee grabbing her “privates” in public are too numerous to name, label and discuss. This is a classic Hip-Hop pose, regardless of sex or gender. The above pistol-packing spreads are notable for the interpretation they appear to demand of all such images: Lil’ Kim’s guns appear photographically not simply as proxies for penises; they appear no less as actual vaginal extensions of her own physiological equipment, her “pussy.” They are pictured, and groped, so as to visually protrude from the groin. They elongate from her (“out of sight”) canal, emerging like a cannon, in a fashion which suggests or confirms that no one set of genitals has a complete monopoly on imagery of fire power.7 So what if anything could French-Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray of Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977) or This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) do with the lyrical writing of The Notorious K.I.M.—in the name of an always and only oppressed, exclusive and “essential” femininity? Clearly, Denise Noble’s comments in an essay entitled “Ragga Music” (2000) apply easily to this context: Similarly, in dances which simulate clitoral masturbation and women in controlling and dominant sexual positions, and clothes that imprint the vagina on the observing gaze, the Ragga Queens construct a sexual subjectivity which is centred on the vagina as the locus of female sexual agency and generative power which does not tie it inevitably to reproduction, that is open and inclusive of a wide continuum of desire: auto-eroticism, lesbian desire and an active powerful heterosexual eroticism. (Noble 2000, 162)

“Stop having a problem with us as Black women, with our sexuality, we don’t have that problem,” says a teacher with a post-graduate certificate staring into the camera of Inge Blackman’s Ragga Gyal D’Bout (1993), as she and sisters are seen bumping and grinding in the tradition, resisting white colonial bourgeois protocol from Jamaica to England. All of this is witnessed in concert, music videos and photo shoots as much as what is heard in Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop lyricism in North America. When she strokes herself across various media, the matter is unabashedly sexual and much more than sexual at the same time. Once, The Notorious B.I.G. quipped that he was quick to grab his Smith and Wesson like his “dick” was “missing,” on Life After Death’s “Sky’s The Limit” (1997). The graphic crotchgrabbing of emcees is at once mic-clutching and gun-cocking, a complex equation of art, sex and stances of conflict or war. What The Notorious K.I.M is quick to grab physically as well as lyrically is genital and gun, “pussy” and “phallus.” And her “hot” spitting mouth (like that of Dancehall deejays who are “Queens,” too) is as important as her “hot” body, her dance, and her clothes. It is a part of her body, a bodily organ and an organ of speech. It is a source of great pleasure and an instrument of mind. It is the cavity that is her capacity to impose meaning regarding the rest of her body in the context of a rapped connection between mind and body, holistically, within picture-graphs and without.



142

143



Figure 6.1

Lil’ Kim’s Cover of Genre magazine

Rewriting Bodies—and Phalluses: An Anatomy of Gun Cocks, “Clicks,” and Sex Pistols Lil’ Kim’s lyrical gun can be recognized as a figural replica of her prized genitalia according to the militant logic of her rhymes. The force of it makes it a



concealed weapon that can be unloaded at any time. Her cover photo for gay male Genre magazine (July 2000) finds her in black lingerie holding a tiger’s mask in front of her crotch with her leg cocked and a sly, trickster grin on her face. Notably, on “Little Red Corvette,” Prince sang a parallel image into being: “If you didn’t come to party don’t bother knockin on my door / I got a lion in my pocket and baby he’s ready to roar” (1999, 1983). In Lil’ Kim, there is a “pussy” which fires and roars without rival. This is not a “kitty.” It is more like lioness, an undomesticated “cat,” both beautiful and formidable in its aggressive selfassertion. Thus, in light of such a radical recasting of anatomy and genitalia, it is never enough to see her as possessing the penis, as much as she herself wields it righteously. For Lil’ Kim routinely robs the penis of its image as the sole organ of power, fire-power, and pleasure, lyrical image after image, rhyme after fiery rhyme. jessica Care moore makes this point about guns and gender in “I’m a Hip-Hop Cheerleader,” a poem from her second book of poetry, The Alphabet Verses The Ghetto (2002). Prior to publication, it was performed fabulously in what looked like a chinchilla mink on HBO’s Def Poetry. The Apollo legend began in signature fashion. She carries hand-grenades and “blood red” pom-poms, sidelined but screaming from a stage she insists she built (moore 2002, 145). Her cheerleader pose is sharp-edged. She does not see “women” and “Hip-Hop” or “women” and “violence” as opposing forces. She sees Black women as Hip-Hop’s foundation. Her women deal in explosives and blood, not European femininity or its bourgeois by-products. Apparently, they scream at a stage they are about to bum-rush; and a revolutionary love is their guide: “[I] got the rifle on my back with a mic in my hand / I’ll be your tubman compass so we can map out this land” (146). These women are warriors, super “fly” “momma” warriors in truth. The mic and the rifle are never far apart. If many artists wave a lyrical gun only to put down the weapon of political insurrection, she is one mic-fiend who keeps it strapped in the tradition of Harriet Tubman, Emancipation General and Conductor of the Underground Railroad (during official chattel slavery), who was known to threaten would-be defectors with her own oft-pictured rifle: “Dead Negroes tell no tales!” She reverberates on Erykah Badu’s “Soldier” from New AmErykah, Part One (2008), when she sings: “And if you think about turnin back / I got tha shot gun on ya back.” This historical image helps jessica Care moore chart new territory beyond pacifist, puritanical womanhood (and pacifist, puritanical feminism) as well as microphone sexism. She spoke in no less violent terms in her first collection of poetry, The Words Don’t Fit in My Mouth (1997), before she put its “Sweetest Revolutionary” to music with her band, Detroit Read. This time her evening gown is “guerilla green,” and she was born to shout rather than whisper “sweet nothings” in her or maybe any man’s ears: “My words are rapid-fire bullets / and, I don’t wanna blow your brains out” (moore 1997, 147). For The Alphabet Verses: The Ghetto, women also become “world terrorists,” “one ancestor at a time,” in an aptly and wonderfully entitled poem, “Estrogism” (2002, 14–16). Black women and violent Black rebellion go hand and hand, tricksterlike, lyrical and physical guns strapped together in “I’m a Hip-Hop Cheerleader” and elsewhere.



144

145

It is dead wrong then for critics of Hip-Hop, Dancehall or selective types of “violence” to say that the gun is a “phallic symbol,” period, and leave it at that cultural equation of “manhood” and phallus, philosophically. What about Harriet Tubman’s guns of antislavery, her historical guns? What about jessica Care moore’s guns of estrogism, her scribal-poetic guns? What about Lil’ Kim’s rap guns of sexual-poetic justice? When phalluses are casually equated with penises, to the exclusion of clitorises (which have been traditionally if less popularly defined as phalluses themselves) or specific shapes or figures which in the case of genitals can take shape “phallicly” in or outside bodies (“male” or “female” in form, so to speak), a critical confusion may follow. If the gun is presently symbolized in large part by one particular phallus, for Western patriarchal societies, this does not mean that all phalluses are always and only symbolized by guns or that all guns are always and only symbolized by phallic penises. When analyzed in this way, a penile phallus could be seen as a “gun symbol.” To suppose the reverse (“a gun is a penis-phallus symbol”) would stigmatize any and all guns as unavoidably male, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and so on. That criticism is culturally specific, irrational, and politically suspect. These phalluses are obviously not the originator of meaning, although some of them can come to be modeled on guns as if the gun of steel did not precede its understanding as a genital gun, a penis-phallus-gun. The Western patriarchal gun can conceive of itself as a genital gun and, incorrectly, as the genital gun of all times and all places; it can always, incorrectly, see male sexism, misogyny and homophobia as its only options in practice; and critics can uncritically agree. Regardless, their wielded penises are not the only phalluses, symbolically; penile or not, phalluses are not only wielded by men or males; and, whether lyrical or physical or lyrical and physical, guns are not only forces of sexism, misogyny or homophobia, whoever wields them. Crucially, much thanks to Hip-Hop’s “Big Momma/ Queen Bitch,” many can see or hear a “pussy” comprehended as gun, a revolutionary gun or cannon, once the (metaphysical or ontological) priority wrongly attached to penises is attacked, revoked and repossessed: Lil’ Kim will take it back, persuasively, and aggressively, while rejecting gender and strategically construing her “pussy” as the supreme source of all cultural symbols in the end. 8 When she put in her cameo along with Mase on Jermaine Dupri’s “You Get Dealt With” (Life in 1472, 1998), a robbery was again in the mix as she climaxed the track. She is proud to clown “dudes” whom she plays like “dummies,” screaming Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s punch-line from Jerry McGwire (Cameron Crowe, 1996): “Show me the money!” The words are preceded by a dramatic “click, click!” The emcee verbalizes the “click” of a gun, pivotally, as it simulates the “click” of her “pussy” in Black mother tongues: The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Suck My D**k” showed how “Suck My Clit” would be spoken and written as “Suck My Click,” linguistically. The penis-phallus and the gun itself can now also logically be viewed as “pussy-click” symbols themselves, thanks to the very logical world-view of her lyricism. Guns are not “cocked” like “male” genitalia in this case, exclusively. They are also “clicked,” like “female” genitalia, which can take center stage at any moment against masculine assumptions. When Lil’ Kim rhymed with Mase alone, signifying on an old Biggie Smalls rap for “Will They Die 4 You?” (Harlem World, 1997), it got more interesting still. She says that Lil’ Kim “spreads” like





syphilis; and then she dares anyone who thinks she’s “pussy,” negatively speaking, to stick his “dick” in it; and this “it” or “pussy” becomes a weapon—a Chrome 44 (Magnum), which she notes with pleasure is “inconspicuous.” Her “pussy” is not something to be conquered, that is, by the phallus poised as a conquering penis. It is something to be desired and feared or respected, and something that could lure you into a fatal situation if your intentions are no good. Her “spread” refers to her royal rule as well as her legs or the central rapport between the two, her sex and her reign—her sexual politics. Her center is visualized in “chromedout” fashion as an “inconspicuous” arm, a deadly firearm, the dreaded concealed weapon whose concealment makes it all the more deadly. On “Gone Delirious” with Swizz Beatz (Ghetto Stories, 2002), therefore, she confirms her subversion of male dominance at the level of guns and genitals: “They say I’m pretty like chrome on chrome / And that feelin at tha top is like ‘Home, Sweet Home.’ ” An Indian literary critic and feminist in U.S. academia, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once deciphered (or “deconstructed”) the male domination of women in terms of “the suppression of the clitoris” in patriarchal or “phallocentric” representations of society and human genitalia (Spivak 1988, 152). The Notorious K.I.M. is diligent and belligerent in her lyrical liberation of this suppressed “clitoris,” a neglected phallus in principle (not to mention vaginal canals), but she is no less belligerent in her liberation of the human body from the standard body divisions of the West with all its various estranged “parts,” hierarchies, values, and descriptions. Against gender as well as sexism, not to mention heterosexism and other structures of domination, she raps this criticism of suppression, repression and oppression in Black popular culture’s language of the African diaspora. Finally, not unphallic in shape by any stretch, her “pussy-gun” is full-bodied when found once more on “Whatchu Workin Wit?” or the soundtrack for Gangs of Roses (2003), a film described as a combination of Young Guns (Christopher Cain, 1988) and Set It Off (F. Gary Gray, 1996). It is heard on-screen where Lil’ Kim stars as a gangstress whose name is “Chastity,” tongue in cheek. On record, her unchaste guns bust shot after shot: “It’s Lil’ Kim, tha Sex Pistol / Stay moist in tha middle like wet tissue . . . ” She shoots and is the lyrical gun in this formulation. Hitherto, she has taken us from (1) lyrical guns presupposed to be metaphorical penises brandished by men, or male rappers and deejays alone, to (2) lyrical gun-penises or phalluses that are brandished by this infamously female rapper or emcee; to (3) lyrical guns that could be “pussy” or penis guns with “gun-cocks” and “pussy-clicks,” depending; to (4) her embodying or becoming all manner of lyrical guns in the rhetorical flesh beyond any genital partitioning to this larger level of humanity, human being or human subjectivity. The issue is forced further when she refers to the “Baby Glock” strapped to the “inside” of her legs. The fire is found between her legs. The “Baby Glock” (or “Glock 16”) of “Baby Girl” is another concealed or concealable weapon; and it is firmly, synechdochally identified with her “moist middle.” But, more significantly, Lil’ Kim is now known as “Lil’ Kim, tha Sex Pistol.” Topping the old British punk-rock group, for whom this name was more or less meaningless, The



146


147

Notorious K.I.M. of Hip-Hop is the total package in her toting. Playfully working physical-anatomical ambiguity and doubleness, as would Eshu-Elegba, symbolic “penis” and “pussy” in hand, she presents herself on the mic as a powerful erotic sex-gun personified; as potency itself; as a human being shooting for humansexual liberation.

Twista: Kim is your flow hot? Lil’ Kim: Like gun shot! (“Thug Luv,” La Bella Mafia [2003])

And yet there’s more. The eroticism or sexuality of fire-power expands when she makes recording history again on The Notorious K.I.M. with a song as equally stunning as “Suck My D**k.” The blow-gun metaphorics of rap orality are doubled over anew when she treats her “ flow” on “Aunt Dot.” Before, on “Don’t Stop What You’re Doing” from Puff Daddy & The Family’s No Way Out (1997), she’d already declared: “He know anything I touch I blow / and I crush ya show wit my luscious flow.” Blown could be microphones or men, especially if everyone “knows” Lil’ Kim’s (lyrical) delivery is as “luscious” as her (stage show) performance is “crushing.” With one stroke of her Hip-Hop “pen,” her “flow” can explicitly refer to (1) bullets flowing; (2) rhymes flowing; (3) orgasmic flow; and, newly, (4) menstrual flow. Prior to its release, “Aunt Dot” was discussed in an interview published in Sister 2 Sister magazine. The emcee explains: “You know, some girls call their menstruation their ‘Aunt Dot.’ ” Sometimes it is called “Aunt Flo” as well. By any name, “this song is talking about having your menstruation” (Lil’ Kim in Brown 1999, 40). It makes a direct connection between shooting, rhyming and bleeding (if not “coming” while bleeding), as only anatomically defined “females” can. The moral of the story turns out to be that no one (“male” or “female”) is more “gangsta” than a “gangsta bitch” with this kind of flow, all white Western bourgeois gender assumptions aside. Who could have predicted “Aunt Dot” was to come from that first line of Lil’ Kim’s “Benjamins” verse, where she began with the infamous Afro-Jamaican expression, “Whut tha blood claat?” She ran with this theme in reference to “Murder She Wrote” by Dancehall’s Chaka Demus & Pliers (All She Wrote, 1993). We have to understand the lyrical sex pistol which can be “person,” “pussy” as well as “penis” to fully understand what goes on and on in “Aunt Dot.” Musically, menstruation is understood as a sort of time of possession, a spirit possession making she who is mounted or ridden “Queen Bitch” (a positively “royal bitch”) to the max. The narrative is another tale of betrayal and vengeance, vengeance as justice in due course. Both Conspiracy’s “Back Stabbers” and La Bella Mafia’s “This Is a Warning” resonate along with a couple of The Notorious B.I.G.’s songs. Innovatively, he composed and performed “Warning” (and “Gimme the Loot”) from Ready to Die (1994) in two distinct voices. The Notorious K.I.M. takes it a step further. She composes and performs three characters in three voices, each



“Aunt Dot” Flows: Blood Claat–Blood Shots


inhabiting one and the same body in different life phases. There is Kim at the outset, in bed; Aunt Dot, or Dottie, in the streets; and, last but not least, her “niece” Shanice, who is suddenly in Kim’s custody on this day as she awakes overcome by “Aunt Dot,” menstruating. All voices are Lil’ Kim’s in every way. A young voice knocks at the door and identifies herself as Shanice. She is sent by her mother Dottie, along with a “shottie,” and a note. Three “bitchez” have put a bomb in her Lil’ Kim’s “Benz, which is why “Aunt Dot” is now out to do harm to these former friends. Aunt Dot takes over, leaving with Kim cousin Shanice, who worships her. In other words, when Kim is threatened, Aunt Dot comes out to protect her. She is protecting Shanice at the same time, since this little girl seems set to become Kim and appears to stand for the little girl Lil’ Kim once was. This Kim is briefly left with a less than regal type of gun; her elder/alter ego, Aunt Dot must have her pretty “twin-glizzies” on her mission in the streets. Blessed with blood, and glocks, Kim-cum-Dottie will put them to good use, a just and righteous use, as the more menstrual persona because endowed with menstrual powers is evidently the most powerful and wildly virtuous persona possible. The aunt who takes care of Kim has raised a daughter to be just like her. However prepubescent, “Shanice” spits a mini-verse here that sounds a lot like her “high-pitched” idol. Refusing to stay in her place, the “womanish” one is persistent. “Aunt Dot” supplies “Miss Little Queen B(ee)” with a weapon concealed in her doll babies, as Kim would carry a stun gun inside her hair bun in some of her rhymes. Cartoon characters aimed at her are dissed in the language Kim employed to counter Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on “Suck My D**k.” Miniature male rappers Lil’ Nique and Jus get robbed for their “toys for tots.” They get a taste of the sexual poetic justice meted out Set It Off-style on Kim’s “Makes No Sense.” Also cited is Luc Besson’s The Professional (1994), when Shanice in her defense tells Kim that she can “clean.” The film is about a professional hit man who suddenly finds himself with a small girl in his charge as well. He is paid to commit murders without a trace; and this is what the film calls “cleaning.” If Kim-cumAunt Dot is the “clean-up woman” (in gangstafied as opposed to domestic terms), Kim-cum-Shanice represents her future (or the future). This future is secured by menstrual blood, symbolically, as a sign of regeneration across generations. The sign is that “blood” or “family” will continue on via “females” of the lyricalgenealogical line. This is revealed further when a new Queen Bee Records artist materializes on La Bella Mafia’s “Shake Ya Bum Bum,” Lil’ Shanice. There, Lil’ Kim raps: “Initials on our jackets like Laverne & Shirl / Kids rock my Queen B logo like a Powerpuff girl.” Then, amidst references to grandmothers and daycare centers, a girl-child is heard, rhyming about shaking her “anus” with the coolest “Queen.” She says she’s about to “blow,” too. Shanice is a self-proclaimed “princess,” delivering in matrilineal mode. Aunt Dot will deliver, herself, at the close of this three-generational tale named for her. Its chorus consists of four, twice-repeated lines. We are told that some “girls” are acting “stank” and funny (specifically vis-à-vis Lil’ Kim): “Y’all bitchez bleed like me—on tha monthly,” she reminds them. If they can’t stand the pain, she rhymes on, they should “pop” a “Humphrey,” since: “I know it hurts (I’m killin y’all!)”



148

149

Why would other “girls” betray “Big Momma,” Kim? This is the track’s key question. What is a Humphrey? She answered that much in Sister 2 Sister: “A Humfrey [sic] is a pill that they used to take back in the days when your menstruation was stuck and you wanted to make it come down. It was called Humpfrey 1100” (Brown 1999, 40). Traitors to her cause act “stank” and funny when they can’t handle the condition of being “female” under male-domination. They need help which, along with this pill, Lil’ Kim provides. These girls can represent former friends who act out of jealousy, just as in “Back Stabbers.” They can represent women who join the chorus of criticism against The Notorious K.I.M., supporting sexist, puritanical double-standards, out of jealousy. “I thought women were gonna be behind me,” she said in an interview given in the days after the splash made by Hard Core (Tannebaum 2000, 197). The “girls” of “Aunt Dot” can also represent other female rappers who imitate her style and condemn her in consecutive breaths. They were discussed in Black Beat magazine: “If you notice, I don’t ever say anything about these females first, at all. They feel like you gotta disrespect me to come up in this game. To me, that’s not how you do it. Why does it have to be like that? Why can’t you be alongside me and we roll together?” (Rudi M. 2003, 18). These feelings are writ large in her Dottie-centered verse in which she asks what went wrong and wonders, briefly, why they can’t all get along and make hit songs? Quickly, she readies to strike back; to “gong” their metaphorical show; to continue her plans for the future; and to bring back the heads of these murderous traitors, like “Medusa.” This Medusa reference is intricate and profound. It comes from what is generally presented to us as “Greek mythology,” even though “Ancient Greece” is over-indebted to Ancient Egypt or Africa in its historical production of knowledge. Mythologically, Medusa is cursed and conquered for testing a goddess. This is thanks to Perseus, an envoy commissioned by Athena and Hermes. Athena represents beauty, as in “Black Athena.”9 A trickster figure often compared to Eshu-Elegba, Hermes represents textuality or writing. By them, Athena and Hermes, Medusa is hacked in a notorious decapitation. Her resulting head of snakes resounds in Lil’ Kim because “snakes” themselves symbolize betrayal all over the artist’s work in lyricism. On “Aunt Dot,” she is able to signify the goddess of beauty herself (“Black Athena”) as well as Hermes (“divine linguist”) and Perseus (“slaying savior”), three major figures in one yet again. Who will fail to notice that it takes three great “Greek” legends to amount to one “Queen Bitch” composite conveyed in a single Hip-Hop song? “Aunt Dot” is a story “to be continued.” Dottie rhymes when she phones Kim, her younger and pre-menstrual self, to describe her vengeful exploits and the status of her safety. The call simulates the call received by Biggie on Ready to Die’s “Warning” (1994), but Dottie doesn’t simply warn. She has dealt with “Nicole” and dumped her body off on a dead-end street, leaving “Laverne” and “Tyesha” ominously up next. The cycle, menstrual and lyrical, will go on as Kim notes that “Aunt Dot” is like five “Bloody Mary’s,” one after another. So this “Auntie” rearranges life as we know it, when she “flows,” when she “comes” (arrives, climaxes, shoots). It is she who determines what clothes are worn; how much stress there is; whether or not you have sex; and, most essentially,





who lives and who dies. If she is five times worse than “Bloody Mary,” this could refer to the drink of hard liquor; or the British monarch, “Bloody Mary” Tudor, whose reign of terror lasted for five years as daughter of Henry VIII; or the “Bloody Mary” of popular folklore who, when you repeat her name three times in front of a mirror in the dark, strangely appears to scratch your face until you bleed to death.10 This is how hard-core Lil’ Kim declares herself to be as an emcee when possessed of a “menstrual flow.” What’s more, her remake of “disco queen” Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” (Bad Girls, 1979) with RuPaul would appeal to this very same “relative” of hers: “You know how it is when Aunt Dot cock-block.” She beats some “niggaz” with a whip, breastfeeds them with her “tit,” and threatens to act out some Lorena Bobbitt “shit,” if they betray her.11 The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Suck My Dick” becomes “Suck My Tit,” too, as castration and sexual (if not coital) domination are added to the mix with “Aunt Dot.” There may be no men whatsoever mentioned in the whole song, but male domination is always the subject of dispute. “Aunt Dot’s” chorus brings another piece of music by to mind: “Niggas Bleed” from Life After Death by The Notorious B.I.G. Its chorus cements his reputation as a superb Hip-Hop storyteller; and it seriously complicates debates about supposed “Black-on-Black crime.” He repeats that these “niggaz bleed” just like him, or us, emphatically, after he paints what he feels to be ridiculous picture—one that has him scared of another “nigga,” who breathes the same air he does; one that has him “shook,” when they can both pull out “burners” and make their “beef” or conflict “cook”; and one that has him hiding while another man has his life in his hands, deciding (if he will live or die). Biggie says running is not in his protocol. He vows to battle. His portrait and point of departure is of a Black male marooned in a “savage” “state of nature”—otherwise known as white racist “society”—where he and his kinsmen are placed against each other in an all-out war for survival. Organized racism is the “criminal” responsible for the “Black-on-Black” violence to which many of his brothers are reduced, and which is clearly white-on-Black violence in any event. The source of destruction tries to turn the tables by scapegoating its victims who are pictured as threats to bourgeois safety and “civilization.” “Niggas Bleed” shows who is really victimized by the violence in which young Blacks are ensnared, specifically; and it radically rejects the posture white racism would prefer “Black males” to adopt: Biggie is not scared or shook or hiding or running. He is not the cringing, cowering Negro. We hear literary echoes of Sterling Brown, James Baldwin, and George Jackson in this representation, especially when Biggie essentially caps Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) in this one sublime rhyme: “Nuthin to lose tattooed around his gun wounds / Everything to gain embedded in his brain.” Lil’ Kim herself has compared him to Langston Hughes on many occasions (Sarko 1999, 124). Huey P. Newton has himself been quoted on his early years: “Every blood on the street was a potential threat, unless I knew him as a friend. After my first fights, though, I recognized that they bled like me . . . ” (Newton quoted in Brown 1992, 252). Beyond North America, Biggie’s lyrical refusal of passive victimization meshes nicely with the revolutionary Frantz Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre (1961) or The Wretched of the Earth (1963), writing on white colonization in continental Africa: “Thus the



150

151

native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner” (Fanon 1963, 45). He breaths the same air, on Life After Death; he fingers the same trigger; he loses the same blood. The world as it is will not recover when the emcee’s brethren combine Biggie’s self-affirmation with a more accurate targeting of enemies. “Niggas Bleed” says he and his will not be preyed upon or starve in the wasteland of “Amerika,” a casualty in his own community of “desperate men, and women, people” (Jackson 1994, 322). But if the bleeding is being done by “niggas” alone, where “niggas” means Blacks or Black males alone, then what The Notorious B.I.G. himself referred to as “the struggle” continues, as much as Black Power slogans resonate on Ready to Die and Life After Death. This politics of men is not the politics of blood and guns on “Aunt Dot,” however, for its violence is shot back in retaliation and regret that her sisters would betray her and their righteous, potentially revolutionary cause. The girls who are acting “stank” and funny in Lil’ Kim’s chorus are not anonymous “niggas” on the street. They are ex-friends who put a bomb in the HipHopstar’s “car,” fully intending to kill her in a murder that would put an end to her bombastic resistance to male privilege, exploitation and oppression of women. There are vital meanings present when she raps of blood which were absent from Biggie’s “Niggas Bleed [Just like Us].” There are multiple meanings for each of these terms as a rule. There are gender-neutral and gender-specific meanings of both “nigga” and “bitch,” and these gender-neutral and gender-specific meanings can be positive, negative or neutral depending on speaker, context and purpose. Many of these meanings are pointedly ambiguous. It is “Queen Bitch” who gave and gives positive meaning to “bitch,” not to mention “nigga,” more than anyone else in Hip-Hop history and the history of “English,” language and literature. Yet and still, she marshals multiple meanings by trade. She does echo Biggie’s “Niggas Bleed” in a sense. She will not be found scared, shook, hiding or running when threatened. The value she gives to her own life will “shake the world” in a “very necessary manner,” indubitably. The people who aim to do her harm, whether “men” or “women,” all of these people can bleed instead of her. An alternative sense of blood prevails in “Aunt Dot,” a sense which is positively about solidarity over destruction: “Y’all bitchez bleed like me—on tha monthly.” There is bleeding as a result of bullet wounds and there is bleeding as a result or sign of life-giving, life-affirming power. “Aunt Dot” upholds this power betrayed by “girls” other than Lil’ Kim. Why should they attack “Big Momma,” who has done so much for them, when they all bleed “monthly” in a culture that oppresses them on the basis of this shared biological potential? The suggestion is that “girls” such as “Laverne” (who always wanted to be and look like her, narratively), “Nicole” (whom she sheltered in her own house) and “Tyesha” (who planned the female homicide, and whose real name is discovered to be Keisha) will remain “girls” rather than “women” until they grow into a realization of this potential solidarity. This is precisely the sort of redirection of violence advocated by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Their petty individual envy is immature in part because it does no damage to those who are really responsible for most of their troubles,





their pain, which is at best temporarily cured by popping a “Humphrey.” “I know it hurts (I’m killin y’all!).” They should join Lil’ Kim’s resistance, emulate her success among men, not scheme to undermine it and remain in a system controlled by men. The need is for them to become “women” or “females” or “sisters” who are conscious of a struggle mostly missing from Biggie’s “Niggas Bleed.” But here jealously is “killing” her detractors, just as Kim-cum-Dottie will be killing her would-be attackers. The sound of music in “Aunt Dot” underscores a seriousness of intent. Classical strings screech and scream throughout, suggestive of Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), signifying a bloody horror that is sure to come, however unfortunate the conflict at hand. With grand violence, “Aunt Dot” undoes the conventional relationship between “gender” and “gangsta” which leaves men or males, white or Black, with all the firepower in or outside of Hip-Hop. The rhymes of these blood claat-blood shots combine gun shooting and sex shooting seamlessly; and photo shots are never far behind. While Lil’ Kim is routinely overlooked as an artist’s artist along with most rap artists, avant-garde photographer David LaChapelle has confessed to being “obsessed with her hardcore sexuality” (Arogundade 2000, 140).12 Apart from her cover of Genre magazine, he once staged a photo of her in which her menstruation is made graphically, aesthetically clear. The visual is aptly entitled “Lil’ Kim: A Visit from Aunt Dot.” The art of the photo is inspired by the art of the musical song, even if the established (apparently white and male, yet apparently progressive) photographer is acknowledged for his artistry before the young Black female Hip-Hop lyricist who is unquestionably author behind the script. LaChapelle has been a frequent Lil’ Kim shooter, for album artwork and fashion layouts, whether or not he comprehends her lyricism or Hip-Hop over and above “shock value” or symbolic transgression. At any rate, LaChapelle is not alone. Lil’ Kim has been an under-acknowledged source of inspiration for countless fashion-aesthetic trends in contemporary Western culture. She remarks on her own episode of VH-1’s The Fabulous Life (2003): “I’ve had Betsey Johnson, Karl Lagerfeld and other designers come up to me and say, ‘My whole Fall collection was designed after you!’ ” She might single-handedly stand for “ghetto fabulosity,” however maligned and misunderstood the concept may be for some: It’s important to remember that she and street-sussed R&B [sic] and garage kids in the US and UK were sporting logo T-shirts from Iceberg, printed jeans by Moschino and patent leather puffas and gold jewellery [sic] during years when high fashion’s dominant aesthetic was either ultra-minimalist or bohemian and eclectic. “Ghetto fabulous,” the opulent cultural fantasy of an urban working class, existed way before designers like Versace and Galliano decided to alight upon it and deem logos and nouveau rich brash the next big thing. (Cole 2000, 154)

This scenario came full circle for Lil’ Kim when she signed on to do a series of ads for Iceberg in 2000. It reproduces the role of African and Oceanic arts in the history of elite European art, Pablo Picasso providing the greatest example. The art of “high fashion” continues to plunder global African youth culture today; and, in many interpretations, it converts original authors or innovators into



152

153

mere “imitators” yet again. When this process is complete, Hip-Hop artists are supposedly no longer artists at all. The art of “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” merits no analysis, no matter how much history her recorded writings make. This situation could be worse with elite Eurocentrism in North America, where neither popular culture in general nor fashion in particular elicit much critical respect as spaces of artistic expression. There are few intellectual kudos here for a Fela Kuti, for instance, which is to say, his Black Power Afrobeat or his visually stunning, fist-pumping, spliff-smoking “Queens.”13 Lil’ Kim’s thrust for power is no less stunning, artistically and politically; and this artful “Queen” speaks. She packs a militant arsenal, a “nasty” mouth, a mean lyrical gun of justice in Hip-Hop. The poet Cheryl Clarke wrote in her essay, “She Still Wrote Out the Word Kotex on a Torn Piece of Paper Wrapped Up in a Dollar Bill . . . ” (2006b): “We have to work against the custom of silence as well as our own fear of power as sexual beings” (184). And, “I think black women writers—poets and fiction writers—could stand to lose some primness, some fatalism, and one-dimensional perspective: one man (or woman), one body, one way, and fade out to flowers. I say throw away the Kotex, forget the tampon, and BLEED” (185). So Ms. G.O.A.T. continues The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Aunt Dot” line of thought with “Rock On” in 2007: “I flows like tha monthly, you can’t cramp my style / Can’t stand the pain, here’s a Motrin, chile!”14 Her symbolics of blood run on and on. Those who merely fear Hip-Hop and Dancehall arms may miss this metaphor of “flow” altogether—although, on The Sun Rises in the East, Jeru The Damaja rhymed famously that he had a “freaky, freaky, freaky-freaky flow” (and that he controls the mic like Fidel Castro, of revolutionary Cuba). Whose flow could be freakier than the flow of Lil’ Kim? An XXL magazine feature would recognize her stature in this regard, perhaps despite itself: “So Sexy: 69 Freek-a-Leekiest Rap Songs” (Alvarez et. al, 2004).15 These lists compiled by journalists tend to be controversial inasmuch as they tend to be rushed, incomplete and shortsighted. This one doesn’t fail where Lil’ Kim is concerned. Some “old-school” female rappers are brought back to mind: HWA (Hoez With Attidude), BWP (Bytches With Problems), Nikki D and LeShaun. Some “new-school” sirens such as Trina and Khia make one appearance each after Salt-N-Pepa and a variety of male rappers (2 Live Crew, Onyx, Slick Rick, Too Short, etc.) who, predictably, predominate. The Notorious K.I.M. appears three times, more than any group or solo artist, except The Notorious B.I.G. All of her appearances (“Not Tonight,” “Magic Stick” and “Big Momma Thang”) come from her solo album releases, while list-makers had to dig deep in the crates for four appearances by her legendary counterpart. Where are her cameos and remixes? There are cameos of his coming from Luke (Luther Campbell) and Crustified Dibbs as well as a formerly unreleased track from his Ready to Die days. It took this kind of consideration for even him to compete with her for the most number of entries on XXL’s less than perfect countdown. No surprise, the categorical label for each lyrical excerpt is “FREAKY FLOW.” This is an established concept within rap, so much so that an artist in Canada has taken it as his name; and Special Ed (who worked on Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s Conspiracy) has taken it as a song title himself (Revelations, 1995). They do not compare with Lil’ Kim, for whom it refers to more than mere





content or style. It is her way of embodying orality exhaustively. Her sexual flow is or can be (1) penile-phallic; (2) vaginal; (3) clitoral; (4) full-bodied; and, ultimately, (5) menstrual. Is it not Eshuesque, Black, and blood red with the color of (spiritual) transition and transformation? All others might exhaust themselves trying to keep up in just one of the above modalities, most of which they cannot actually imagine. Apparently, her lyrical gun is maxed out by the militant erotics of “Aunt Dot.” There are no cultural or anthropological taboos on such blood in this universe, where it is all good and it is all about power. There would be no biology or society without it. The menstrual is the matrix out of which life and, by extension, all possible cultural meaning must emerge; this is a power which Lil’ Kim claims with a fiery passion in Hip-Hop and Dancehall-flavored rhymes, marvelously.

Conclusion Relatedly, “Rebel Music” takes interesting turn when Lady Saw deejays over the “riddim” of Bob Marley’s “Crazy Baldhead” (Rastaman Vibration, 1976) on Give Me the Reason’s “Life without Dick” (1996). The Wailers and he classically chase a con man with all his con plans out of their town, defending the people from another Babylon scheme of oppression and exploitation. Surrounded by a society or a world that pretends to separate sexuality from politics, slyly, in order to enforce its own particular brand of sexual politics in reality, Lady Saw puts a spin on this selection collected on Rebel Music by speaking of desire—her desire and its survival—in opposition to Babylon’s erotic schemes of empire. The doubleentendre or multiple meaning-making cannot be missed here: “Dick” could have been a person or a boyfriend, but instead it is the personification of her desire, the object or symbol of her desire, the physical substance of her desire and sexual self-actualization: “Life without it D/dick could neva be nice / If mi can’t have D/ dick then I will neva survive.” So she deejays over the “riddim” of Bob Marley’s “Crazy Baldhead,” repoliticizing it brilliantly in order to protect and defend her desire, if not desire in general, from every Babylon con man and every Babylon con plan that might dupe the people out of its freedom from sexual repression and sexist oppression instead: “Rebel Music” it is for Lady Saw of DancehallReggae in a certain kinship with Lil’ Kim. The notoriously “dread” Grace Jones may provide a rebellious precedent for Lady Saw and others. Her “Pull Up to the Bumper” (Nightclubbing, 1981) was reprised by a patois-rapping Patra for Fatal Attraction (1995) before the former model, actress and star of her own One Man Show (1991) worked with Lil’ Kim on “Revolution,” appropriately enough, for The Notorious K.I.M (2000). Then, after the likes of Sister Nancy, Shelly Thunder and Dawn Stephens, for example, there is Tanya Stephens who could release an album entitled Ruff Rider (1998), which was “studded for pleasure” according to its cover art’s safe-sex/condom motif, an album entitled Gangsta Blues (2004), and an album entitled Rebelution (2006), clearly contradiction-free. Many more still continue this tradition, more or less famously, locally and globally. The more or less notorious women of Black



154

155

popular music of the Americas may be many and varied, but what of sex, gender, and the lyrical gun of “Rebel Music,” specifically, among the masses of the African diaspora? Critically unafraid of “Rebel Music” in myriad modes, Carolyn Cooper’s “Lyrical Gun: Metaphor and Role Play in Jamaican Dancehall Culture” remarks that the “power of the gun” in Perry Henzell’s classic film The Harder They Come (1972) is “magnified by the fire power of the singer’s music and lyrics” (Cooper 1994, 433). The flash of “ritual gunfire” is “the flash of verbal creativity,” for artists and their audiences: “Words fly at the speed of bullets and the lyrics of the DJ hit hard” (435). A product of the mind materializes at the physical level of the body, sparking a spirited energy via the organic intellectual organ of the mouth. The sexuality of this orifice, its elemental eroticism in performance, somehow this is all lost in standard preoccupations with male genitalia. The mouth is “penetrating” (and “phallic”) as much as the penis when lyrical gunplay is at work. There is no lyrical gun without it. A self-proclaimed oral genius, Lil’ Kim wields her orality as an instrument of power, pleasure and knowledge, “polymorphously.” She wields a lyrical penis. She wields a “pussy.” She wields a “click,” a “clit” or clitoris. She wields her whole body as well as her mind. She wields her capacity to menstruate as a cosmic process from which she emerges as the essence of creation, generational continuity and “gangsta.” For “Aunt Dot” is at once “killer,” heroism, and a heroine’s salvation. This is what it means to be Hip-Hop’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch.” This is her lyrical gun, her “lyrical sex pistol,” how it flows and hits “hard, hard, hard.” Hers is a most “conscious” “message music,” as Cooper necessarily redefines it elsewhere: “a gendered political space in which cocksure men assume absolute power in their sexual relations with women; and feisty women set them straight” (Cooper 2002, 277). It is also a lyrical undoing of Western sex categories altogether, despite racist media representations of Black popular culture as complete “sexual savagery” set to music. Lil’ Kim’s Hip-Hop gun leaves these concepts of oppression simply dazed and confused. Indeed, it gives added, erotic meaning to Cooper’s later contention in “ ‘I Shot the Sheriff’: Gun Talk in Jamaican Popular Music” (2007) that the “lyrical gun” is “the language of subversion and subterfuge: mixing things up, turning them inside out and upside down” (Cooper 2007 159), possibly “in the cause of a revolutionary struggle against oppression” (155). Critics who are afraid of such “Rebel Music” prove to be racist and classist as well as sexist and heterosexist in their phobic focus on Black male gun play to the exclusion of The Notorious K.I.M.’s antisexist/gender-defiant/ultra-erotic gunning for sexual poetic justice. Before music by men or women of recent years, Bessie Smith sang of cutting and shooting “good for nothing” men with razors and guns on “Black Mountain Blues” (1930). Is hers the first lyrical gun violence of note in African America? Paule Marshall wrote in her novel of Barbadian migrants to New York City, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959): “in this white-man world, you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun” (Marshall 1981, 70). The mouth is a “do-or-die” weapon for her, too, in Brooklyn. The “no good” man in this case is not a lover. He is the source of greater, modern historical ills. Chester Himes wrote of Black lesbian “femmes fatales” in the eighth installment of his nine-part Harlem detective series, Blind





Man with a Pistol (1969): “As though their entrance had been a signal, one of the lesbos [sic] leaped atop her table and began doing a frantic table dance, as if spraying the audience with unseen rays from a gun hidden beneath her miniskirt. The skirt wasn’t much bigger than a G-string. It was in gold lamé, looking indecent against her smooth chamois-colored skin” (Himes 1989, 143). The gun is sexual and not male in this enticing rather than frightening narrative episode of a larger narrative exploration of the merits of organized versus unorganized violence in U.S. Black liberation struggles. Many years later, after Shabba Ranks and his explicit punning on As Raw As Ever’s “Gun Pon Me” (1991) in Dancehall, Lil’ Kim would rap into being all sorts of gun play via Hip-Hop, but not without great literary and musical precedents.16 Her “problem-solving” revolver could be clarified by comments made in To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (1971).17 Currently, Fred Hampton, Jr. is fond of citing the Minster of Defense of the Black Panther Party (BPP) or his polemic which urged his comrades and fellow-travelers to “politicize the gun.”18 The son and namesake of the state-slain Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP is himself seen and heard in Hip-Hop on dead prez’s Let’s Get Free (2000) and Turn off the Radio, The Mixtape (Vol. 2): Get Free or Die Tryin’ (2003) as well as in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2006) and dead prez’s John Threat-directed concert film/documentary, It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop (2006).19 What was written by the BPP Minister of Defense in “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community: April 17, 1971” was that the “gun itself is not necessarily revolutionary because the fascists have guns, in fact they have more guns. . . . [T]he gun by all revolutionary principles is a tool to be used in our strategy” (Newton 1995, 48–49). This means that the gun does not have any inherent (“objective”) meaning, negative, positive or neutral, independent of cultural, historical, and political context, since guns like everything else in society have to be given meaning in order for them to have any meaning at all, be the meaning in question fascist or anti-fascist, sexist or anti-sexist, homophobic or anti-homophobic, symbolically phallic or not. The meaning loaded by Lil’ Kim into her “lyrical sex pistol” shoots gargantuan holes in theories that uphold male domination and those that pretend to oppose it by opposing both Hip-Hop and Black revolutionaries as naturally and essentially male or misogynist and hopelessly so. To be sure, standard academic theories of gender and sexuality stand to be rewritten in this Hip-Hop light. For example, it is revealing when Joy James asserts in her foreword to T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1997): “Say ‘black revolutionary’ and the reflex response ‘patriarchal male’ manifests as the negative image” (James in Sharpley-Whiting 1997, ix). This is an adequate representation of how academia represents Black revolutionaries, across the board, and other threats to the counter-revolutionary establishment of white and bourgeois societies of the West or Westerndominated countries. But who has accepted this propaganda, exactly, how and why? Illogically, it erases and even encodes as “absent” or “abnormal” the whole history of Black female revolutionaries, no less so in the name of feminism, as it



156

157

evidently aims to reverse Malcolm X’s militantly egalitarian, Pan-African realization: “You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to be is an intelligent human being” (X 1965, 135). There is no doubt now a reflex academic response to Black revolutionaries that both upholds white bourgeois ideals and negates the very idea of Black revolutionaries in a fashion that enforces the same traditionally conservative, heterosexist gender conventions which are supposed to be challenged—“in theory.” To be sure, standard academic theories of gender and sexuality stand to be rewritten in light of Hip-Hop’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” lyricism, specifically, thanks to its thoroughly revolutionary gun fire and refigurations of human embodiment. The writings of Sigmund Freud could demand some treatment in this regard, if not the “controversial” Black psychiatry of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing. As a teenager on the verge of stardom, Lil’ Kim expressed a liking for his writing in her Brooklyn school days: “I think of myself as a very visual person, and so was Freud. Just the way he would analyze people’s dreams. I remember one about snakes and horses.” (Gonzales 1997, 67).20 It is Freud’s notion of “polymorphous perversity” that her work explodes with a vengeance. He proposes it in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), most notably. If “polymorphous” refers the fact of taking many or multiple shapes or forms, then this terminology might refer the many, multiple forms she takes as a lyricist sexually, visually, stylistically or aesthetically, musically, vocally, etc. As far as sex or sexual genitalia in particular is concerned, she gives new meaning to “polymorphous,” which Freud could only negatively envision within his framework of “perversion.” She embraces her body, pleasure and power in a radical variety of forms, without fear, guilt or anxiety. She can hence model her manifold guns on the whole of human embodiment. She is by no means bound to the body that Freud sexes, or the sexuality he sought to standardize as “normal” and “civilized” for the sex and gender of Victorian, Judeao-Christian Europe. “Anatomy is destiny” for her only insofar as our destinies are our in own hands, rap-writing hands in her case. Her production of rhymes refuses to reproduce the reproductive body of his repressive sexual politics, or his oppressive sexual racism.21 Yet however sexist or heterosexist, misogynist or homophobic, Freud is not now nearly as “controversial” as The Notorious K.I.M., Hip-Hop and Dancehall or even Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers (1991) in contemporary white bourgeois society.22 The “Rebel Music” of The Notorious K.I.M. could not possibly be the product of a “gun moll,” for certain, contrary to a lot of commentary on Hip-Hop and the commentary of Judge Lynch of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.23 A “gun moll” is the girlfriend of a mobster or gangster, who may hide or carry his guns for him, as she exists for his sexual satisfaction; she is not the undomesticated gunner that is Lil’ Kim in her Hip-Hop lyricism; nor is the gun moll’s man as a matter of fact. This lyrical gun play and word play responds to Bob Marley’s wail, which Black, African listeners are invited to run with like a band of Maroons: “Why can’t we be what we want to be? / We want to be free!” Why can’t we be free sexually, since we want to be free? How can we be “ free,” in fact, if we are not erotically free, embodying freedom? In the West, “anatomy” is thought to be “destiny” when it is more akin to slavery as the West defines and





imposes it. The biology of European and North American textbooks is radically rewritten in the rhymes of “Lil’ Kim, tha Sex Pistol.” Her lyricism reimagines the body most have been schooled to take for granted and, by extension, all the bodies of knowledge built on the body as a foundation for intellectual thought and socio-political action. Officially, on the margins, Women’s Studies and Gay and Lesbian Studies have for decades argued in the wake of Black Studies for a human body liberated from many of the anatomical alibis of sexism and homophobia. But no critical scholarship has come close to accomplishing what she accomplishes in the musical tongue of the Black masses. Systematically, it continues to collaborate with racism and empire in its feminist and masculinist, gay, lesbian, and heterosexist formulations, almost none of which fail to demonize Hip-Hop, Dancehall, and Black revolutionary militancy, wholesale, while normalizing the violence of the state and elite social institutions in general. They would rob the children of Maroons of weapons while the establishment remains fully armed and fortified with physical and sexual-political weapons. Nevertheless, the polymorphous gun of The Notorious K.I.M. symbolically destroys the myth of femininity or female anatomy as mute, passive and weak at the same time that she destroys the overall framework of gender or the arrogant dichotomy of masculinity and femininity, manhood and womanhood, a hallmark of white racist imperialism for centuries. She can radically transform our “consciousness”—and our “unconscious” psycho-social activities—as a consequence. This is the “fifth” element of Hip-Hop in full, fantastic effect: “Rebel Music” it is as she “politicizes the gun,” power and the pleasurable body toward a human freedom unknown and unspoken by “gun molls,” academicians, federal judges and other certified agents of “Babylon.”



158

The “Sound Clash” of The Naked Truth: Erotic Maroonage, Public Enemies, and “Rap COINTELPRO”

Do you need protection from my voice Or do you need protection from your protectors? (Mumia Abu-Jamal, All Things Censored [2000]) Fascism [is] the resistance of a sexually and economically, deadly sick society to the painful but resolute revolutionary tendencies toward sexual and economic freedom, a freedom the very thought of which instills the reactionary man with mortal terror. (Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism [1933]) Man, fuck tha law! The whole system’s corrupt! (Lil’ Kim, The Naked Truth [2005])

S

ylvia Wynter issues a call for a new order of knowledge in “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” (1992), before her call elsewhere for a new “order of consciousness” (Wynter 2000), as virtually all of her essays and articles insist on this task of “rewriting knowledge” (Wynter 1992, 18). We must not only think more critically about what we think we “know,” and what we don’t know, but we must also think more critically about how we go about knowing, or how we define “knowledge” itself. In what or whose tradition of knowing do we or can we claim to be knowledgeable? “N.H.I.” is an acronym. It stands for “No Humans Involved.” It was made famous for a while after the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), which is as infamous in Black consciousness and Hip-Hop as the NYPD (New York Police Department). A powerhouse Black Studies as well as Spanish and Portuguese professor at Stanford University at the time, Wynter explains that “public



7


officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely used the ‘N.H.I.’ acronym to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young jobless, black males living in the inner city ghetto” (Wynter 1992, 13). This is a racist-fascist denial of “human rights” or humanity itself, and it is “normal” and “logical” under the current order of knowledge first put in place 500-plus years ago with the rise of Western imperialism and the “European Slave Trade.” Hence, Wynter holds intellectuals (“all of us”) responsible for training these “N.H.I.” officers in a fundamentally anti-Black worldview and for upholding the essentials of this world-view across each and every intellectual discipline (field or subject) taught at any given school, college or university in North America and the West at large. The task of “rewriting knowledge” and the very definition of “human being” remains a life-and-death matter, therefore, for Blacks or Africans, especially; and it must certainly rearrange who is presupposed to be “knowledgeable” and who is not, or who is alleged to be a “knower” and who is nowadays simply supposed to be “known.” Since Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation proclaimed knowledge to be “the fifth element” of Hip-Hop, not unlike KRS-One and the Temple of Hip-Hop later, no rewriting of knowledge would be complete without considering the writings and rewritings of Hip-Hop, the sonic writings of those writers perhaps maligned most by the “N.H.I.” category of this contemporary white-supremacist order of “knowledge,” politics and “consciousness.” Boldly, Public Enemy made their mark as marked men with songs—written and spoken texts which rewrite worlds—such as “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” on their classic album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), whoever Chuck D and company are today at this point in Hip-Hop time. “I got a letta from tha government,” the emcee raged. He opened it; and he read it; and, according to him, it said they were “suckaz!” This was a prelude to a prison break, a phenomenon that Sizzla would also deejay about himself in Dancehall-Reggae with wicked, Pan-African success (Strictly the Best 23, 1999). Clearly audible in “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” is Malcolm X’s insistent distinction (in 1963) between what other people identify as “our government” and what most Black people identify as “the government,” which is by no means “ours” unless we have lost our Black minds in “Message to the Grassroots” (X 1965). Chuck D and company rage on about the U.S. government’s drafting of Black men for white racist wars of Western domination and conquest. The emcee says he couldn’t give a damn, not for this scheme. He’s a Black man and could never be a “veteran.” They imprison him and he breaks out—breaking out of their social conceptions; their language, vocab or lexicons; their political propaganda as well as their physical spaces of confinement, incarceration and global African captivity. This is why Public Enemy’s logo was a Black male body in a periscope, targeted but targeting with his own gun of self-defense and Black liberation struggle. Their model of politics and revolution was a work-in-progress. “Incomplete,” as all revolutions are at any stage of existence, Public Enemy’s sonic revolution would not envision much in the way of sexual revolution beyond “Sophisticated Bitch” on Yo! Bum Rush The Show (1987) and “She Watch Channel Zero” on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, not to mention other albums and



160

161

records. This notion of politics did not and does not pose much of a challenge at all to the basic politics of sex, gender, and sexuality that is such a central, crucial part of all politics, especially the politics of racism, anti-Black domination and white-supremacist empire. The model of politics and revolution at play then and now among mainstream and alternative artists, critics and thinkers is a terribly limited model of politics and revolution that Black revolutionary politics ought to explode, ecstatically, in and outside of music. Why in the world should traditional social and political conceptions of the European bourgeoisie bog down the social and political movements of Pan-African peoples, communities and cultures? The work-in-progress of politics and revolution still needs to advance forward into sexual revolution, sonic and otherwise. Almost a full decade into her career, Lil’ Kim’s The Naked Truth (2005) came to stun those agents of the establishment who enforce a strict separation between sex and politics (eros and rebellion) around the same historical period that the U.S. state or government put her in a federal prison in Philadelphia, PA. She faced the possibility of spending up to thirty years in captivity for “perjury,” officially speaking, in an age of gargantuan state lies, presidential lies, multinationalcorporate lies, white patriarchal colonial, neocolonial, or imperial lies on top of global catastrophic state violence. Vocally, she resisted complicity or collaboration with this state in its crusade against Black people in general and young Black people and Hip-Hop in particular, as it continues to economically draft poor and Black men and women into its white racist wars of conquest. Lyrically, The Naked Truth expresses its own aggressive (anti-state, anti-government) identification with Malcolm X (“I stand behind Martin Luther King, but I’m more like Malcolm X”), even as its emceeing entrenches Lil’ Kim’s signature, guerilla-style sexual revolution in every imaginable way. She instructs us to call her “Madame X” elsewhere, on “The Game’s in Trouble” (2006). She breaks out of U.S. cages and conceptions—before she goes in to prison and promises to come back— “ fucking” with time and space, minds and bodies, and all manner of Anglo– North America’s ruling-class social conventions. Resonating with Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961) or The Wretched of the Earth (1963), The Naked Truth is best analyzed in light of Carolyn Cooper’s continued work on “erotic maroonage” and its “grassroots” challenges to state power, state violence and state imperialism. She and Hubert Devonish write of “a mass-based alternative morality” in “The Dancehall Transnation” for her Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004). This morality of the masses clashes with the governing state or society that is grounded in the values, history and politics of the West, that is, the oppression and repression of Europe from the slavery and colonialism of the past to the neo-slavery and neocolonialism of the present. The sounding of this clash in Black popular music is heard in Hip-Hop as well as Dancehall-Reggae. The dominant order of knowledge, culture, language, politics, and economics demonizes Hip-Hop as it expels Blacks or Africans from its Western bourgeois concept of humanity. Hip-Hop responds by rewriting this scenario with its own version of “a mass-based alternative morality,” internationally, while it is demonized even further by state or governmental strategies of containment and elimination, or liquidation. What a number



THE “SOUND CLASH” OF THE NAKED TRUTH


Figure 7.1

Table-Image of The Naked Truth (2005) by Jonelle Davies


163

of critics have called “Rap COINTELPRO” (“counter-intelligence program”) or “Hip-Hop Cops” takes center stage with no small amount of white (and Black elite) public support. However, The Naked Truth refuses to let state power, state violence or state imperialism have the last word: The Notorious K.I.M.’s continued work of “erotic maroonage” is writ large in this music from “grassroots” communities that communicates with the “maroonage” of African ancestry—a “tradition of resistance science that establishes an alternative psychic space both within and beyond the boundaries of the enslaving plantation” in “Plantation America” (Cooper 1995, 4). How ironic will it all be—this revolutionary work on the mind and body, or flesh—coming from an artist who is not conventionally classified as “political,” “conscious,” or “knowledgeable,” at least among those audiences who have been deaf to the flow of these insistent sounds all along? Long assumed to be “apolitical” (or without “politics”) precisely because of her arch-political sexual politics, she provided her own commentary on repression and persecution on her way to prison, refusing the false and absolutely non-African separation between an artistry of politics and an artistry of pleasure. Would this not be sexual poetic justice, too, her justice and revolutionary politics prevailing in the end against unjust odds and despite every last effort of the established order or status quo? The following account of the first ever Hip-Hop album whose principal theme concerns so-called Hip-Hop Cops (or “Rap COINTELPRO”) can therefore function as a fitting if provisional conclusion to a study of Lil’ Kim’s ongoing production of Hip-Hop lyricism. “Countdown to Lockdown” I would definitely say some of the most creative people are in prison. (Lil’ Kim, “Letter #3”: MySpace.com/lilkim [2006])

In reality, the “countdown” to her “lockdown” started long before Lil’ Kim’s fourth solo album, The Naked Truth. Her Hard Core (1996) debut featured “Spend a Little Doe,” a raw, potent, Bluesy song with an introductory dialogue between her and a man who has betrayed her. She took the fall for him and did a stint in prison, as the narrative goes. Yet she got no visits, no commissary, no “nothing” during her three “muthafuckin” years upstate. Her ex-man claims in response to her interrogation of him that he just didn’t want to see his “bird” in a cage. He promises to take care of her now. The song begins as she blows him away for betraying her, his promises, and their principles. Lil’ Kim would commence her work in rap coming out of prison on wax, fictionally avenging a wrongful imprisonment, in fact, and emerging victorious nonetheless as Hip-Hop’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch.” A prison organizer, “guerilla-intellectual,” and Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, George Jackson wrote autobiographically in Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970): “Blackmen born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability





of prison. For most of us, it simply looms large as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations. Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that lead so many blackmen to the prison gate” (Jackson 1994, 4). He wrote, in addition, after years of confinement: “We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality. As a result, each of us has been subjected to years of the most vicious reactionary violence by the state” (16). There’s no time for bourgeois mentalities at all. How does Hip-Hop which honors “Comrade George” and other political-economic prisoners in annual, national and international events such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s “Black August Hip-Hop Project” echo this preparedness for prison, this move from criminalized to revolutionized mentalities, this multifaceted resistance to slavery and what he called modern-day neo-slavery? In the wake of Hard Core’s sexual revolt in Hip-Hop, The Notorious K.I.M. (2000) would open with “Lil’ Drummer Boy,” a song-skit in which she is put on trial for her many, militant Hard Core ways. She’s a menace to society; she’s an outlaw; she’s a killer of cops; or so accuses the vicious, violent, reactionary state government in this narrative. The cultural politics of her Hip-Hop and the sexual politics of Hard Core are what transform her into The Notorious K.I.M., a literal and lyrical “enemy of the state.” The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Lil’ Drummer Boy” rejects this character assassination and champions self-defense as well as escape, by any means necessary. The government had subjected her to secret surveillance. Men in blue orchestrated set-ups and murder with high-tech weapons. She blows them away, too, her lyrical gun always within reach. When she is taken into custody and later to court, she rejects the legitimacy of their law or legal process, only testifying to expose it. Ultimately, Lil’ Kim stages maroonage at the outset of The Notorious K.I.M. in the form of a courthouse jailbreak, with “Judge Funk Doctor Spock” (or Redman) in tow.1 The emcee as prophet was facing three decades in prison then, according to him; and on the title track, she emphasizes her ethos of non-cooperation with the incarcerating state in search of “snitches.” This was long before The Naked Truth, again. Similarly, on La Bella Mafia’s “Get in Touch with Us” (2003), Lil’ Kim swore with Styles P of The “Money, Power, Respect” Lox that she’d do a “bid” for her “crimey,” which can be defined or translated as “a criminal(ized) element” or, as she immediately defines it herself, her “co-defendant.” On one of La Bella Mafia’s WBUZ “Queen Bitch Radio” skits, a caller named “Killer” dialed in from prison to request a package “or something,” to which Lil’ Kim replied that she will send him a “kite” (or letter) with her “panties” attached to it, before a different prisoner interrupts this conversation to take pleasure in and masturbate to the mere sound of her majestic Hip-Hop voice. Many prisoners took this kind of pleasure in her Hard Core promotional poster on the title track from The Notorious K.I.M. and, reputedly, in “real” life. She is the lyrical fantasy of the alleged “property” of the state, whom she shouted out at the end of this particular La Bella Mafia skit, while as the climax of her “Get in Touch with Us” verse she threatened “snitch niggaz” who try to get a “nigga” (her) locked up. This is not to mention her audacious mix-tape remake of The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Who Shot Ya” (2004) prior to



164

165

The Naked Truth when, as “Came Back for You” puts it, the “Fedz” were watching her or placing her under surveillance. She dedicated this last Grammy-nominated song to “gangstaz” with federal cases and incarcerated “Scarfaces” to complete La Bella Mafia, a matriarchal project whose central narrative theme pivoted around a female takeover of “the Mob” (to “spread love”), once its male members were eliminated mostly by other, “lawful” patriarchs. The “buzz” single for her fourth solo album was selected to be “Shut Up, B***h,” while “Lighters Up” would spin as the first, official single of The Naked Truth, which was followed by “Whoa” after the artist was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. “Shut Up, B***h” was her reply to rumors, hatred and gossip, or the rumor mill she had regretted years ago on “Call Me” featuring Too Short (Booty Call, 1997). The “bitches” in question may be male or female, as usual. They are haters, paparazzi and critics full of envy. Some say she’s rich or broke, and snorting “coke.” Some say her world-famous rhymes were written by Biggie Smalls, as if he somehow continues to write for her from the grave. Some say she’s in jail, finally, and some say she’s already out on bail. Once in a revealing interview with Honey magazine, she stated: “How can I know that I have love if I don’t have the haters?” (Barnett 2003, 87). If the rumors or gossip can never get the old or new facts straight in “Shut Up, B***h,” it is clear that there is a whole industry (or propaganda machine) out there oiled up to constantly cast aspersions on her undeniably notorious name (“Some people jobs is to talk about Lil’ Kim / Let’s face it: I’m a way of life for all o’ them”); it is clear that these critics and haters cannot afford to ask why this industry of frantic, obsessive negativity is deemed necessary in her case; and it is clear that there is no comparable industry of literary critics trained or willing and able to say much of anything about what Lil’ Kim actually says herself in her narrative art of Hip-Hop or rap. A Black philosopher (and a prominent scholar of Frantz Fanon), Lewis R. Gordon remarks in “The Problem of Biography in the Study of the Thought of Black Intellectuals” (1998): “the independence of text has been a rule of thumb in the art of interpretation. This rule, however, has been violated in peculiar ways when it comes to the work of black writers. For them, a different rule, an insidious rule, continues to reign” (48). The rule for Blacks under this society is that biography is all that matters, texts be damned. There is no independence of Black texts (i.e., texts to be studied as texts, for what is written inside these texts, not life beyond them) without independence or self-determination of Black communities. Thus, Gordon notes that “blacks are often studied as problems instead of people who face problems” (48). He recalls that the authors of late-eighteenthand nineteenth-century “slave narratives” authored work which “had more rights in the United States” than these enslaved authors had themselves (49). Historically, well beyond official “chattel” slavery, “the black theorist’s ideas were often absent” from academic consideration, as “his or her biography became text for political interpretation. The focus was on what [Frederick] Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, [W.E.B.] Du Bois, or Marcus Garvey did, not what they argued” (52). It is important that we see how this approach to Black creativity and intelligence produces conditions under which Black political and theoretical ideas can be stolen, appropriated or plagiarized, systematically, without any appearance of





wrongdoing since Blacks are thought to provide not “ideas” or “theory” but “biography” (biographical “content”) instead. This is objectification. Still, as Gordon observes, autobiography has been a vital element of Black intellectual activity in its own right: “Whereas the old European may sit down to write memoirs, in the black experience, the moment of self-reflection begins with youth; black authors produce autobiographical reflections even in their teenaged years, and many black theorists write in this voice from their first publications onward. It is as if living blackness in itself counts as experience” (50–51). Houston A. Baker, Jr. writes in Betrayed: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (2008), fifteen years after writing Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (1993): “In the black world, the self-story has served as self-defense against whitesupremacy’s claim to know, statistically regulate, and police who precisely we are, and where we must live” (Baker 2008, 10). Although Gordon’s remarks in “The Problem of Biography in the Study of the Thought of Black Intellectuals” are about academic or elite intellectuals, exclusively, they are most appropriate for Hip-Hop and other, non-academic intellectual writers among the Black masses as well. Indeed, these are the folk Carolyn Cooper would refer to as “low theoreticians” in Noises in the Blood (Cooper 1995, 9). Hip-Hop emcees might well be the epitome of Black writers who begin either fictionalized of non-fictional memoirs of self-reflection in their embattled youth, focused on the life experience of Blackness as well as the feat of living to tell about it; and what artist or author is presented as an object of biographical narrative rather than a subject who creates narrative more than The Notorious K.I.M. in what passes for criticism in contemporary U.S. commentary on music and culture? Ever since she stepped out on her own, solo, unbuffered by the otherwise all-male crew of Junior M.A.F.I.A., she has received infinitely more attention for what she is alleged to have done than for crafting verses that “rewrite knowledge” of sex, gender, and politics, for example. Talk could turn to her daring manner of dress, or make-up, instead, as she rapped Hard Core in any style of outfit that pleased her. Talk could turn to speculation about her dynamic relationship with Christopher “Biggie Smalls/The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, even though she and his former, once-estranged wife would have planned to make music together by the time of The Naked Truth: Faith Evans could be a fan while who hurls old accusations of “adultery” at Lil’ Kim, as an evaluation of her art? Talk could turn to hair color, instead, when it is some shade of yellow or blonde, as long as no one bothers to notice her black, red, orange, green, blue, and multicolored wigs or weaves worn in an African/ Dancehall tradition of fashion—or even that blonde hair has been conspicuously worn by everyone from Dinah Washington and Etta James to Tina Turner and Mary Wells of the Supremes to Mary J. Blige and Beyoncé to Andre 3000 of Outkast and Cee-Lo now of Gnarles Barkely to Elephant Man of Dancehall and Angélique Kidjo of Benin. (What happens when this one color is left behind? Is this really supposed to mean that scandalizing work recorded or promoted with black hair is acceptable or valuable, whereas work recorded or promoted with blonde or yellow hair is critically dismissible?)2 Talk could turn to cosmetic surgery, instead, as if it has not become virtually the rule among diverse entertainers



166

167

from the lips and noses of the likes of Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle to the breasts and faces of a range of R&B singers, radio personalities as well as Black, white, and other actors and actresses. Such talk could suggest explicitly or implicitly that Lil’ Kim’s artful appearance was an attempt at “whitening,” when rumored collagen injections or lip augmentation could never make sense as a “whitening” of anyone’s physical appearance, obviously. The racially ambiguous album cover photo for The Naked Truth appears to mock these accusations made by people who, ironically, strive to assimilate or imitate Western bourgeois culture in general and seek a cultural “whitening” of their gender and sexual identities in particular.3 The irrationality of it all parallels the sexist assumption that no female emcees write their own rhymes (and all male rappers do) in its nonsense. For no one can account for who else could compose this unique brand of lyricism, especially when the presumed ghostwriter of The Notorious K.I.M. was supposed to be The Notorious B.I.G., who was murdered how many Lil’ Kim albums ago? (Was his lyricism anywhere near as anti-sexist or pro-female as hers?) Criticism or condemnation of her is routinely desperate and conservative; and if it is almost always puritanical, or sexually repressive, it is almost never lyrical unless screams for censorship could count as serious critical engagement. Whatever negative criticism might conceivably apply to the actual doings of Lil’ Kim, according to whatever or whoever’s hitherto unexamined values or standards, it positively cannot conceal how these criticisms are currently mobilized to scapegoat her for widespread practices accepted and sometimes revered when embodied by someone who is not a female rapper (from the Black poor or working class) projected as a “menace to society” and, eventually, an “enemy of the state.” It cannot conceal the fact that what passes for criticism is designed to deflect attention away from the writings of Lil’ Kim and their consequences. Such criticism cannot conceal that what separates her from all entertainers and commentators alike is her production of this truly phenomenal, anti-sexist, gender-defiant, and ultra-erotic lyricism that is hers and hers alone. The panic of condemnation inspired by this artistry in a range of critics not ready for Lil’ Kim’s revolution would morph into persecution on top of verbal condemnation in the corporate media of the establishment. “Tha Fedz pinched me for a shootin / but instead they indicted me for my fuckin music,” blasts “Durty” on The Naked Truth. So prosecution and persecution were made indistinguishable by those whom this album shouts down as “Hip-Hop Cops.” The double-entendre (or word-play) of “fuckin music” should not be missed. “I took one for the team,” she tells Joshua “Fahiym” Ratcliffe at The Source magazine, quoting a formulation that would soon be found on “Slippin.” “I took one for Hip-Hop. I love my music. I love our culture . . . . I was only targeted because of who I am” (Ratcliffe 2005, 98). A nonfatal shooting took place outside of “HOT-97” (WQHT-FM) radio station in New York, on February 25, 2001, reportedly involving the entourages of Capone-N-Noreaga and her Junior M.A.F.I.A. The federal government that was surveilling The Notorious B.I.G. on the night of his murder but which has shown no interest whatsoever in solving his murder did take this opportunity to make a statement about Hip-Hop





and The Notorious K.I.M. When she refused to play the role of informant for the state, it hit her with charges of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, convicting her of perjury and conspiracy, sentencing her to one year and a day in a federal prison plus three years probation. Lil’ Kim tells The Source, further (about her grand jury inquest): “When I would go in there, they would ask me, ‘So, what is an A&R?’ ‘So, what is a snitch?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t use that language. ‘Who are you sleeping with?’ ‘Who’s your boyfriend?’ What the fuck? This is a disrespect to our culture and to me as a Black woman. Now do you understand why I wasn’t trying to talk to these people?” This refusal to “snitch,” “inform,” or “cooperate” is not a failure of “rationality,” as many conformists are led to assume, but a moral condemnation of the social order, its power, its “ethics” and its propaganda. She goes to court with this understanding: “They could’ve been like, ‘I’m giving this bitch 20 years, 30 years,’ just ’cause they didn’t like what I wore to court that day. That’s how they are. That’s how the government can be” (98). The Source calls her “Hip-Hop’s new millennium version of the ‘queen of royal badness’ ” (98), “a ‘matriarch by circumstance,’ ” “her own heroine by choice” (100), and “the first woman within the Hip-Hop world to serve prison time” (98), revealingly. The U.S. government’s image of The Notorious K.I.M.’s Hip-Hop—her “fuckin music”—which “fucks” with their cultural dominance and their oppressive and repressive politics of gender and sexuality, this is central to her prosecution and her eventual conviction in the context of a strategy of persecution practiced by their special, now aboveground squad of “Hip-Hop Cops.” This is also why no prison sentence of theirs could result in “penitence” on the state’s terms; rather, it would result in more, moral resistance on the terms of Hip-Hop and Lil’ Kim.4 This is exactly what could be seen in Lil’ Kim: Countdown to Lockdown, the six-part “Reality TV” series that chronicled the life of the lyricist during the last fourteen days leading up to her incarceration at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. Prior to its imminent release, The Naked Truth provides an informal soundtrack. The show was the highest-watched debut of any show in Black Entertainment Television history, as approximately 2 million viewers tuned in to see evidence of her statement to The Source that she’d be “walking into prison with her head help up high” (Ratcliffe 2005, 101). The climax’s credits would close by thanking “All my girls and dudes at Philadelphia FDC.” Before then, she is shown “getting ready to do a year and a day for this bullshit” and “working [her] ass off” to deliver a record album full of material commenting on that “bullshit.” Angela Y. Davis writes in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003): “There has always been a tendency to regard those women who have been publicly punished by the state . . . as significantly more aberrant [or ‘abnormal’] and far more threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts” (Davis 2003, 66). When Lil’ Kim does interview after interview in a brief effort to promote The Naked Truth (such as those with BET’s 106 and Park, Angie Martinez on “HOT-97” and Rap Up magazine, for example), she dispels many a degrading myth about prisoners. She has much harsher words for the jailers than the jailed. She declares on screen, “I’m a thug it out” and, quoting in advance what will be The Naked Truth’s closing track (“Last Day”): “A cell can only hold my body and never my mind.” By the time she gets



168


169

Rap, COINTELPRO, and Counterinsurgency: State Racism, Violence, and Repression “Free Mumia!” “Hands off Assata!” “Free ’em All!”

Lil’ Kim’s resilience and rejection of the logic of the state would send many agents of the establishment reeling, for years. A new propaganda campaign was to be waged against an “anti-snitching” ethic of the Black masses that the white and Black elites pretend they cannot understand in the public discourse of North America. Yet a white investigative reporter by the name of Jim Redden had already written Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State (2000), evidently for a white mainstream or middle class somehow unaware of the whole history of U.S. violence, repression, racism, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism: “Welcome to Snitch Culture,” it greets us in a blurb, “a surveillance society far more insidious and pervasive than anything George Orwell ever imagined [in his once futuristic novel, 1984, originally published in 1949]. Elected officials from both political parties have spent decades building a vast domestic intelligence network to track every man, woman and child.”5 The word fascism is too dangerous for some to utter under the threat of fascism, it appears. A Hip-Hop historian, journalist, deejay and community activist, Davey D would subsequently post “Snitching Is Big Business” (2007) on “David D’s HipHop Blog” (“Where We Speak Truth to Power”). He exposes the hypocrisy of the white state and society that pushes its own “anti-snitching” code as policy in federal government, big business (including major record labels which practice “payola” on a grand scale) and police departments, not to mention the corporate media, while the masses of Black people are represented as exotic, immoral, and murderous for not informing and legitimizing the power or authority of this menacing state. He recalls this government’s counterintelligence program organized to doom and destroy Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Panther Party as well as “how informants/snitches in the form of ‘house niggas’ were the ones who doomed slave revolts including the one led by Nat Turner.” The establishment presumption of a “good,” “benevolent” and “protective” state is the presumption of an uncritical, Western bourgeois perspective on the history of Western bourgeois violence, “domestic” or “global,” past, present, and future. Later, on “That’s What It Is,” Immortal Technique would incisively snarl: “Everybody knows how tha government do / They neva snitch on themselves, but they want you to snitch on you” (The 3rd World, 2008).



to Philadelphia, the inmates are banging tumultuously on the windows in a dramatic demonstration of what family and friends all term “street” love, solidarity and support. The moral and morale of Lil’ Kim: Countdown to Lockdown and The Naked Truth are not what the government had mind when it sent her to prison, and this urban, “maximum security facility” specifically.


Since Davey D refers to COINTELPRO or the “COunter INTELligence PROgram” of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which sought to destroy the Black liberation movement and the lives of its activists and advocates, where was the discussion of “Rap COINTELPRO” in the selective discussion of “snitching” or government informants conducted mostly by non-independent newspapers, magazines, radio and television programs? Alongside “Hip-Hop Cops,” this term surfaces in an article in The Village Voice by Dasun Allah (2004) and then in an extension of his report in The Source by Allah and J.F. Ratcliffe (2004). Both veteran Black radical activists (especially current and former political prisoners) as well as current Hip-Hop artists and activists criticized state surveillance, prosecution and persecution long before Nicole White and Evelyn McDonnell’s Miami Herald story (on March 9, 2004) about how the NYPD had trained Miami Police Department officers in special tactics already in full effect in New York (if not Houston, Los Angeles, and elsewhere). A “rap surveillance unit” said to be a section of the NYPD’s “gang intelligence unit” compiled a database of extensive information concerning “rap stars and their crews” for use by “Hip-Hop Cops” who “photographed rappers as they arrived at airports, staked out clubs they attended and monitored their video shoots” (Allah and Ratcliffe 2004, 42). The covert “intelligence” unit of New York was to develop into a model for other units and agencies to emulate. Its professed architect, Derrick Parker has all but conceded that the federal case indicting Lil’ Kim was the pretext for these counterinsurgent operations to expand nationwide. Perversely, he has sought celebrity status with a book entitled Notorious C.O.P. (2006), and a film entitled Black and Blue: Legends of the HipHop Cop (2006). He seeks to reposition himself as some kind of new, protective force as opposed to a racist-fascist force akin to COINTELPRO agents of old. For Allah and Ratcliffe’s “Law and Disorder” article in The Source, Karl Kamau Franklin and Rosa Clemente of the Hip-Hop Political Convention counteract his kind of revisionism; also of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Monifa Bandele observes to counteract the immoral legality and illegality of counterinsurgency: “I think that anytime our community has visible people of influence . . . whether you want to call them leaders or you want to call them cultural icons, that’s a threat to the government” (46). Indeed, no conscientious reference to COINTELPRO should confuse the persecution of Black people with the protection (or mere “prosecution”) of Black people, however much it gets rhetorically justified or rationalized in the interests of a traditionally anti-Black state and society such as the United States. After all, for African diaspora, there may be no more odious an acronym from the mid-to-late twentieth century than COINTELPRO. The director of the FBI and its predecessor (the Bureau of Investigation) until his death in 1972 was J. Edgar Hoover, the same rabidly racist statesman who oversaw the harassment and ultimate deportation of Marcus Garvey (whom he dubbed a “notorious negro agitator”): Garvey’s millions-strong Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) would never recover from Hoover’s fanatical campaign of destruction. Unfortunately, a similar fate and set of techniques would await many, many others beyond Pan-African heroes Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the



170

171

Black Panther Party, including a host of Black political prisoners struggling for liberation in the spirit of George Jackson. If the formal period of COINTELPRO operations may officially date from 1956 to 1971, its politics of counterinsurgency predate and postdate any particular period. The terrible repression writ large in this programmatic attack on dissent, dissidence or resistance came on the heels of resistance to the overt repression of McCarthyism (“Red Scare”), the Smith Act, and Subversive Activities Control Board Hearings in the 1950s. Those who might not be prosecuted in courts might be persecuted or, in the preferred rhetoric of the state, “neutralized” by various means. By the 1960s and 1970s, notable COINTELPRO targets included the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), New Left organizations (e.g., Students for a Democratic Society), Puerto Rican Independentistas and the American Indian Movement (AIM) in addition to those whom the FBI absurdly labels “Black Nationalist Hate Groups.” Some “White Hate Groups” like the Ku Klux Klan have been monitored, but they were routinely aided and abetted by COINTELPRO operations because their social and political objectives basically, systematically converge—until the rise of white racist militias, at least, which despise the state themselves for white racist reasons. COINTELPRO’s impact on Black militants is perhaps most profound. For Assata Shakur, currently a political refugee in Cuba, it is “a program that was set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to eliminate all political opposition . . . and destroy the Black Liberation Movement,” pointedly (Shakur 1998, 44). She has been saluted in song by Public Enemy (It Takes a Nation of Million to Hold Us Back’s “Rebel without a Pause,” 1988) and Common (Like Water for Chocolate’s “For Assata,” 2000). Godmother to Tupac, she is hunted by the state which has posted a million-dollar bounty for her capture in the wake of her escape from prison in 1979. Hence, she identifies herself as a “Maroon woman” eluding “slave catchers” in the twenty and twenty-first centuries.6 In Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries, Dhoruba Bin Wahad outlines COINTELPRO as a “domestic war program . . . aimed at countering the rise of Black militancy, Black independent thought, and at repressing the freedoms of Black people in the United States” (Bin Wahad et al., 1993, 18). A former political prisoner of nineteen years, he would relocate to Ghana where he continued his Pan-African activism and where he has managed Reggie Rockstone, a popular and pioneering artist of “Hip-Life” (a genre of music blending High Life from the continent and Hip-Hop). Hoover and the FBI could by no means disagree with this assessment. One of COINTELPRO’S infamous memos would state its aims bluntly: “to prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups,” “to prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement,” “to prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups,” “to prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability,” and “to prevent the long-range growth of militant black organizations, especially among the youth.” Much of this information has been conveniently compiled in Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall’s The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (1990).





A world-renowned Black political prisoner on Death Row in Pennsylvania, Mumia Abu-Jamal enhances this literature on repression by rethinking the nature of the state altogether in his WE WANT FREEDOM: A Life in the Black Panther Party (2004). Chapter 6 of this text is “The Empire Strikes Back: COINTELPRO.” It investigates a series of strategies designed to prevent Black unity and Black selfdetermination so that the FBI comes to function “as political and race police— agents for the preservation of white-supremacy . . . . The nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one said to be investigating crimes, had itself been committing crimes motivated by hatred against Black Americans for decades” (Abu-Jamal 2004, 122–23). They violate privacy, wiretap, or eavesdrop. They send bogus mail or correspondence to comrades to sow conflict or discord. They arrest, indict, and imprison to disrupt activism and organizing. They slander real, genuine activists as “snitches” as they mobilize their own snitches, informants, infiltrators, double-agents, or provocateurs in order to create mass confusion among movements. They character-assassinate organizations and outright murder many and drive many underground or into exile. COINTELPRO is plainly understood as “a war against the people,” all people, since dissenters and dissidents or all who advocate significant social change are construed as “enemies of the state” in the systematic yet rarely acknowledged practice of “governmental crime” (24). The U.S. state apparatus uses tactics designed for conflicts with foreign adversaries against alleged citizens and pseudo-citizens when any people or the people act in the collective interests of the populace instead of the interests of those who rule or run the government. When the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI storage facility in Media, PA, on March 8, 1971, they broke the story of COINTELPRO crimes. It wasn’t the corporate media (a vital instrument in the success of this violence). WE WANT FREEDOM revisits their findings in a fashion that does not yield an alibi or a moral pardon for the state or the FBI, a “police substructure that acts as a social and, indeed, political power unto itself, without even a hint of control by the political branches, despite public protestations and claims to the contrary” (124). If the majority or 40 percent of FBI activity was devoted to the surveillance of political activists, while 30 percent was dedicated to administrative affairs; 25 percent to bank robberies; 20 percent to murders, rapes, and interstate thefts; 7 percent to draft resistance; and a measly 1 percent to organized crime (or gambling), then the imperialist beast is indeed exposed (156). No one has ever been prosecuted for official COINTELPRO, government crime, which it is the state’s prerogative to execute with impunity as long as it wields a power of violence rooted in slavery, colonialism and empire. This is why it is naïve, ill-informed and near-suicidal for Black commentators on “Rap COINTELPRO” to imagine it as a matter of legal prosecution, benevolent surveillance, or a matter of “criminal justice.” It is surveillance for the sake of what? It is prejudicial prosecution after mass criminalization with what purpose in mind? Cedric Muhammad of BlackElectorate.com (and a former Wu-Tang Clan manager) has authored a series of articles (interviews and messages) employing the phrase “Rap COINTELPRO.” They have been posted widely on the Internet. Others have circulated this phrase without an adequate grasp of the politics of counter-insurgency, local and global. Most



172

173

academic or journalistic writing on this subject is like most writing in North America on the subject of Hip-Hop intellectually limited by liberalism—an obedient reformism—unlike Hip-Hop itself. However much Hip-Hop comes to us as “Hip-Hop Revolution,” chanting down the irredeemable corruption of the status quo, commentators on Hip-Hop almost always display an unshakeable faith in the system in place. So when “Rap COINTELPRO” is conceived, it is too often conceived as a matter of impotent speculation, as if it may or may not exist despite mountains of evidence; or a matter of law or jurisprudence, as if it does not break as well as compose and recompose man-made and nationbound laws drafted to sustain white capitalist elites; or, at bottom, a matter of whether or not Hip-Hop artists and activists behave themselves (by completely unquestioned standards) in obedience to an authoritarian order that targets Hip-Hop and Blacks for oppression, repression and on countless occasions literal destruction, no matter what: “Rap COINTELPRO” commentators ignore to our peril how COINTELPRO’s aim is not anybody’s legality but “neutralization” and “liquidation” of movements and revolutions, Black (and Native American) revolutions and movements most of all. With its contributions by Bin Wahad, Shakur, and Abu-Jamal, Still Black, Still Strong emblazons an important FBI memo on its back cover: “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.” Critically, Bin Wahad reminds us that COINTELPRO was just one name for one counterinsurgent program, at one point in time. Besides its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) equivalent, “Operation Chaos,” there would also be NEWKILL (“New York Killings”) and “Operation PRISAC” (“Prison Activists”) and “Operation Mirage” (for “Arab Americans”) apart from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Act), JATTF (Joint Anti-Terrorist Task Force), LEAA (Law Enforcement Assistance Act), and SWAT/BUT (Special Weapons and Tactics/Basic Unit Tactics), for instance, all of which are central to the work of the “national security state” of U.S. colonial imperialism (Bin Wahad 1993, 17–22). This is before “Homeland Security” and Patriot Acts I–III, their political-historical offspring. The Black youth of today are no less of a concern for lethal government crime and its legalized violence. Were they not in fact the original concern of Hoover’s FBI? The discussion of “Hip-Hop Cops” should be shifted from a discussion of “Rap COINTELPRO” to “COINTELPRO” pure and simple to counterinsurgency, period, henceforth. The captive journalist and activist scholar Abu-Jamal was heard speaking on Immortal Technique’s Revolutionary, Vol. 2, or “Homeland and Hip-Hop” (2003); and he spoke intimately of a number of these issues in All Things Censored (2000), a compilation of his alternative radio commentaries banned from NPR (National Public Radio) in 1994. The book is accompanied by a compact disc and prefaced by this statement: “By reading (or hearing) these very words, you are now participating in a conspiracy of resistance. I welcome you. For the spirit of resistance is, in essence, the spirit of love” (5). Those who subscribe to revolutionary love, the state will kill. The corporate and political powers will act in concert. The police and media conspire to “cut the mike” of those who spread this love of resistance and struggle for revolutionary transformation (49). The





meaning of things like “law,” “justice,” “civil rights,” and, above all, “crime” shifts dependant as it is on “whether one works for the system or against it” (58). “Black anti-systematic radicals, from the ancient days of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser, could find nothing in the law but its lash and the noose” (134); and Mumia Abu Jamal says that the government would rather give him a gun (“an Uzi”) than a microphone (21). What a symbolic statement for Hip-Hop: U.S. state and society seem to concede the power of the Black word but in a way that traces it right back to a high-tech weapon when emcees (and Black militants) are at work and at play. The lyrical gun of Hip-Hop and Dancehall-Reggae remains a threat, whether purely linguistic-metaphorical or not. When this threat is the lyrical sex pistol of The Notorious K.I.M., it may be amplified exponentially. Wilhelm Reich wrote that fascism was the sexual and economic repression of freedom in his classic European study, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), which was substantially engaged and extended by Black revolutionaries Frantz Fanon and George Jackson. The essence of Abu-Jamal’s piercing question in All Things Censored reverberates in the female emcee’s combination of militant sexual politics with more familiar anti-state politics on The Naked Truth: “Do you need to be protected from my voice? Or do you need protection from your protectors” (Abu-Jamal 2000, 50). The “Sound Clash” of The Naked Truth What is certain is that popular culture—the low—does interrogate the high fearlessly. (Carolyn Cooper, “Border Clash: Sites of Contestation” [2004])

Facing twenty to thirty years in federal prison, Lil’ Kim went to work on The Naked Truth, rapping without fear a narrative alternative to tales told by the state in the name of “the people” of “the United States of America.” This album does virtually supernatural things with time. Where the lyricist is at any specific moment in the history it chronicles, it is never actually quite possible to tell. She is still on trial at the very outset. The paparazzi stalk her during “Intro” (on her daily trips to “the Federal Building”). She is about to go on lockdown at the very end. Her best friend, “sister,” and co-defendant “Moe” speaks candidly with her, post-conviction, on tapped cell phones, after “Last Day.” She is sometimes already incarcerated in between: “Whoa” hears her boasts of being a “bad bitch” even in a “jail jumpsuit,” and her manager jokes with her in an “Answering Machine” skit about her becoming “the first bitch to hold a fashion show in jail.” Tricking folks sublimely in the vein of Eshu-Elegba, she is “back” or even on the verge of breaking out at assorted points while, on occasion, she is far from preoccupied with this imprisonment that was looming over her as she raced to complete production of this opus, in time, not knowing how much time she would be forced to spend in the cage of a cell. In each and every scenario, she robs the government of any ability to strike her with fear, regret or shame, as Lil’ Kim’s narrative takes control of the meaning of her life-time before, during and after her trial,



174

175

conviction and sentencing by the state and society which she condemns herself with an unrepentant, hard-core Hip-Hop ferocity on The Naked Truth. She and her brand of justice triumph on “All Good,” the song in which she most explicitly and thoroughly revives the voice of Biggie Smalls—in the background, on the chorus and in the metaphysical motto of the track’s title and theme. Her verse opens by jabbing at “haters,” the press and “snitch niggaz,” who all need to “hang” and, ironically, who only make her stronger. She thanks them for the favor of their hatred, their slander and their treachery. She next disses (and “outs”) the D.A. (district attorney) who wants to give her time in “tha Fedz,” saying she’s from Brooklyn; she can do this time “on her head.” She even comes down with her “weave straight” and sitting on “bread,” to spite the G-men’s grand scheme to degrade her. This song then flashes back to a time when “Kimberly Jones” was broke, earning money on the streets, and holding down her “nigga” in jail. She thanks God for B.I.G. and her move away from a teenage life of smuggling “weight” and avoiding “Jake,” to her fabulous life in Hip-Hop. Her concluding lines will reaffirm a Notorious B.I.G. line from “Juicy” or Ready to Die (1994). Does she ever feel regret for any of the things she did? “Hell no, I love the life I live.” She knows what true happiness is because as he rapped on “Juicy,” “I went from negative to positive / And it’s all good.” What is positive or negative for her and what it is positive or negative for U.S. society are entirely different, opposite evaluations. Her positive ending is centrally about evading the negative ending it legislates for her and hers. She spoils “the master plan” and imposes her own. On the chorus, she knocks critics who copy her style as well as anyone who smiled while she was trial, as she identifies herself with hustlers and workers in the struggle of day-to-day Black survival. If it is “all good” in Lil’ Kim’s case, after all is said and done (in this resurrection of Biggie Smalls on record), there must be poetic justice since the moral of the song-story is this: “You can’t keep a good bitch down.” The Source would relish in these “glorious, controversial jabs” at her enemies (Ratcliffe 2005, 100). It gave her a five-mic review, too, the first ever for a female emcee in virtually two decades of publication: “Spitting every verse as if it was her last, Kim excels . . . [I]t took a petite Black woman to make Brooklyn stand up and give New York its voice back” (Harris 2005, 118). This rating was predictably controversial in some circles. Yet Vibe magazine would also certify The Naked Truth a classic, if no major story supplements its short review (Conway 2005, 210). If Dan Charnas may have been confused at times in his review for The Washington Post, “ ‘Naked Truth’: Lil’ Kim, More Than Skin Deep” (2007), he could remark that “Lil’ Kim’s secret was always the Yes, Yes, Y’all,” recognizing her composite lyrical persona as “Beauty, Brain, Soldier and Artist” (Charnas 2007, C01). The best critical evaluation comes under duress, evidently, as if this were the last chance for critical holdouts to come clean, openly and honestly at last. When some reviewers suggest that she has grown or that her artistry is now somehow more “complete,” she embraces her growth but maintains that this has always been who she is, what she has been doing, and how she delivers.7 Why can’t critics see, or hear? To grow for a certain class of people is to grow away from sexuality, unabashed sexuality, and its politics





of freedom. This notion motivated Joan Morgan’s strangely relieved review of The Naked Truth in The Village Voice: “From a Different Place: The Notorious K.I.M. Lets the Sex Boasts Go and Spits from Gut” (2005). Puritanical, pseudobourgeois, and erotically sexist, this pop “feminist” criticism cannot imagine sexual politics as a source of resistance, rebellion, or revolution—Audre Lorde’s popular position in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) notwithstanding. What’s more, it wants to wish away the tireless assault on the sexual status-quo that is a basic element of The Naked Truth; and for this reason alone, it cannot see or hear the full-bodied attack on enemies of the erotic guaranteed by every Lil’ Kim album, always.8 The reign of bourgeois and male-dominated minds and bodies does not survive this record, by any stretch. For on “Kitty Box,” she raps over a beat-mix by producer “7” (Aurelius) that calls both LL Cool J and Jimi Hendryx to mind: “My box’ll have you open / I’ll drown you out when I’m wet like tha ocean.” On “Kronik” (featuring Snoop Dogg), she raps her “beehive” logic, again, about drones addicted to her erotic power and potency: “Honey Girl keep him home for days / bussin nuts and seein circles from this bag of sweet purple.” The flow of these tracks is distinctly experimental. On “Gimme That,” Maino guest-raps mostly about his penis size as she continues to rewrite anatomy and our collective erotic imagination in a most extraordinary manner. In the boast of all boasts, embodying a spectacular Black oral tradition (stigmatized and suppressed by Morgan and her brand of criticism), she raps about her “tightest, rightest” vagina: “Guys act stingy wit my goodies / I’m tha only bitch in that world that got two pussies.” Is there an anal sexuality that we are forced to reimagine here or what? In any case, our faculties must be activated against social laws, restrictions, and taboos in response to this school of rhyme. It is a plain lack of imagination in others that leads them to oppose sexual politics and anti-state politics routinely; and this lack led a number of Hip-Hop critics and consumers—those who rarely condemn the state, but condemn sexuality, in public, as a rule—to assume out of ignorance that The Naked Truth’s “Lighters Up” was a new song by Lauryn Hill. This was thanks to her commercial image as a “conscious artist” and thanks to its “socially conscious lyrics” or its patois-laced, rebel Reggae feel, even though Lil’ Kim has been rhyming in this African diasporic tongue for eons and even though these African diasporic musical genres cannot be easily separated, in the first instance or in the final analysis. Thus, Carolyn Cooper unsettles a false division between “slack” or “hedonistic,” “new-school” Dancehall and “conscious,” “old-school” Reggae at the same time that she upholds multiple principles of maroonage. When she evokes maroonage in Noises in the Blood (1993) as the “tradition of resistance science that establishes an alternative psychic space both within and beyond the boundaries of the enslaving plantation” (Cooper 1995, 4), she defines verbal maroonage as “the rude impulse of language . . . or oral art-form . . . as in . . . the lyrics of the DJs” (136); and she defines erotic maroonage as “undomesticated sexuality” (161). Such eroticism is especially “Maroon” or undomesticated when it is “aggressive,” “female” sexuality in the context of societies of the white patriarchal, anti-erotic West. In a later conference lecture, entitled “Erotic Maroonage” (2007), it would



176

177

be defined as “an embodied politics of disengagement from the Eurocentric discourses . . . a decidedly political discourse . . . an ideological revolt against law and order . . . a radical underground confrontation with the patriarchal gender ideology and pious morality of fundamentalist . . . society” (Cooper 2007, 1). This maroonage supplies the foundation for the writing of Sound Clash and “The Dancehall Transnation,” its climactic chapter (Cooper 2004, 301). The “clash” Cooper studies refers to contests for power; onstage competitions between rival deejays and sound-systems; hostile conflicts or zones of warfare in politics or communities; and larger, ideological clashes between competing value systems in Jamaica, specifically (35). These zones of conflict and warfare include “erogenous zones” as well (41). The greatest factions are marked by race and class as African maroonage clashes with European empire in the Americas, while Black, “brown,” or colored elites play their positions as middle-men and middle-women for white imperialist power at the level of the state or government and society or culture. The masses of Jamaica and the entire Black, African world remain stateless, in effect. The government is never our government under neocolonialism, the current world order of oppression and repression, whether we are on the continent, in Europe or across North, South and Central America and the Caribbean. Each version of government in this political order seeks to institute its version of society, culture, morality as the only possible, conceivable, or desirable society, culture and morality. Yet the Black popular masses organize a culture of resistance, an alternative vision of society and “a mass-based alternative morality” (301) in response. A clash between competing sets of values ensues—historically and daily—over language, economics, aesthetics and sexuality, for instance; and it is sounded in Black popular music—daily and historically—from the perspective of the masses who are deemed “apolitical” when they challenge the very particular version of politics (culture, society, and morality) promoted by the state or government that rules. The thesis of Sound Clash travels as far as the “European Slave Trade” and all the African peoples who sabotage it, globally, for maroonage and more.9 This subject of maroonage was not absent from Ifi Amadiume’s anti-state work in Re-inventing Africa (1997). She is critical of the hierarchical or highly stratified, exploitive political state privileged in the history written by the contemporary Western or European bourgeoisie. This “centralized” state is opposed to the form of social organization often preferred by the majority of communities in Africa. Amadiume terms them “anti-state decentralized political systems” (16), unlike Western anthropologists who refer to them as “stateless societies,” as if these communities are lacking something or (“civilizationally”) incapable of producing the hierarchy and exploitation built into large centralized states. They choose to live otherwise. Amadiume argues that these majority African societies rarely embraced by academic historians are in the main “anti-state” in their social structure, their moral philosophies and, often, their matriarchies. They will flee in rejection of any hierarchal or highly stratified, exploitative political state system that threatens to surround and predictably engulf them (16–17). The crux of Amadiume’s work in Re-inventing Africa was thereby documenting a mode of maroonage on the continent in a manner that resonates well with the





orally transmitted, anti-state collective values of Dancehall-Reggae and Hip-Hop in the African diaspora. An Ethiopian filmmaker, Howard University professor, and a radical PanAfricanist, Haile Gerima has recently posed a crucial question en route to his cinematic sequel to Sankofa (1993): “What is Maroon about Hip-Hop?”10 The alternative psychic space provided by Hip-Hop defined by Hip-Hop against the grain of slavery and neo-slavery is perhaps most evident in Hip-Hop’s systematic rejection and repulsion of the state apparatus of Plantation America, its philosophy of Black deprivation and its socio-sexual values of Puritanism, or Victorianism, which is to say its racist hypocritical ethics of erotic repression. At one with a “mass-based alternative morality” in Hip-Hop and Dancehall is a mass-based alternative language, a mass-based alternative economics, a massbased alternative aesthetics, and so forth. A soldier of erotic maroonage, and a public enemy to white and Black elites, The Notorious K.I.M. enters Hip-Hop to broadcast sexual revolution within and beyond Hip-Hop’s revolution—with her “African matriarchy,” her gender-defiance or subversion of “scientific anatomy” (i.e., biological determinism), her militant “uses of the erotic,” her “Big Momma/ Queen Bitch” lyricism and its relentless condemnation of the government of U.S. empire on The Naked Truth. On “Lighters Up,” Lil’ Kim walks us through the Black experience of rough and wretched life in symbolic Brooklyn, echoing the sounds of Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley’s “Welcome to Jamrock” (Welcome to Jamrock, 2005). Lyrically, it’s the “concrete jungle,” where money is power; bulletproof vests get clapped through; and the police stick to you like tattoos. There is a New York City edit of this song on the chorus of which the emcee shouts out local “hood” after “hood,” Bedford-Stuyvesant front and center. There is a Ragga-enhanced Go-Go Table 7.1 Clashes Sounded* Maroonage

Plantation America

Dancehall-Reggae or Hip-Hop

The State, official nationalism (e.g.,: “Jamaica,” “USA”) The elitists—bourgeois, petty- or pseudobourgeois “Babylon” or slavish conformity to Victorian norms and sex ideals Western imperial (police and military) violence anti-body, decapitated mind the puritanical morality of repression—and hypocrisy Neocolonial/Neo-slavery Economics literature, paper-bound scripts British English or Yankee English White America, Europe: Occidentalism

The masses or massive so-called slackness or Sexual Independence gangsta, outlaw (and guerilla) violence pro-body, pro-mind an alternative mass-based morality Informalized or Underground Economies orature/oral-scribal expression Afro-Creoles (Patois, Ebonics, etc.) Black/Global Africa: Pan-Africanism

Note: *A schematic interpretation of major social conflicts via Carolyn Cooper’s Sound Clash (2004).



178

179

mix as well. The official album version is a nationwide anthem that shouts out street-dwellers in city after city, state after state: New York, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago; Los Angeles, Virginia, Texas, New Orleans, St. Louis, Atlanta; New Jersey, Boston, Baltimore, and Miami. It continues to shout out Brazil, Kingston, and Puerto Rico, setting the stage for a remix featuring Reggaeton’s Tego Calderon. He tells us in Spanish to call the firefighters on “this hot Jamaican chick,” who becomes “Jamaican” from Brooklyn for his African diasporic purposes. He says that the (political) abuse from top to bottom is over and, appropriately, he dedicates this multilingual mix to all those locked up in federal prisons. Another remix by female artist Flo from Guadeloupe and featuring Mecca from Haiti via New York would appear in Creole on the mix-tape circuit in Miami as “Lighters Up: Gwada Haiti.”11 Laying a foundation that would also be emulated in a Fugees concert by Lauryn Hill, irony of all ironies, Lil’ Kim says that she herself is “tha hottest bitch on tha planet.” She instructs us to put our lighters up no matter where we’re from and to never show “thy” enemies love. Her “Welcome to Brooklyn” ode ends by telling us that what makes her town “the truth” is that “tha youth dem bang at da cops off da roof.” This is N.W.A.’s “F--- tha Police” (Straight Outta Compton, 1988), reiterated and resounded with a Gangsta Ras vibe in check. Being “the truth” means being “dope” and doing battle against violent forces of the state. Another rendition of Reggae appears as Dancehall with “Lighters Up” on The Naked Truth, rejecting the artificial separation between so-called conscious music and so-called slack music in contemporary Black music commentary: “Durty” is articulated in multiple voices. There is a sample of Millie Jackson’s live concert voice from “Phuck U Symphony” (Live and Uncensored, 1996). She mocks members of her audience who will claim she’s “dirty” publicly while they keep “buying her shit and hiding it.” There is a sample of Black female comedian Adele Givens, who is most famous for boasting, “I’m such a fuckin lady!” There is Lil’ Kim’s own rap voice and verses. And, then, there is her interpolation of not only Tanya Stephens’s “Mi and My God” (Too Hype, 1997), but also a resignification of Mighty Sparrow and Shabba Ranks. She sings the latter’s “If a man want love / make him pay down pon it” (Rough & Ready, Vol. II, 1993) and the former’s “No money, no love” (Only a Fool, 1996) with her own lyrical embellishments.12 Each of these voices is ushered forth to situate the artist in a contemporary and historical, Black national and international lineage, a heritage of sexual-political resistance to an order structured for the pleasure and benefit of somebody else. Once hailed as “The Millie Jackson of Rap,” The Notorious K.I.M. will conclude by insisting that no matter what she has to go down as a “gyal” who knew how to “get it on.” This is the same song in which she notes that the “Fedz” “pinch” her for a shooting, but indict her for her “fuckin music.” “Durty’s” coexistence with “Lighters Up” speaks volumes to the artificial separation of sexuality and politics in critical discourses on the African diaspora and all of its music in the Western hemisphere. It is this “hottest bitch on tha planet” who would craft the definitive Hip-Hop statement so far on “Hip-Hop Cops,” “Rap COINTELRPO” or counter-insurgency as it centrally concerns Hip-Hop targets. More than any other particular song,





“Slippin” captures the tactics and the outcomes of a program that sought to capture her. She screams, “Fuck tha Law,” in the first verse. For it is not enough to scream, “Fuck tha Police,” alone, evidently.13 There’s no such thing as “fair play.” A street grudge puts her in front of judge, but her people get railroaded everyday. In a second verse, the perils of Black celebrity in North America are addressed, as resented as this celebrity is when achieved by the Black poor or working class in white America. “Devils” will find a way to get at you in this world. The set-up of surveillance for persecution’s prosecution and its use of paid or planted informants fill out the third verse, pointedly. “Jake” is always approaching, so you always have to sleep with one eye open; and, now, you have to watch the “niggaz” in your crew as well as the infamous “Boys in Blue.” The latter will use the former to testify against you. In sum, you can get caught slipping with no protection because the official agents of alleged “protection” are the agents of racist state repression (who subject you to surveillance until they find or fabricate some excuse to snatch you up while their own white ruling class runs wild and free).14 This is lyrically argued by an artist whom most academic and non-academic critics would say lacks “politics,” as much as she confronts the state here and as much as she has always confronted the gender and sexuality politics upholding and upheld by the state throughout her career. The “devils” of a racist government make use of a host of pawns or fake “gangstaz” in pursuit of Lil’ Kim, according to The Naked Truth. Since “rats,” “snakes,” and “rodents” all over this album have left the rap game “hot,” she slams 50 Cent on “All Good” by asking how a “snitch nigga” could make a record called “Wanksta” (8 Mile, 2002). On “Quiet” (featuring The Game), miming his “boss,” Eminem, she slams an ever-imitative Foxy Brown, a short-lived affiliate of Capone-NNoreaga around the “HOT-97” shooting that became a federal matter for The Notorious K.I.M., but not for Brown, Capone-N-Noreaga or most members of Junior M.A.F.I.A. Lil’ Kim testifies to her crew’s betrayal of her, and their ethics, after a history of her fighting tooth and nail to keep these “punks” out of jail; and she testifies to how after her trials and tribulations now other female rappers wants to go to court on mere “publicity charges.” On “Quiet,” Junior M.A.F.I.A. is the focus of her rap criticism of “studio gangstaz.” (“I hear em talkin like they gangsta material / But I don’t see it, man, their gangsta’s invisible.”) She says their “gangsta” is invisible and her shots will have them bleeding like her “menstrual.” These fake friends and fake “gangstaz” who testify against her are only “tough” up to a point, that is, when the state’s police come charging in. If the horror-flick strings of “Aunt Dot” subtly reappear to accentuate treachery on “Slippin” (produced by Denaun “Kon Artist” Porter), her old “Backstabbers” theme from their Conspiracy (1995) debut is applied to these newly exposed “lames” and “bustaz,” these fake and backward “hustlaz.” The “devils” of a racist government put these “punk” or “punked” pawns to work for it in this swift quotation of Malcolm X on Lil’ Kim’s The Naked Truth.15 It is on “Spell Check” that she interpolates and supplements The Notorious B.I.G.’s account from Life After Death’s “Mo Money Mo Problems” of federal agents who bug their cell phones and the landlines in their basements. While “B-I-G P-O-P-P-A” would speak of spying by the DEA (Drug Enforcement



180

181

Agency), providing them with “no info,” of course, “B-I-G M-O-M-M-A” spells out her name and speaks of being spied on by the CIA. Plus, she elaborates, the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) is trying to take her pay. For she was subject to a tax audit (to the tune of nearly one million dollars, reportedly) on top of surveillance for the sake of this U.S. counterinsurgency coded as “Hip-Hop Cops” or “Rap COINTELPRO.” A revisitation of K-Solo’s “Spellbound” (Tell the World My Name, 1990), “Spell Check” launches The Naked Truth, lyrically, after its Eshuesque “Intro.” Thirtyfive seconds of sound precede this song. The record starts to spin as the emcee spins on her heels out of a revolving door; she is stalked by reporters and fans, apparently after an appearance in court. She does not say a word, yet, as they beg her for “the truth” that only she can give them. The threshold of the trickster “god/ dess” is her point of departure. When the music plays, almost half a minute later, she name-checks herself and The Notorious B.I.G., punctuating her lyrical and sexual-political place in history once again. She laces her musical history throughout “Spell Check,” slyly but surely. Her flow still “gets you high” as it did on Hard Core’s in “ ’96.” Men and women still want to be this “Queen B(ee)” and stay mad when they can’t be, as on “Big Momma Thang.” No one does it better, still, a line that supplied the title for a unreleased track recorded for The Notorious K.I.M. Further, recalling the new “Mob” affiliation of her previous album, La Bella Mafia (2003), while royally dissing Junior M.A.F.I.A. (as “P-U-S-S-Y”) for turning state’s evidence, she confirms in conclusion: “I’m more nigga than dem bitch-ass guyz / cuz they took tha stand on tha D.A.’s side.” The history that “QB” makes is selfevident, for her; and she shouldn’t have to spell it out. Across time, Lil’ Kim continues to rewrite received gender and sexuality norms and categories, mobilizing her radical fluency in Black speech or “Ebonics” and, lately, exploiting the gender-bound homophobia of her enemies in this conflict with the state. She can clown them with it and for it since they are nowhere near as gender and sexually flexible as she. 50 Cent is no longer “50” (or “Fiddy”). A suspected (if not known) NYPD informant and instigator, he’s “5-0” in song after song on The Naked Truth. “Durty” orders us stay away from “5-0” or the “Hip-Hop Cop” in another, pointed double-entendre. In “Spell Check,” she no longer sees “5-0” (or 50 Cent) in the club, tongue in cheek; he’s out in “C-T” (or Connecticut) with a “dick” in his “butt,” as much as Lil’ Kim loves anal sex and as much as she “straps on” lyrically to stick her “dick” in these Black male butts herself. She literally “outs” male and female attorneys for the state on “Durty” insofar as they denounce her publicly for her sexual image and probably go home and listen to The Notorious K.I.M.’s “How Many Licks,” after a hard day in court, aiming to send her to prison for as long as they can manage. Terms such as “bitch” and “dyke” and “faggot” then like “nigga” can be neutralized and redeployed in her context, when it is this (self-proclaimed “try-sexual”) “Queen Bitch” who utters them in defiance of gender and sexism. She stands with all her “niggaz” on The Naked Truth’s “Whoa” and “a whole buncha dykes on Ninja bikes” in her lesbian-identified boast on The Notorious K.I.M.’s “No Matter What They Say,” formerly a quip from “Bad Girls” or her unreleased song with RuPaul. The gender-flexibility of “nigga” and “bitch” in Hip-Hop and “Ebonics”





or Black speech is mobilized in “Spell Check” to successfully present herself as both Blacker and stronger than those “dudes” or men who claim to be “real niggaz” and superior to any “bitch” before they bow down and testify for the sexist and homophobic state that colonizes them, racially and sexually. Her proverbial “weave straight,” and her opposition to the U.S. government intact, Lil’ Kim calls them “pussy,” tongue in cheek, even as she loves her “pussy” so much that swears she has two of them (on “Gimme That”). Her rewriting of gender and sexuality is at the heart of the historic character of her Hip-Hop writing, time and time again, without a doubt. When she closes The Naked Truth, lyrically with “Last Day,” facing twenty or thirty years in federal prison, her sense of history and her place in it comes to a head, the drama heightened, poignant and intense. If it’s her last day, then it’s her last day, she raps. But they can’t take away how they scream her name; how she “pimped” this game; or how she is critically acclaimed. Still, the point is that Lil’ Kim is going nowhere, for now. It’s not over till it’s over, so to speak. No tactic of neutralization or liquidation will work. No wish for a Black or white missionary conversion will be satisfied, ever. No prison degradation strategy will work to eliminate her either. Her name will be “everlasting.” She will remain “That Bitch” who so many in Hip-Hop now want to become. She is Hip-Hop. She is lyrically “maroonage.” Hard-core till the end, she is Eshu-Elegba’s divinely ordained, ultra-erotic, and gender-defiant message—duly driving enslavers mad with timeless, double-mouthed verse (Bastide in Gates 1988, 31). When she contends that her life-script is “God’s plan,” her supernatural, demi-god posture is completed by the last of the lyricist’s words on The Naked Truth—before a fiveminute, tapped cell phone conversation between Lil’ Kim and her co-defendant/ best girlfriend Monique Dopwell is set to play and punctuate her point: “I’m tha ghost of B.I.G. / So you could neva git ridda me!” And so the “sound clash” goes on . . . Conclusion The government tried to put me through it / But I’m back to style on y’all, like Martha Stewart. (Lil’ Kim “The Game’s in Trouble” [2006])

When Sylvia Wynter issued her call for a new order of knowledge in “No Humans Involved,” her open letter to her colleagues in academia on police racism or fascism and intellectual politics, she signed off by taking a page from Frantz Fanon, African revolutionary born in Martinique and author of The Wretched of the Earth: “The starving ‘fellah’ (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the global new poor, or les damnés), Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. They are the truth” (Wynter 1992, 16). To be the “truth” in Hip-Hop terms is no less primary. This “truth” was “naked” in Constance Farrington’s French-toEnglish translation of Fanon’s essay on colonial-racist violence and the ecstasy of anti-racist, anti-colonial revolt: “The naked truth of decolonization evokes for



182

183

us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it” (Fanon 1963, 37). The masses fight back with a violence of justice and vengeance. Also quoted by “Hard Blak” of the Mau Mau rap clique in Spike Lee’s failure of a film, Bamboozled (2000), Fanon issues his famous call for “a new society” and “a new humanity” in L’ An V de la révolution algérienne (1959) or A Dying Colonialism (1965) as well as The Wretched of the Earth, on behalf of Arabs, Asians as well as Africans, worldwide. The title of Lil’ Kim’s The Naked Truth is as provocative as it is a perfect illustration of her musical line of thought. On “Last Day,” she would confess a certain rhetorical “guilt” in a declaration of loyalty to “a mass-based alternative morality” and a people oppressed rather than represented or protected by the state, the U.S. imperialist state. That state represents a “lie” and her “lie” to it represents “the truth” in a struggle against this government’s counter-insurgent repression or persecution of Blacks, Hip-Hop, and herself. Because it is naked, and bold, this is a truth unveiled and unburdened by the mind/body split or the erotic conservatism of the West: Lil’ Kim’s truth is mental and physical, sexual, and political, totally.16 The stereotypical interpretation of her and her work as “apolitical” or even “anti-political” is not only ignorant of its significance, but ironic. The model of politics associated more with Public Enemy in Hip-Hop is a model of politics narrowly centered around the state, whether the state is to be confronted with the violence of overthrow or not. Yet, an all-around enemy of erotic maroonage, or the entire life-force of maroonage (past and present), this state is a social institution that polices sex, gender and sexuality as a fundamental part of its operation; it scripts and enforces a specific set of social and sexual norms, behaviors and identities in support of the puritanical, heterosexist, patriarchal state governed by the white ruling class and its disavowed, undercover politics of sexual domination. The more complete model of politics expressed in Lil’ Kim towards sexual freedom and against state repression challenges the state and society alike with its ironic trumping of politicos who would either disdain or ignore her, stereotypically and self-righteously, to boot. On July 3, 2007, one year to the day of the release of Lil’ Kim from federal prison, New York’s Daily News ran several stories on George W. Bush which it failed to connect to its criminalization of Hip-Hop or U.S. counter-insurgency of any kind. The titles of these articles say it all: “Bush commutes Libby’s ‘excessive’ 30-month term” (Meek 2007); “Move ‘corrupt’ or correct? It depends on who you ask?” (Sisk and Bazinet 2007); and “He won’t go to the poky, and he soon may be in the money” (Lisberg 2007). I. Lewis Libby was “Chief of Staff” for Vice President “Dick” Cheney until his indictment for lying to a grand jury about “outing” a secret CIA operative, Valerie Plame, after her husband (Joseph Wilson, a retired U.S. diplomat and a CIA envoy to Niger, Africa) had been a vocal critic of the lies pushed by the Bush and Cheney administration regarding “weapons of mass destruction” in—or not in—Iraq. This was before Saddam Hussein’s eventual execution by hanging, and long after his original empowerment by the CIA itself. The only White House official ever charged, and an official who helped write the “national security” policy of Bush and Cheney, “Scooter” Libby was





convicted of four felonies, or two counts of perjury, one count of lying to FBI agents, and one count of obstructing a federal investigation (“obstruction of justice”). Some lies constitute “perjury” or “crime” with time to be served in prison, and some do not, according to the prevailing definitions of lies and crime. First, one is not supposed to tell the truth about the CIA here. Second, the U.S. war machine is licensed to lie and to expose “treasonous” information in its efforts to secure its own interests in the name of government, “America,” or the U.S. citizenry. Third, Bush’s commutation of Libby’s two-and-a-half-year prison term in the service of what many outside of North America identify as war crimes would get justified in terms the alleged suffering of Libby’s “wife and young children” (Bush in Meek 2001, 5), not Bush and Cheney’s international economic agenda or their national as well as international strategies of oppression and repression. At any rate, what this presidential act confirms is that imprisonment (a space where official slavery remains entirely legal and profitable) is literally and symbolically coded as suitable for Lil’ Kim, Hip-Hop, and the Black masses but unsuitable for the political-economic powers that be or their minions. The traditional, established vision of politics is far from absent from Lil’ Kim’s lyricism or her lyrical persona. Besides a politics of monarchy and matriarchy embedded in her earliest “Big Momma” and “Queen Bitch” postures, The Notorious K.I.M.’s “I’m Human” would picture her impeaching the U.S. president in order to take his place in the world as a thoroughly new kind of “First Lady.” She has dared to identify herself with the power of disaster struck on “September 11th” on several occasions. This is heard on “Can You Hear Me Now?” from La Bella Mafia which generally insists she is a movement and that we should “fight for the cause.” On “Spell Check,” for The Naked Truth, she said she stays out the country, with the “A-R-A-B’s,” while on “All Good” she “comes through” like two airplanes in “Midtown.” How audacious in a period when more than a few rappers from New York especially turned “patriotic”—like “state’s evidence” or, as dead prez put it, “star-spangled slaves.”17 But, before, The Notorious K.I.M. had identified herself with the most extreme enemy of U.S. foreign policy for La Bella Mafia on “Hold It Now,” contending that she was feared in this country like Saddam Hussein. So hometown Brooklyn will later go from being Vietnam metaphorically to Baghdad on Ms. G.O.A.T. (2007), her post-prison mix-tape. She extends the traditional, anti-establishment vision of politics signified by Tupac and his Outlawz (“Operating Under Thug Laws As Warriors”), for example, who mic-named themselves after “Third World” adversaries of the white racist government that oppressed them: Kastro, Yaki Kadafi, E.D.I. Mean, Komani, Che Guevara as well as Hussein Fatal.18 The sexual politics of her anti-state stance were super-visible in her cover photo for One World magazine (December/January 2003). Beautifully shot by Alexei Hay, it features her in a brown suede bathing suit and red silk gauze veil, or an abbreviated “burka” of the sort worn by veiled Muslim women in some Islamic traditions. Her body in a striking pose, she stares straight ahead with haunting green eyes (or contacts) in an image that strategically calls to mind a famous National Geographic cover and photo from 1985: Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl” image of Sharbat Gula was for the West an image of a nameless and storyless refugee for



184

Figure 7.2

“Lil’ Kim in Burka” by Alexei Hay (2003)




almost two decades.19 But The Notorious K.I.M.’s name and narrative are well known, far from quiet, passive or submissive as Sharbat Gula’s image has been consumed. What’s more, the emcee harbors a sexual aggression that energizes the many political messages implied here and now in the context of a renewed invasion of Afghanistan, not by the Soviet Union but by the United States itself. The “First World” would decide to exploit the plight of Afghan (or “Third World”) women and girls to rationalize their white racist and sexist imperialism, as if sexual repression is something foreign to North America and other Western societies, which have socially, economically and sexually oppressed and repressed the rest of the world for 500 years and counting. The veil that Lil’ Kim sports in Alexei Hay’s photography can be read to signify the hypocrisy of this alibi for empire. For what forces in this culture haven’t tried in vain to veil her sexuality, her sexual freedom and all Black female sexuality, in effect? What else should this veil signify when worn by The Notorious K.I.M., “gangsta,” trickster and “Head of La Bella Mafia,” when Fanon wrote in A Dying Colonialism of female militants who hid guns and grenades in their Western-fetishized veils to advance the Algerian revolution, an African revolution fortified by a remarkable sexual revolution at one point in time? When magazine editors and publicists at One World fretted over the politically charged content of this cover and lay-out, it was the Hip-Hop author of The Naked Truth who was without fear or anxiety, once again.20 No less stunning is the fashion/performance-art spread photographed by Derrick Santini in Flaunt magazine’s inaugural “Fall Fashion Issue” for the month which saw Lil’ Kim’s initial detention and The Naked Truth’s subsequent release (September 2005): “Marc Jacobs Featuring Lil’ Kim as Joan of Arc.” This theatrical, twelve-page series of shots includes six spectacular scenes centered around her as a Black heroine, visionary, heretic and leader of political resistance: “The Prayer,” “The Call to Arms,” “The Victory,” The Trial,” “The Punishment,” and “The Saint” all scene-by-scene identify Lil’ Kim or “KIM of BK” with the female iconography of this near-mythological French personage, Jeanne d’Arc (Santini 2005, 210–221).21 While the significance of France for contemporary fashion in the West makes this artful comparison quite interesting, Pan-African commentary on Joan of Arc makes it far more so. A Senegalese novelist, journalist and scholar-activist, Boubacar Boris Diop has written Les tambours de la mémoire or “The Drums of Memory” (1990) about a Black heroine who resembles Aline Sitoé Diatta—or Aliin Sitooye Jaata, the twentieth-century anti-colonial activist who was exiled by the French for her activism against French colonial rule in West Africa. A Diola queen of reputed religious powers in the region of Casamance, and a leader of a tax resistance movement around World War II, she was imprisoned and then deported to a prison in Timbuktu, Mali, where she died from disease in 1944. She is often read a “Joan of Arc” figure by some. A novelist, poet, and playwright who was once imprisoned for his own demonstrations against France, Bernard Dadié of Côte d’Ivoire has written a related play in French, Béatrice du Congo (1969), which is a satirical drama whose Black heroine is burnt at the stake for her spiritual activism. She was “born in the Congo,” as Nikki Giovanni put it in “Ego Tripping (there may be reason why)” (Re: Creation,



186


Figure 7.3

“St. Kimpa Vita of Kongo” by Jamaul Smith, Art by Any Means, 2008



1970). She was burnt at the sake as a “witch” or “heretic” for proclaiming Jesus Christ and his mother to be Black or Kongolese; for proclaiming Kongo as the new Holy Land and the site of a new kingdom against all Western colonialism; for proclaiming her Black, Kongolese female self to be possessed by the spirit of Catholic St. Anthony of Padua; and, finally, for giving birth to her boy child (by her “guardian angel”) as a self-proclaimed virgin prophet or prophetess. An actual historical figure, “Dona Beatriz” or Kimpa Vita was an adamant opponent of slavery and the trans-Atlantic “European Slave Trade” in particular. Followers of her African-Christian movement would not only find themselves in the Americas after her execution in 1706, they would also help foment the Stono Rebellion of South Carolina in 1739, the bloodiest antislavery uprising in the British colony that would become the settler colony of the United States. This is not to mention her presence in Brazil and Martinique or Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. On Kimpa Vita, John K. Thornton would publish The Kongolese Saint Anthony (1998) while, in French, Baba Kake Ibrahima published Dona Béatrice: La Jeanne d’Arc congolaise (1976) and Rudy Mbemba Dia Benazo-Mbanzul would publish Le procès de Kimpa Vita: La Jeanne d’Arc congolaise (2002).22 The former Black Panther and “Joanne Chesimard,” Assata Shakur was hailed as “St. Joanne” as well as “High Priestess” of the Black Liberation Army in the media at the height of the U.S. government’s pursuit of her and her comrades in the late 1970s: Audre Lorde wrote a poem for this, her “sister warrior” after her capture in The Black Unicorn (1978), where Joan of Arc is embraced at the back of Shakur’s prison cell by Yaa Asantewa (28), “Queen Mother” of the Ashanti who waged war against British rule in present-day Ghana, once known as the “Gold Coast” thanks to the Portuguese and the British and for the same reason that the French christened the so-called Ivory Coast as “Côte d’Ivoire.” Yet and still, who fought for France (or the Vatican) and who fought for Africa? Le Jeanne d’Arc was the name of the ship carrying troops to Dakar in 1857 to officially conquer Senegal and Africans for French colonialism.23 The biography and iconography of heroines, visionaries, heretics and leaders of resistance routinely represented in the West by Joan of Arc has a longer, Blacker history beyond Europe. And this African history of politics speaks through Lil’ Kim’s embodiment of these radical postures in visual art-performance and lyricism. Joan of Arc or Flaunt’s provocative and politically important pictorial interpretations aside, such a spread can or should also be reinterpreted as “Lil’ Kim as Aliin Sitooye Jaata,” “Lil’ Kim as Béatrice of the Congo” or “Lil’ Kim as Kimpa Vita of Kongo,” just for example. She survives her trials and intends to thrive despite it all: “Big House Didn’t Break Lil’ Kim, Rap Diva” was Lola Ogunnaike’s break-out story on her in “The Arts” section of The New York Times on the eve of MTV’s Video Music Awards in 2006. She would open the show in an orange prison-issue jumpsuit handcuffed and flanked by two handsome Black bodyguards; she would step out of the handcuffs and the jumpsuit with the assistance of these guards; and, then, she would announce in an allusion to “All Good” from The Naked Truth: “You can’t keep good bitch down!” The article underscores her lyrical position for the corporate media that had hounded her, mercilessly, and that do not dare print the word



188

Figure 7.4 “The Saint” by Derrick Santini (2005)




“COINTELPRO” (or the phrase “Hip-Hop Cops” or “Rap COINTELPRO”) in any of its coverage: “I really feel like I was singled out because of who I am, my occupation, and because of the color of my skin.” How hard was time in a cell for her? The New York Times wants to know, since she would never break down or cry for their pleasure or consumption: “ ‘If I could stay for years at my aunt’s house in the projects, I can survive anything,’ the Brooklyn-bred rapper said . . . . ‘When you grow up in the ’hood you learn how to tough things out, how to roll hard’ ” (Ogunnaike 2006, E1). Her revolutionary, ever-evolving work-in-progress continues despite counter-insurgent designs of all kinds. Freshly sprung, on a mix-tape remix of DJ Khaled’s “We Takin’ Over” (2007), she’d maintain that she was in a new state; a new place; with new (license) plates; and a new “face” (which could actually signify a new drivers license or cosmetic visage), so: “by the time they try to build them a new case / I’m gone like yesterday.” The Notorious K.I.M. is unshakeable as she reflects on the happenings of her Hip-Hop life thus far: “I came into this industry to make people smile, cry, laugh and have fun . . . I came to touch people. I didn’t look at it like, ‘God, why me? I said, “Why not me?’ ” (Ratcliffe 2005, 98). She reiterates the original definition of Hip-Hop in her sense of purpose. Very much a “public enemy” and rebel without a pause for this cause, Lil’ Kim is loud and clear as a vocalist of that “sound clash” charted by Carolyn Cooper in her Pan-African support and call for “erotic maroonage.” On and after The Naked Truth, she confronts “Hip-Hop Cops,” “Rap COINTELPRO” or counter-insurgency as it is construed by Mumia-Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, Dhoruba Bin Wahad and so many others in the struggle for global Black liberation. This is the struggle of “The Wretched of the Earth.” In this struggle, a “mass-based alternative” order of morality, language, economics, aesthetics and sexuality is indispensable; an alternative model of knowledge, politics and consciousness is definitely, urgently in order. All of it is rewritten in the phenomenal lyricism of Lil’ Kim, Hip-Hop’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch,” whose musical, anti-state sense of socio-poetic and sexual-political justice is without match— within or outside Hip-Hop—in modern, Western-dominated times, at least.



190

I

t would make no sense whatsoever to discuss Hip-Hop without Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation, without whom neither the term nor the movement would be put in motion, worldwide, over three and a half decades ago. This fact is clearly understood by The Coup, the Oakland or Bay Area duo comprised of Boots Riley on vocals and Pam The Funkstress on turntables. They released Pick a Bigger Weapon (2006) after Lil’ Kim’s The Naked Truth (2005). They scrupulously combine the double-mantra or motto of Hip-Hop—“peace, love, unity and having fun” and being “warriors for the community”—with their own tracks such as “Bullets and Love,” “Head (of State),” “I Jus Wanna Lay Around All Day in Bed With You,” “Baby Let’s Have a Baby Before Bush Do Somethin’ Crazy,” “I Love Boosters!,” and “My Favorite Mutiny” (featuring Black Thought of The Roots and Talib Kweli of Black Star). Best in this respect on Pick a Bigger Weapon is “Laugh/Love/F***,” the uncensored chorus of which perfectly reiterates the doubly erotic and political definition of Hip-Hop: “I’m here to laugh, love, fuck and drank liquor / And help tha damn revolution come quicka.” The Coup do not condemn sex or celebration in Hip-Hop. They celebrate sex and celebration. They condemn U.S. imperialism in Iraq as well as ruling class exploitation everywhere, while brandishing a classic and beautiful logo of a Southern African woman, freedom fighting soldier carrying a child in her arms and a machine gun on her back. To “pick a bigger weapon” in the spirit of Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation’s Hip-Hop should surely involve weapons of real rather than cliché sexual revolution, as a part of revolution at large, without a doubt. On Ms. G.O.A.T.: Greatest Of All Time (2007), The Notorious K.I.M. records a song that shares a title with a song from Hard Core (1996): “**** You” or “Fuck You.” Packing a serious punch, she opens it by signifying all over a famous line from Maya Angelou’s And Still I Rise (1978): “Does my sexiness offend you?” The title poem of the more accepted writer’s collection assumes new meaning for this poet of Hip-Hop. Despite historical lies and every effort to break her, she rises and bounces back (on wax) with seemingly inexplicable “sassiness,” “haughtiness,” and “sexiness.” As does And Still I Rise’s “Phenomenal Woman,” who symbolically had “a hive of honey bees” swarming around her in the form of “fellows”



Conclusion


falling down to their knees (Angelou 1978, 8–10). However, what this society can handle in the more accepted (even “presidential,” state-approved) writer, it cannot begin to handle in this writer of Hip-Hop. Her speech and sexiness suggest the downfall of its so-called civilization, thanks to sexual and anti-state politics that continue to saturate Ms. G.O.A.T., where Lil’ Kim pays special tribute to host of female emcees. She remakes a series of their more memorable songs ranging across regions, styles, and time periods: “Cha Cha Cha” by MC Lyte (Eyes on This, 1989), “Wrath of My Madness” by Queen Latifah (All Hail the Queen, 1989), “Deeper” by Boss (Born Gangstaz, 1994), “Afro Puffs” by Lady of Rage (Above the Rim: The Soundtrack, 1996) and “Lost Ones” by Lauryn Hill (The Mis-Education of Lauryn Hill, 1998). Fanatic in her Hip-Hop, she rhymes with zeal. How could the significance of her own lyricism possibly go unnoticed, unrecognized, unappreciated, before or after Ms. G.O.A.T.: Greatest Of All Time, the mix-tape that would mark an end to her major record contract with Atlantic Records in a new age of Internet distribution and independent label deals? *

*

*

For one, L.H. Stallings does not fail in this regard with Mutha’ Is Half a Word (2007), her recent study of Black folklore, old and new. In closing, she is able to recognize: “Lil’ Kim’s lyrics invert the sexual mores of our time” (273). “Lesbian, straight, bisexual or polysexual females benefit from her narrative” (274). “Further, in ways that feminist critics could not, Lil’ Kim reincorporates female pleasure . . . back into mainstream consciousness” (275). “She conceives of a sexuality that will not be bound, controlled, or imprisoned by words and representations, one that is as visually deceptive as trickster and just as aggressive and transgressive” (278). Finally: “Her work can be read as a militant stance to move hip-hop culture,” not to mention a colonizing white Western culture, of course, “into overcoming its learned homophobia and heterosexualism of desire” (279). The reference is to Lil’ Kim’s lyrics, Lil’ Kim’s narrative, Lil’ Kim’s consciousness, Lil’ Kim’s conceptions, and Lil’ Kim’s militant work—which is to say, the subject of Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh. Stallings’s Mutha’ Is Half a Word faults other interpretations perceptively: “There is a war on Black female bodies, and strategies for the fight have been marred by reducing approaches to turning bad girls into good girls instead of making men and women change their limited notions of gender and sexuality” (Stallings 2007, 256–257). Most notably, besides Essence magazine, there is Gwendolyn D. Pough who attempts to use pop-psychology on select interviews with Lil’ Kim and ignore her radical-lyrical appropriation or transvaluation of “bitch” (as “Queen Bitch”) in Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, HipHop Culture and the Public Sphere (2004). There is in addition Imani Perry who would reduce her to “shock value” in Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip-Hop (2004), which cannot comprehend her ethic of sexual poetic justice or her criticism of middle-class norms of male domination and exploitation in a sexist and classist misreading of Lil’ Kim’s statement in “Lady Marmalade” (Moulin Rouge, 2001), “We independent women / Some mistake us for whores,”



192

193

even though this is a sex worker anthem and a cover of La Belle’s classic, which had mocked puritanical repression and hypocrisy no less. Likewise, there is Elaine Richardson who in Hip-Hop Literacies (2007) can only perceive Lil’ Kim as a “Jezebel,” a racist-sexist stereotype, while attempting to rescue “Kimberly Denise Jones” from this indictment in an analysis of legal transcripts in place of Hip-Hop lyricism. This is why Stallings’s Mutha’ Is Half a Word could question “Hip-Hop Feminism,” its promotion of white and bourgeois concepts of femininity or womanhood in market-oriented journalism and academic criticism as well as its categorical hostility to recent Black working-class female rappers or emcees who have broken free of prevailing sexual ideological constraints. Those bonds were more or less accepted by other, consequently more acceptable artists embraced earlier by Tricia Rose’s “Bad Sistas” chapter from Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994). Chinosole’s neglected point in The African Diaspora & Autobiographics (2001) about how Black and white, male and female scholars and fiction writers remain trapped in U.S. slavery’s Victorian “Cult of True Womanhood” is a point extremely well taken. Thus, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting practices a predictable brand of largely Hip-Hop illiterate, anti-rap “feminism” in Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip-Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (2007). Typically, Hip-Hop is either not defined here at all or defined as the U.S. corporate media would define it (i.e., as heavy rotational “rap music and videos,” at a precise moment in history, etc.) for strictly commercial purposes in its dominant society of sexism, misogyny and homophobia. Such a gender-conservative and heterosexist framework must repress a great deal: Hip-Hop outside of North America; Hip-Hop off of radio and television; Hip-Hop as originally and continually defined by Bambaataa and the “Mighty Zulus”; Hip-Hop as elementally defined by graffiti-artists, deejays, and break-dancers (or b-boys and b-girls), besides “rappers” or emcees; Hip-Hop in the work of “commercial” and “non-commercial” artists who disregard, dismiss or denounce many of the established sexual norms and ideals of the Western bourgeoisie (regardless of sexual orientation); and Hip-Hop in the work of rebellious or revolutionary female artists who must be conceptually eliminated by Sharpley-Whiting and most commentary on “rap,” which proves to be actually invested in Hip-Hop’s much-maligned “masculinization,” so as to advance an agenda that is far more anti-rap and pro-status quo than anti-sexist or anti-misogynist. What of Erykah Badu and her pimpsterism, or her freakquency? What of dead prez’s “Pimp the System” slogan or their statement on “Afrika” (Turn Off the Radio, The Mix-Tape, Vol. 2: Get Free or Die Tryin’, 2003), “I wanna go to Afrika / instead of bein pimped like a hoe in amerika,” as well? What of the way all kinds of Hip-Hop expression revamps and reverses what is sexually taken for granted beyond Hip-Hop? On Ms. G.O.A.T., Lil’ Kim raps: “when you sick o’ hoin I can show you ’bout pimpin / I’m tryna put you onto game, pay attention!” Yet Sharpley-Whiting aims to construe her as misguided girl who was imprisoned for protecting undeserving Hip-Hop guys, not an adult or artist who lyrically and politically opposes the counter-insurgent operations of the pimping, patriarchal U.S. imperialist state, which is somehow construed as deserving (of power, respect, obedience) by Sharpley-Whiting in Pimps Up, Ho’s Down.



CONCLUSION


By contrast, Cheryl L. Keyes almost heretically allied herself with the Black masses in Rap Music and Street Consciousness (2004); and, beforehand, bell hooks exposed the race and class politics of now academically certified reactions to Hip-Hop in “Gangsta Culture—Sexism and Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap?” (1994). The “white mainstream media” was reportedly not interested in her “hardcore critique” of “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” whenever it came calling for her to “trash” this “gangsta rap” controversy as spectacle. She would refuse “the sensationalist drama of demonizing black youth culture in general and the contributions of young black men in particular,” remarking: “It’s a contemporary remake of Birth of a Nation [or D.W. Griffin’s cinematic defense of the Ku Klux Klan, 1915]—only this time we are encouraged to believe it is not just vulnerable white womanhood that risks destruction by black hands, but everyone” (hooks 1994, 115). This elite Negrophobia shared by white and Black as well as patriarchal and feminist points of view explains why their beloved society can enjoy and acclaim the sexism and misogyny of cultural products such as Jane Campion’s Academy Award–winning film, The Piano (1993), while denouncing “gangsta rap” in programmatic sexual rhetoric. Nonetheless, hooks never interrogated the category of “gangsta rap” itself, as a “white mainstream media” fabrication, given her own lack of familiarity with Hip-Hop intellectually. She continued to represent it as essentially male or masculine in her tactical reference to an interview she conducted with Ice Cube and in the absence of any reference to an interview she had conducted with Lil’ Kim prior. Further, she minimizes the political import of “gangsta” stances in Hip-Hop, which embody an oppositional alternative to middle-class socialization, at the same time that she includes “Gangsta Culture—Sexism and Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap?” in a book of hers entitled Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994). It was as if it is radical and legit when academic writers adopt “gangsta,” “outlaw” postures but not emcees. Lastly, none of these critics is immune to charges of homophobia and heterosexism themselves, no matter how much homophobia and heterosexism are projected onto Hip-Hop affiliates wholesale. If hooks’ conflicted relationship to homophobia is well known, all professed sex radicalism aside, Keyes’s attempt to classify all female rappers into four basic, distinct categories (“Queen Mother,” “The Fly Girl,” “Sista with Attitude,” and “The Lesbian”) is hardly a revolutionary moment in Rap Music and Street Consciousness, as it seeks to contain Black, human, female and Hip-Hop sexualities and subjectivities in an objectifying heterosexist framework in the vein of sociological positivism or British empiricism (Keyes 2002, 189). *

*

*

At bottom, mere liberalism of some sort has been the primary tool used by the high-profile to study what many call Hip-Hop Revolution, paradoxically. Neither Nelson George, Bikari Kitwana, Michael Eric Dyson, Todd Boyd, William Jelani Cobb, Mark Anthony Neal, Jeff Chang, nor Jeffrey Ogbar think to break with this tradition of U.S. colonial nationalism in North America—any more than Patricia Hill Collins or “Hip Hop Feminism.” That imperialism is not remixed



194

195

or recycled by KRS-One and Marley Marl on Hip-Hop Lives (2007), for instance. The title track boasts, “Hip is tha Knowledge—Hop is tha Movement . . . An Ancient Civilization has been Born Again.” Wryly, they go on to detail how one can get away with murder these days, and ensure police investigations go no further, on “Kill a Rapper.” One can politically imprison or intellectually condemn a rapper with similar effect. In academia, Hip-Hop emcees have been constituted as mere objects of investigation for other people’s paradigms, as if there is no “fifth” element of Hip-Hop that should help bring about the downfall of the so-called civilization to which academicians, critics, and journalists are characteristically faithful. Their reformist when not opportunistic use of “rap” or Hip-Hop to uphold the current world order of oppression, exploitation and repression means they cannot endorse, recognize or extend any fundamental, revolutionary breakthroughs accomplished by Hip-Hop or other Black cultural art forms, either nationally or internationally. If Hip-Hop is indeed “Ancient Civilization Born Again,” Lil’ Kim’s revolution within a revolution is ancient and super-modern, ancestral and utopic or futuristic in its invention or reinvention of power, knowledge, and pleasure. This is her booming recreation. It channels and regenerates “African matriarchy” by any name as well as the spiritual, even anatomical tricksterism of Eshu-Elegba, African “god/dess” of freedom. Unlike any academic tradition of record, it incarnates or reincarnates a system of logic that is systematically and simultaneously anti-sexist, gender-defiant and ultra-erotic in a grassroots and Pan-African universe of meaning; what’s more, it is popular and communal as opposed to intellectually marginal, elitist or Negrophobic in impulse. Meshing radical anti-state politics with radical sexual politics for HipHop Revolution, it is not mere Western bourgeois liberalism but so much more, hence giving great credence to Lil’ Kim’s contemporary Ms. G.O.A.T.: Greatest Of All Time claims. Legendarily, it all began as an organic movement when Afrika Bambaataa beheld an image of Africans in revolt on a movie screen. The film was Cy Enfield’s Zulu (1964), starring Michael Caine. It is as racist as it gets: “Outnumbered British soldiers do battle with Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift,” so goes the ad narrative, in Natal, South Africa, 1789. The Africans are not supposed to be the heroes of this Hollywood MGM production. But the “Godfather” or “Grandfather” of HipHop who is said to have supplied the music with so much of its African flavor, as “Master of Records” or “Father of the Mix-Tape,” he was a “bad spectator.” He focused only on the uprising—from the insurgent perspective, transforming this white colonialist propaganda into a picture of Black rebellion: “What I did is took all these elements from all these great leaders and teachers that we had at that time and said I will start a group called the Zulu Nation . . . . Just to see these Black people fighting for what was theirs against the British that always stuck in my mind” (Fricke and Ahearn 2002, 44). “It was powerful to see Black people standing up and fighting at a time when we were only in Heckle & Jeckle roles” (Bambaataa 2003, 130). “So what I did, with myself and a couple of other of my comrades, is get out in the street, start talking to a lot of the brothers and sisters, trying to tell them how they’re killing each other, that they should be warriors for their community” (Fricke and Ahearn 2000, 44). This message in tandem with that



CONCLUSION


of “peace, love, unity and having fun” would provide the basis for the Universal Zulu Nation and its planetary promotion of Hip-Hop, as such, now nearly thirtyfive years old or young. It was not foreseen by the makers of Zulu, who could not envision “African Cinema of Liberation,” or Djibril Diop Mambety. They did not anticipate Kgafela oa Magogodi’s I MIKE What I LIKE (2005), “the world’s first Spoken Word film,” coming out of South Africa, or Hip-Hop rising up virtually everywhere on the continent and throughout the African diaspora. They would not willingly give us the text of The Notorious K.I.M., to be sure. In Zulu, there was a mass of dancing, ratchet-wielding warriors—jumping up and down as if to make the world shake themselves—who were mis-described as “maidens” by white missionaries. Similarly, their “spears” were embarrassedly and intentionally mis-interpreted as “symbols of chastity,” as a patriarchal Englishman describes them to comfort his white daughter and protect their common gender and sexual politics of British Empire. To stand up and fight this enslaving, colonizing force, whether U.S. or Anglo-Saxon or European as a whole, to be warriors for communities of Africans in struggle is to do battle against ideas about human being and human bodies institutionalized globally now for over 500 years. Lil’ Kim’s “QUEEN B@#$H” lyricism of Hip-Hop is that battle, this bigger revolutionary weapon; and it’s as “true-school” as it gets.



196

1 Orals . . . Head . . . Genius: The Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure of Hard Core 1. See Chris Rock’s “Monica Interview” on his comedic album, Bigger & Blacker (1999), for an illustration of this point about Lil’ Kim’s orality and the general public reception of her first solo album. The comic concocts an imaginary interview full of questions for Monica Lewinsky, who is famous or infamous for her oral sexuality in the Oval Office of the White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But the comedic answers provided all come from audio samples of Lil’ Kim’s orality on Hard Core, so much is it identified with oral sexuality in the minds of many, critics and fans, then and now, if far too simplistically. 2. See, for this formulation, jessica Care moore’s long-awaited collection, The Poetry of Emcees: A Comprehensive Anthology of Hip-Hop Generation Writers Known to Rock the Pen. 3. The (gay-club friendly) “Tronco Trak Mix” of “Big Momma Thang” on Lil’ Kim’s Dance Remixes (2006) scratches and literally makes a song out of just these first few words of Hard Core words. 4. http://www.zulunation.org. 5. http://www.templeofhiphop.org. 6. Much of Chester Himes’s writing is directly inspired by the lyrical lines of the Blues, most of all those sung by Bessie Smith; and of this specific play, he notes: “I wrote it in 1961 while living in a one-room penthouse atop a five-floor walk-up overlooking the Ramparts in the ‘old town’ of Antibes. As the story of Baby Sister unfolded in my mind I was moved to tears. When not crying I was singing at the top of my voice: What did I do to be so black and blue?” (Himes 1973, 7). 7. Kristeva is renowned for her intellectual attempts to explain the role played by the body in language. She draws a firm distinction between its “symbolic” and “semiotic” elements. One is defined by general rules of sense, meaning-making, and “rationality.” The other is associated with bodily drives, energy, affect, desire, most especially bodily rhythms identified with maternity (in psychoanalysis) or the mother’s body. Though Kristeva claimed to find new value in these semiotic elements via poetry, all her poets were European and male. Furthermore, her distinction between “symbolic” and “semiotic” elements of language leaves the power of making sense, meaning or rationality strictly outside the realm she assigns to the body and its functions, so that “symbolic” reason or language is never fully redefined, contested or subverted by any other conventions of sense or meaning besides those already in power and place. Black music, poetry, and speech in general could wreak havoc on Kristeva’s basic European



Notes

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

NOTES

dichotomy: Lil’ Kim’s “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” music, poetry, and speech would also seriously reconfigure this discussion, in particular. From a personal conversation with Babacar M’Bow in Miami, FL, on June 22, 2007. See also Cheryl Wall’s Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage and Literary Tradition (2005). This is not to exclude her visual “body language” as seen in music videos, for example, such as “Get Money” by her Junior M.A.F.I.A. (Conspiracy, 1995). The first half of the video features The Notorious B.I.G. The second half features Lil’ Kim as its climax. Biggie’s dramatization is full of drama and stages a very romantic, genderconventional narrative of chaotic conflict. The Notorious K.I.M.’s segment represents a serious departure from these expectations. She rhymes as the queen at the center of a male harem in a salon of female solidarity, supported by luminaries Salt-n-Pepa and Mary J. Blige. When it comes to conflict, she stands up to instruct men to sit down—in tune with her lyrics—at least the men who are not thrilled to serve or service her and her female crew of friends. There is no romance or gender repression, in other words. The man who must be lectured and tongue-lashed symbolically is then all but left behind as Lil’ Kim turns her attention to the camera, breaking the first law of Hollywood filmmaking where women and even male actors are mere objects to be controlled and directors are in charge. “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” becomes the narrative of “Get Money” herself, not any traditional male/female conflict, the drama that still preoccupies The Notorious B.I.G.’s own visual illustration of his verse. She literally stalks the camera. She shakes it up, circles, and surrounds it. She steals its assumed authority while keeping it totally off balance and at the mercy of her lyrical as well as physical-semiotic or kinesthetic moves on screen. In the end, she is in effect the de facto director of this performance delivered in “Get Money,” videographically; and this performance is demanded or commanded by her verse, the language informing her “body-language” here and elsewhere. “Girls, let’s have a meeting,” the Soul Sister repeats in this song’s introduction after she shouts that “the boys” think that they don’t know how to “get down.” Later, her refrain to men who say women can’t “make it” without pleasing men is: “If you don’t give me what I want, I got to get it some other place.” Another Soul Sister’s song is sampled by “No Time,” “Take Me as I Am” by Lyn Collins (1973). She’s “The Female Preacher” whose “Think (About It)” (1972) is also sampled by “Dreams” on Hard Core. Her originals now appear on Mama Feelgood: The Best of Lyn Collins (2005). The refrain of “Think (About It)” would give to HipHop “It Takes Two” by Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock (It Takes Two, 1988); it also maintains: “We got to use what we got to get what we want.” Patra would remake “Think (About It),” featuring “Lyn Collins—‘The Sultry Siren of Funk,’ ” for her Queen of the Pack (1993). Further, Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core interestingly samples two songs by Sylvester, the falsetto-singing, gay drag performer and legend of Disco and Soul, on “Big Momma Thang” and “Drugs.” If many critics of Hip-Hop complain about the practice of “sampling,” few critically analyze the significance of it for meaning-making in Hip-Hop. This was also the title given to another version of his contribution to Hard Core’s “Drugs” when repackaged for his posthumously released Duets: The Final Chapter (2005). See Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line (2000) for a beginning analysis of sexology and race. See Reich’s Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure (1936), for a unique example of sexology tied socialist movement for revolutionary social and



198

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

199

economic transformation in Europe (Austria and Germany, to be precise). See Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy (1948), for “oral orgasms,” not to mention Myron Sharaf’s Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (1983). It is all treated many times over elsewhere. The anal sex broached by “Big Momma Thang” returns on “Chinatown,” for instance, a Lil’ Kim, Junior M.A.F.I.A., and Lil’ Cease feature on DJ Clue’s The Professional 2 (2001). The rimming, water sports and group sex of “Dreams” reappear on SWV’s “Give It Up,” “QUEEN B@#$H II” and Blu Cantrell’s “Impatient,” respectively. The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Suck My Dick” is filled with voyeurism, among other things. Masturbation may have first appeared, for her, comically, on the remix of Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money.” It comes back no less comically on her La Bella Mafia’s “Hold It Now.” Such “womanist” self-pleasure was also at the center of Lil’ Kim’s philosophically “bitchy” interludes on Missy Elliot’s Da Real World (1999), “Checkin’ for You,” and “Throw Your Hands Up.” Like sex and narcotic, cunnilingus, fantasy, and masturbation are mixed in or up on “How Many Licks?” This is not to mention the stimulants of Conspiracy’s “I Need You Tonight,” The Notorious K.I.M.’s “She Don’t Love You,” etc.; and, on a similar, Hennesey-friendly note, who else would The Product G&B get to bless their “Freak Freak” (Ghetto & Blues, 2003) except Lil’ Kim? This is just for starters. Then, there is The Naked Truth (2005). Hip-Hop can be easily linked to Wynter’s allegedly “esoteric” writings. Its most direct connections to Dancehall-Reggae may make her “One Love—Rhetoric or Reality?— Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism” (1972), a review essay, especially significant in this regard. Later, she published “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Toward a Deciphering Practice” in Mybe Cham’s Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema (1992). This essay in divided into two parts: “Part I—To Rethink Aesthetics: To Fight the Power” (a graphic nod to Public Enemy) and “Part II—After Criticism, Beyond the Winepress: Towards a Deciphering Turn” (a graphic nod to Bob Marley). A keynote address and marathon argument, Wynter’s “Un-Settling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom” (2003) begins with epigraphs or “guide-quotes” from Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques LeGoff, Pico della Mirandola, and Nas (among others); and, at the SUNYBinghamton conference of the Coloniality Working Group for which she was originally writing, Wynter rapped her citation of this song by Nas (“CIA”), awing us and awed by its passion, intellect and poetry. See Stephen Henderson’s comparable treatment of Black Arts or Black Power Movement poets in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music as Poetic References (1973). He focuses on the idea of “liberation” (21) as the central theme of this poetry, remarking how “the younger poet will rap, declaim or sing” (26), frequently in “the rough tradition” (43). Hardly afraid of so-called obscenity, blurring the lines between “poetry” and “music,” Henderson highlights the “miraculous discovery” of Black poets themselves that “Black people are poems” (68). See Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993) for an exceptional analysis of class and the politics of “taste” in evaluations of “orature” by Africans “at home and abroad.” “Haiku” provides an interesting addition to this poet’s well-known admiration for Hip-Hop in the person of Tupac Shakur. If Sanchez first distrusts the idea that there could be a “revolutionary fuck” early on in her career (Sanchez 1986, 11), she discovers by the time of Like the Singing Coming off the Drums that sex is exactly what we make of it in “Poem”: “When it comes RIGHT, you / understand that sex is & that sometimes it ain’t” (Sanchez 1998, 57). This is after she relates Thelonius Monk to Hip-Hop.



NOTES

200

NOTES

1. The particular song’s title is “I’m Human.” 2. When Amadiume refers to figures such as “Big Mama Prayer” and “The Blessed Spiritual Mother” in “Holy Ghost” churches on the continent today in her article, “Prophecy, Authenticity and Oppositional Models: Writers and Politics in Africa” (2003), their earlier, “woman-dominated” counterparts are called “Holy Spirit matriarchal churches” (10): Lil’ Kim’s assumption of this “Big Momma” title also has obvious, African historical significance with regard to Amadiume’s “church of matriarchy” framework specifically. 3. Sylvia Wynter refers to “Condi” as “a sort of Roman proconsulare” and a “black Margaret Thatcher” in an interview published in PROUD FLESH 4 (2000). 4. The phrase has been associated with the colossally problematic Eldridge Cleaver, who might turn over in his grave at the thought of this militantly anti-sexist usage. 5. Lil’ Kim’s verse for Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” (Conspiracy, 1995) was explicitly organized around this theme or expression. 6. “The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (Lorde 1984, 55). The connections to be made between this poet’s essay and Lil’ Kim’s lyricism are countless. In any case, Lorde seems to come to this conclusion through her studies of West African spiritual belief-systems for The Black Unicorn (1978), a groundbreaking collection of poetry. 7. See Nadine Cohodas’s QUEEN: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (2004), even simply the cover photo, or prologue, for the uncanny cultural resemblance of “Ruth Jones” to Hip-Hop’s Lil’ Kim. 8. Lil’ Kim goes on to make commentary on “Ike” (Turner) and “O.J.” (Simpson). And, on La Bella Mafia’s “Heavenly Father,” she sends out a personal threat to “women abusers,” not simply rapists, marking any such “niggaz” or men lyrically for revenge. 9. http://www.africabookcentre.com. 10. http://www.m-w.com/home.htm. 11. Compare the entries for “nigga” and “bitch” in Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (1994/2000), however limited or outdated this particular “dictionary” proves to be. 12. Even when “man” is used in the Black speech of Hip-Hop (“my mans ‘n’ ’em”), it is more often than not a translation of “nigga,” which does not translate, merely, into the white English understanding of “man” as gender; and even in the rarer use of sexspecific English terms (such as “girls” and “boys”), the terms are not then used in a sex-specific manner at all necessarily. 13. On an “Advakids” freestyle (circa 2003), Lil’ Kim shouts out her “magic clique” or female posse who will use their “magic clicks” (“clits”) to execute their female hustle on streets dominated by men. The word play of her homonym is significant and, linguistically, grassroots-Black. 14. The expression “Suck my dick!” has literal and metaphorical meanings. It can mean “bow down” physically, as in fellatio or oral sex, and it can mean “bow down” socially, as in respect or admiration shown for someone of apparent power or status. Both



2 Sexual Poetic Justice: On African Matriarchy, Flexible Gender Systems, and The Notorious K.I.M.

201

meanings merge often, as in Lil’ Kim’s “Suck My D**k.” Indeed, her manipulation of these (sexual and non-sexual, phallic and non-phallic) meanings extend well beyond any one song or album. 15. Co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton would actually affirm this African matriarchalism in a stunning piece entitled “Eve, the Mother of All Living,” which was published in 1974 (Newton 2002, 313–316). 16. See Amadiume’s “Grassroots Revolution” (in Ecstasy, one of her collections of poetry), where music and poetry, sexuality and matriarchy come together in a way that would please Lil’ Kim via Fela Kuti (Amadiume 1995, 17). 17. Under a chapter section entitled “Loss of Autonomy of the Women’s Council” (from Re-inventing Africa’s “Gender and Social Movements in Africa: A West African Experience”), Amadiume notes that in 1977 its leaders were arrested and detained in Onitsha after clashing with historically new forces of patriarchy: “In the precolonial social values, the arrest and detention of elderly women, especially leaders of the Women’s Council—who would have been Ekwe titled women, the earthly representatives of the Goddess Idemili, the ultimate matriarchs–would have been sacrilege . . . . The Christian and Western influenced elites condemned the women’s ‘headstrongness’ as unfeminine, as all women ought to bow their heads to their husbands; women should be seen as helpmates and subordinates” (Amadiume 1997, 134–135).

3 Mic “God/dess” . . . Eshu-Elegba: Signifying Divine Freedom—In the Flesh 1. www.ZuluNation.com. 2. Interestingly, this may refer to a kind of fashion poetics as well as a special script of graf artistry in Hip-Hop. 3. Her Michigan State University Ph.D. dissertation is A Revision on the Narrative of the Trickster Trope in Black Culture for Alternative Readings of Gender and Sexuality (Written by Herself) (2001). Its folkloric insight was a major source of inspiration for my extended connection of Lil’ Kim to Eshu-Elegba. 4. This phrase grew out of an initial and productive conversation with a friend, Peter Carlo-Becerra. 5. I must thank Vernedra Williams specifically for requesting this catalog of connections in “Hip-Hop Eshu: QUEEN B@#$H 101,” Fall 2004. 6. See New Birth’s Web site: http://www.thenewbirth.com. The sampled song is “You Are What I’m All About” (Birth Day, 1972). It is also sampled by Jeru The Damaja’s “Ya Playin’ Yaself” (Wrath of the Math, 1996). 7. Parts of Ready to Die’s “Me & My Bitch” notwithstanding. See my earlier analysis of this song vis-à-vis The Notorious K.I.M.’s sly reply in “Suck My D**k” in chapter 2. 8. “There is the equally popular Oke-Ibadan festival, which is a festival of designated abuse, curses, oaths, slang, erotic laughter and popular tricks, celebrated around the figure of Esu,” according to Femi Abodunrin’s Blackness—Culture, Ideology and Discourse (1996, 60). 9. The Signifying Monkey has relatively little to say about Eshu’s reincarnation as Legba, as Gates demotes this “god[dess] of the crossroads” from a spiritual divinity to an academic metaphor. Such a strategy has cultural and religious politics of its own. It is to Eshu or Legba that one appeals when important, life-changing choices are to be made, at life’s intersections; and “children” of this orisha are thought to live at these crossroads, more or less. Gates states that “Esu is the indigenous metaphor of the literary 10.1057/9780230619111 - Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh, Greg Thomas


NOTES

NOTES

critic” (Gates 1988, 9), “an ideal metaphor for black literary criticism” (51), and “an indigenous black metaphor for intertextuality as configured in Afro-American formal literary discourse” (59). Now, his location of this activity in Western academia and at the center of U.S. cultural, political, and economic empire is not thought to be a problem at all: Pan-African worldviews are subordinated to European or white American world-views in the process, never the reverse. The mass tradition of Black folklore is translated, moreover, for the elite purposes of scholars trained and housed in an institution of knowledge that is far from “indigenous” (or “native”) to this tradition, the tradition of Black folk en masse. It is a “non-indigenous,” non-African intellectual tradition that remains authoritarian in Gates. In a professionally self-privileging move, he confuses the crossroads of the orisha for what many in the Black tradition might view as a “tragic mulatto” style of rhetoric: The critic of comparative black literature also dwells at a sort of crossroads, a discursive crossroads at which two languages meet, be these languages Yoruba and English, or Spanish and French, or even (perhaps especially) the black vernacular and standard English. This sort of critic would seem, like Esu, to live at the intersection of these crossroads. (65) Gates’s “crossroads” is not that of the orisha who lives on across the Americas. It is hardly comparable to Esu-Elegbara’s multilingual African world existence, or Exu as an “enemy of enslavers” and European colonizers of America. The above scenario confines all language-use to a colonized-elite condition, while ignoring the politics of these conflicts; making a virtue out of a situation that was never necessary, historically; and suggesting this orisha could somehow choose colonial assimilation against itself within its own native/indigenous/African system of thought. Gates places Eshu in an ultimately pseudo-secular, Christian academic-intellectual culture of interpretation while confusing the orisha’s crossroads with colonization. He asks us to imagine Esu-Elegbara as Esu-Elegbara choosing between a Yoruba language or discourse and a colonizing-enslaving language or discourse that would destroy Esu-Elegbara as Esu-Elegbara in the name of “Spanish,” “French,” and “standard English.” At a crossroads, Jesus Christ could not convert to Islam in a still Christian frame of mind; and the same is true for Mohammed who would have to be conquered for his spirit or metaphysics to be reduced to “metaphor” in JudaeoChristian terms—even as both Islam and Christianity strive to conquer and convert Africa and its spiritual belief systems, themselves. All “indigenous” talk aside, Gates and The Signifying Monkey cannot take Eshu or Legba too seriously on Eshu and Legba’s terms. 10. Gates makes no bones about his hatred of Hip-Hop, publicly stating a preference for Jazz as if Black musics can be legitimately pitted against one another; and as if his hatred of Hip-Hop would not call into question his alleged expertise on EshuElegba, who has so much in common with contemporary Hip-Hop emcees. At the same time, the Blues (and Hoodoo) are short-changed as well in a clearly classhierarchical coding of Black art and culture in the African diaspora. See Elaine Brown’s piercing discussion of Gates in The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2002), where she blasts his “bastardization” of W.E.B. Dubois and deems him “Head New Age Negro at Harvard” (216): “Gates clings to the ideal of a civilized, primarily white America, to which the black underclass remains unworthy of inclusion” (217). 11. For example, Katrina Hazzard-Donald writes in “Dance in Hip-Hop Culture” (1996): “The rappers whose dance movements best encompass and personify the



202

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

203

extremes in the genre of hip-hop movement are Flavor Flav, of the group Public Enemy, and M.C. Hammer. Flavor Flav resembles the contemporary urban Eshu-Elegba, or deity (principle) of uncertainty and unpredictability, also known as the trickster deity” (228). See L.H. Stallings’s Ph.D. dissertation and then her Mutha’ Is Half a Word (2007) for her treatment of Bogus’s “Queen B” readings. Hence, “[I] am arriving at the fork of my blues,” wrote Jayne Cortez in “Back Home in Benin City,” a poem from her Scarifications (Cortez 1973, 28). This piece is followed by another poem, “Orisha,” whose closing line is “Orisha Orisha Orisha Satchmo Orisha” (29). It is preceded by “Call the Night,” which reads: “Hear this cherrythroated/guitar god-son of poverty” (27). The collection is a treasure of Legba music on the printed page. That said, was the cover art for Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares (1969) a riff on Eshu, visually? Cortez also makes an explicit appeal to Robert Johnson and the crossroads in “Taking the Blues Back Home,” which appears in Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002) as well as on Jayne Cortez & The Firespitters’s CD, Taking the Blues Back Home (1996). “I got nineteen men and I want one mo,’ ” sang Bessie Smith on “Sorrowful Blues” in 1924 (Bessie Smith: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 1, 1991). Marcia Douglas provides a wonderful illustration in her magnificent novel, Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells (2005), which is ripe with orisha imagery from beginning to end. Whereas in conventional scholarship the “god of the crossroads” is always pictured is a phallic penetrator, Douglas provides another divine crossroads perspective with this stunning, far from simply masculine image: “Run back down to the gravel path, past the julie mango tree and back to the place where the road splits like your legs throwing away a child” (134). In Notes from a Writers Book of Cures and Spells, then, Legba is not just a penetrator of female bodies, and female bodies are not just penetrated: Legba’s crossroads is the site from which “s/he” gives births to the world, exploding into this world, through a womb that could thus even be said to “penetrate” (or cross over into) our world itself: Aché! Then there is Lorde’s Zami, when she explodes: “Afrekete Afrekete ride me to the crossroads . . .” (Lorde 1982, 252). Afrekete, Aflakete, and Aflekete have recently been offered as possible analogues of Eshu and Legba, if these offerings still seek to leave these African spirits confined by gender, whether male or female, now, problematically. At the level of speech, “Kronik” can be included here along with “Durty” and “Lighters Up.” In Mark Bialczak’s “7 Questions for Lil’ Kim” (2004), her answer would reveal her goal of learning “five new languages” and her plans to record a song in which she raps in “many different languages,” none of which are or resemble English (2). See http://therapup.rawkus.com/2007/12/kim-freaks-the-stage.html (accessed December 26, 2007). The brief “beef” between Lil’ Kim and Eve came to an end before the release of either artist’s next album. “The Female Mack” is how Lil’ Kim introduces herself on an unofficial remix for “How Many Licks?” (2001). On another remix, for Trick Daddy’s “Sugar (Gimme Some)” from his album, Thug Matrimony: Married to the Streets (2005), she raps that she has all these pimps giving her all their money: “just to taste my jar of honey.” She is always a pimper of pimps. Then, there is the chorus to The Naked Truth’s “Last Day” (where she rhymes about how no one can take away how they scream her name and how she’s “pimped this game”).



NOTES

204

NOTES

1. This information and these quotations are taken from Samba Gadjigo’s interview (April 11, 2004) with Sembene on Mooladé for New Yorker Films, which can be found at http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/nyf/t_elements/moolaade/moolaade_pk.pdf. 2. See Françoise Pfaff’s The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, A Pioneer of African Film (1984) and Sheila Petty’s “Towards a Changing Africa: Women’s Roles in the Films of Ousmane Sembene” from her collection, A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene (1996). 3. The writings of Sylvia Wynter are the ultimate source of reference here. See her “Un-settling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, after Man, Its Over-representation” (2000), although her entire body of work is beyond extensive on these and other matters. 4. For instance, Hopkinson and Moore’s Deconstructing Tyrone (2006), which is truly absurd. 5. Badu’s invocation is as precise as can be, undercutting any academic appropriation of the subject when read alongside Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, for instance: “The primal god of the Fon is a Janus figure; one side of its body is female and is called Mawu, while the other side is male and is called Lisa. Mawu’s eyes form the moon; Lisa’s eyes form the sun. Accordingly, Lisa rules the day and Mawu rules the night” (Gates 1988, 23). “I’m an Orange Moon,” Badu croons in a Mawu yet Lisa-inspired moment, if Lil’ Kim would rule day and night since she defies strict “male/female” division as a lyrical “god/dess” herself. 6. This music video is included as a part of the DVD release of Brown Sugar. 7. Dr. Acklyn Lynch would remind me of this connection between Erykah Badu’s creative “matriarchal” theatre and Dinah Washington’s almost “polyandrous” practice of marriage and sexual relations. 8. These fantasies were made no more apparent than by the appearance of “Groupie Confessions” as a regular section of Ozone magazine, a magazine claiming to be the southern voice of Hip-Hop music. And then, no less problematic or consumeristic, there is the porn-erotic fantasy life of gay productions like The DL Chronicles, on cable television and DVD. 9. The disc jockey’s “real-life” drama continues in another book, The Wendy Williams Experience (2004), also written “by” Williams “with” Karen Hunter. 10. There is no pagination supplied for this text which was originally published in English, not French. 11. This is why Baltimore-born poet Laini Mataka (formerly Wanda Robinson) and author of Restoring the Queen (1994) asks, “Just How Traditional Do We Spoze to Be?” in Never as Strangers (1988). 12. Badu would tell Giant magazine (in “New World Order”): “I know about the backlash, the ‘Erykah Badu, if you look at her, she’ll make you change gods and wear crochet pants’ backlash.” She also recognizes: “Some people get caught up in those titles, as I did for a little while” (Badu in Hope 2008, 97). 13. In this sense, they are quite like those “girls” who betray Lil’ Kim and her sisterly cause in The Notorious K.I.M.’s “Aunt Dot.” 14. While, for several critics, Liking is reputed to be writing totally beyond gender in It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral, Marjolijn de Jager’s translation should raise some



4 (Black) Consciousness (Reprise): Neo-Soul’s “Baduizm,” African Cinema of Liberation, and Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H”

205

fundamental questions on this subject with regard to gender and colonial homophobia or heterosexism. On the women of Lunai, it is written: “They’re entangled up to their necks stuff themselves up to their noses lick the slugs and the ass of the queers oh mama!” (Liking 2000, 54); and, later, as the “misovire” envisions a new day without a range of negative ills, she identifies it as a day when “Africanity is no longer a pretext for servitude,” and when “children no longer play the flunky or the gangster / The transvestite prostitute or drug addict or queer” (104). Is this homophobic “queer” language African, in fact, indigenously, or is it another import that needs to be excised with decolonization? Is this language originally Liking’s herself, or is it another problematic of translation? “Here they no longer know the enjoyment of that one special look that one special moment that one special relationship” (87), It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral would add elsewhere in a passage which may suggest that romantic “monogamy” remains an unquestioned ideal for the author or narrator or translator as well. If this is the case, for Liking, then heterosexist gender is not renounced, totally, by Liking, after all; and there is lot that can learned here by the author, narrator and/or translator from the sex-radical lyricism of Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H,” Lil’ Kim. 15. The filmmaker’s response to a question posed by the author—“What do you think of the political voice of Hip-Hop in Senegal?”—during a seminar session moderated by Prof. Mbye Cham (of Howard University), chief organizer of the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute on “African Cinema” conducted from June to July 2005 in Dakar, Senegal, West Africa. Many thanks to Juanita Anderson and Ardencie Hall for sharing their video documentation of the late, great filmmaker’s visit so it could be transcribed for my purposes here. 16. “The male will be an object of pleasure for you, not an arrogant, egotistical master,” Sarraounia is told at a young age. Hondo makes his film on this real-life magical, warrior queen, Sarraounia (1986), which Mbye Cham recalls as “a song in praise of dignity, determination, difference and devotion to ideals of freedom, justice, tolerance, understanding, and love.” In his words, everything is “based on actual events that transpired in Niger and the surrounding Sahel subregion at the end of the nineteenth century, the high moment of terrorism, pillage dispossession, and subjugation directed at Africa and Africans [by European colonizers] in the name of progress, reason, God, country, and civilization” (Cham 2004, 64). Winner of FESPACO’s grand prize or Etalon de Yennenga, Hondo’s account is of the royal leader of the Aznas who successfully battles the French and repels their ruthless invasion. Sarraounia spearheads a pan-ethnic, Pan-African fight, to victory, promising immortality to all her soldiers since her griot shall sing their praises for eternity. Hondo utilizes the oral tradition as well as written documents to script Sarraounia and the music of Abdoulaye Cissé and Pierre Akendengue to score it. The queen in question has been described as a “sorceress” or “herbalist,” and a “general.” In his interview with Françoise Pfaff, “Sarraounia: An Epic of Resistance” (1997), he invokes a number of warrior woman in African history (e.g., Jinga of Angola, Ranavalona of Madagascar and Beatrice of the Congo) as he insists emphatically that “Sarraounia is not a legend; she did exist and still does . . . . Now, however, she is more of a cultural symbol and no longer has power. She is Queen of the Aznas; she is chosen; she continues to select her men and make love as she pleases” (Hondo in Pfaff 1997, 155). 17. The “Marxist” and pro-matriarchal Sembène says of his female protagonist in Ceddo: “as far as the heroine being a princess is concerned, one can belong to a privileged class and still participate in movements for justice and tolerance” (Sembène in Pfaff



NOTES

NOTES

1984, 175). In The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, Pfaff notes: “Princess Dior, whose name is reminiscent of the great historical Senegalese figure Lat-Dior, who resisted French colonialism, is a political symbol of bravery and courage. She makes up for the weakness of her father and the men he used to rule. Through Princess Dior, Sembene stresses the influential role of the lingueres (princesses) and other women in Senegal’s history” (Pfaff 1984, 175). Moreover, if “Ceddo” means “non-believers” among the masses in Africa who resist conquest by Arab-Islamic and Euro-Christian invaders, then it can be understood as a continental equivalent of “Field Slave” as employed by Malcolm X in his classic speech from 1963, “Message to the Grassroots” (Malcolm X Speaks 1965, 3–17). And it is from his “grassroots” that these “Hip-Hop Queens” come with their rhymes and unruly claims to royalty. 18. The work of many, many female emcees should provide a next-level dimension to Clarke’s “After Mecca” work (which does not include Blues artists here in its claims about “poets,” Black women and sexuality). Their lyricism in Hip-Hop radically redefines “lyric poetry” and “poetry” at large. Unfortunately, this opportunity is quickly, even aggressively foreclosed (shut down or “missed”) by Clarke in the end: “outside the discursive space of rap, few women rappers criticize their male colleagues’ sexist expressions or actions” (Clarke 2005a, 165). It is unclear why for “rap,” the “discursive” space is not what matters most, since for the “poets” under study it is their “poetry” (or “poetic discourse”) that matters most, not their interviews or media statements, or alleged lack thereof; and, it is no less unclear how or through what study Clarke has drawn such a conclusion, besides a reading of Tricia Rose’s Black Noise (1994), in an otherwise, extremely impressive work. This may be the fallout of privileging of the written word, or a pushing of poetry as poetry on the printed page as opposed to poetries that would fit Shirley Anne Williams’s description of the Blues (which applies no less to Hip-Hop’s rap): “a verbal [and not simply musical] genre” (Williams 1979, 73). The often Bluesy novelist Gayl Jones provides an alternative approach to Clarke on issues of orality, while supplementing Williams, in Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991). Both Jones and Williams were preceded in this light by Stephen Henderson’s insightful introduction to Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music as Poetic References (1973). All of the above are further enhanced by Isidore Okpewho’s “Relationships between the Oral and Written Poetry” in his The Heritage of Africa Poetry (1985). See Fahamisha Patricia Brown’s Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture (1999), finally, for a corrective to any page-bound conception of poetry in the African diaspora: “these poets perform the word on the page and on the stage” (6). In “After Mecca,” at any rate, Clarke actually begins with an analysis of lyrics sung by Aretha Franklin. 19. “In taking on a project like this, I’m taking the responsibility for my race and my planet,” Badu would tell Hillary Crosley (in very Afrika Bambaataa-like language) for Billboard (December 10, 2007) at http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_ display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003683279. The motto of this whole project: “Freeing the Slaves and the Slave Masters.”

5 “First Female King”: The Art of Morph and Monarchy in La Bella Mafia’s Beehive 1. Elaine Brown, “Empowering All Women” (Keynote Speech for UNC-Chapel Hill’s Women’s Week: March 27, 2001). Importantly, she would appoint a significant number of other women to key positions in the BPP during her time as “Chairman.”



206

207

2. See Butler (1995). 3. The accompanying photo by Olugbenro Ogunsemore pictures Bobbito’s head laying “innocently,” playfully in her lap. 4. The first verse of “Can’t F**k with Queen Bee” begins on an interesting note in this regard, consoling Lil’ Kim’s envious enemies by reminding them that she can take none of her symbolic (and transgressive) material acquisitions with her when she dies and goes to “Heaven.” 5. He is Biggie Smalls—after a “gangsta” character from Let’s Do It Again (1975), The Notorious B.I.G. (“Business Instead of Games”), Big Poppa, Frank Whyte, “The General” of Junior M.A.F.I.A., etc. 6. “Shake Ya Bum Bum” announces “da whole Beehive” earlier on La Bella Mafia. 7. On “Can’t F**k with Queen Bee,” she wants her body to be “held” in a “world museum,” the Brooklyn museum widely understood to be a Black museum by its Black patrons in a very Black borough of New York City. History is told to museumize her remains as an “object of worship” as much as an “object d’art” in what is officially touted as the first museum in North America to “display African objects” (i.e., masks, statues, and jewelry) “as art.” The Brooklyn Museum of Art specializes in “ancient Egyptian masterpieces.” Lil’ Kim has simulated Hatshepsut as well as Isis in other poses elsewhere. Jeffrey Rotter traces the stock of “stately Beaux Arts structure” to “the reigns of Nefertiti and Cleopatra” in “Queen Mutha” (2003). But this line from “Can’t F**k with Queen Bee” is by no means “a throwaway line,” as he is anxious to suggest (93). 8. See Dikobe (2003). 9. This is an unpublished manuscript of a keynote lecture given by Boyce Davies in May 2007 in Trinidad at the First International Conference on Rapso, which is a form of “spoken word” or “street poetry” and music born of the Black Power movement in its Caribbean location of Trinidad and Tobago, featuring Lancelot Layne, Cheryl Byron, and Brother Resistance as instrumental pioneers. 10. LaChapelle was compelled to recognize this kinship between continental African culture and contemporary Black popular culture in Rize (2005), where traditional masks and today’s “krumping” or dance are cinematically reconnected.

6 It’s the Lyrical Sex Pistol: Or, A Rebel Music that Rewrites Anatomy—Rhyme after Fiery Rhyme 1. See The Black Panther newspaper and New Day in Babylon (Van Deburg 1993) for Black Power’s indictment of “Babylon” in the 1960s and 1970s. Maria W. Stewart is the famed Ethiopianist orator who also used the term in the nineteenth century to condemn the society of white racism. See her “Address at the African Masonic Hall” (1833). This is a Black, African diasporic tradition shared across time and space with Jamaican or Caribbean popular culture as powerfully influenced by Rastafarianism, of course. 2. The Free Dictionary gives a definition at http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/ gun+moll. 3. Merriam-Webster’s online: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/polymorphous. 4. The primary sections of Julien’s problem-ridden film (allegedly on Hip-Hop and Dancehall) are partitioned by two subtitles: first, “GUN CULTURE” and, then, “SEX CULTURE.” 5. These tracks could be found on DJ Four5’s Lil’ Kim “mix-tape” CD in 2003.



NOTES

NOTES

6. The staying power of Robert F. Williams’s analysis from the 1950s and early 1960s is stunning. 7. This is all fundamentally related to graphic figurations of Eshu-Elegba, needless to say. 8. Lil’ Kim’s lyrically anti-sexist and gender-defiant Hip-Hop is most striking when compared to the more strained and problematic efforts of academic intellectuals, such as those writing in “The Phallus Issue” of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4:1 (1992) and Luce Irigaray, author of Speculum of the Other Woman (1985) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) in English translation. 9. In academia, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987) is famous for arguing Greece’s indebtedness to Black Egypt. But not only can Bernal not bring himself to admit Egypt’s Black identity, despite his book’s title, his notoriety stands in the way of scores of previous Black scholar-activists who have affirmed this Egypt and “Ethiopianism” in a more Pan-African fashion. 10. Lil’ Kim herself threatens to carve her name in the face of her enemies on The Notorious K.I.M.’s “You Can’t Win.” 11. Some of these lyrics would eventually become “No Matter What They Say” on The Notorious K.I.M. 12. “He’s wild and crazy and likes to do daring stuff, and so do I,” Lil’ Kim tells Rolling Stone (September 30, 2004) in the context of their feature, “The Photographs: The Fifty Greatest Portraits and the Stories Behind Them—A Special Issue” (95). The subject was her memorable, Louis Vuitton–logoed nude photo shoot for Interview magazine (November 1999). 13. If Lil’ Kim rejects both monogamy and polygamy, lyrically, preferring something much more akin to “polyandry,” her body politics are extremely significant with respect to Fela and these “Queens,” as a recent essay by Vivien Goldman reveals: “Almost all Fela’s wives were raped by soldiers. One had broken bottles sewn into her vagina at the hospital. Alake, Fela’s most loquacious wife, remembers the high jinks they played in prison that time, fooling the warders by hiding precious cigarettes in toilet rolls in their vaginas—just like prisoners in Irish H Blocks today, discovering all kinds of new anal functions” (Goldman 2003, 23). 14. On the same song, she’s a young diva/senorita whose flow is tighter than a “twoseater” (car or vehicle). 15. In 2006, Ozone magazine’s fourth annual “Sex Issue” compliments XXL. Besides a list entitled “The Love Below,” Randy Roper and Eric Perrin’s “Microphone Freaks” has this much to say about Lil’ Kim: “The Notorious K.I.M. by far is the freakiest female rapper of All Time. From her introduction in the rap game, her femme fatale style took feminism into uncharted waters.” Provocatively, she is then described as a trendsetter for “the female sexism” of rappers who rhyme in her wake (Roper and Perrin 2006, 64). 16. William Eric Perkins’s introduction to Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (1996) would thus read, after recalling The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron: “Similarly, black women poets like Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and others also developed a spoken style that turned words into bullets” (Perkins 1996, 4). 17. Literally, Lil’ Kim refers to her revolver as a quick problem-solver on “All Hail tha Queen.” 18. See Fred Hampton, Jr.’s interviews with Workers World (2006) and PROUD FLESH (2007). 19. See Howard Alk’s The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971). 20. Zora Neale Hurston once wrote in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934): “So we can say that the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in



208

209

hieroglyphics” (Hurston 1981, 50). Might this help explain why many Hip-Hop artists rhyme through film references so consistently? 21. Curiously, her lyricism could be read as concrete material validation of many of Judith Butler’s claims in “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” (1993). How interesting this is since the philosopher’s ideas on embodiment (and, relatedly, psychoanalysis) have been met with resistance in academia; and since this radical validation would come from Lil’ Kim’s rap within Hip-Hop’s Black popular culture? The emcee definitely represents one “serious response” which Butler anticipated: “One might also argue that to continue to use the term ‘phallus’ for this symbolic or idealizing function is to prefigure and valorize which body part will be the site of erotogenization” (Butler 1993, 62). There is “the phallus” in The Notorious K.I.M., narrowly speaking, and a whole lot more. Yet and still, neither the term “lesbian” nor the term “phallus” is privileged in her lyrical onslaught against the entire sexual system represented by Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis in the West. 22. The “Guns as Symbols” chapter of Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers, a kind of Black classic which is cinematically cited by John Singleton’s Baby Boy (2001), could be used in a campaign against Black musical firearms, but not when it is read carefully against Western social norms. For an antiracist agenda, Cress Welsing dares to take liberties with the liberties usually taken by traditional psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She recalls that the words “weapon” and “penis” were synonymous “until the end of the fourteenth century” (Cress Welsing 2004, 103). She examines racist sexual stereotypes to expose how white male genitalia are viewed as “degraded” in their constant cultural comparisons to Black genitalia (105). This feeling of degradation requires compensation, or overcompensation, which for her assumes the form of gun production. Historically, white men generate gun technology as a symbolic “equalizer,” to settle an extremely sexual score in a war for worldwide “white-supremacy” (110). Cress Welsing thus concludes that there can never be “gun control” in white societies based on white-supremacism, as psychologically this “would represent white male (genital) castration” (114). This is how she wreaks havoc in another chapter of The Isis Papers, “What Freud Was Really Talking About . . . The Concept of Penis Envy.” She draws a distinction is between “real” or “primary penis envy,” the envy white men and white women have for Black genitalia, and “secondary penis envy” which is the envy white men project onto white women in an effort to conceal their own male sense of inferiority (99). The body politics of this global historical conflict actually center around “wombs” or female genitalia as much as penises, a fact that is minimized by many readers of The Isis Papers and Cress Welsing herself. White men as well as white women are said to sexually envy and desire Black males as well as Black females; and this envy is said to lead to a desire to “attack” and “destroy” Black sexual potency (97). Black males are emphasized more in Cress Welsing’s explanations because, supposedly, “it is males who initiate the act of reproduction” (96). This is a Victorian view, not an African view, and a very sexist view which Cress Welsing obviously shares with Freud’s Europe. Much of her writing supports conservative ideas on gender, as if these repressive, puritanical ideas were not themselves white, Western and bourgeois. In yet another chapter of The Isis Papers, “The Mother Fucker and the Original Mother Fucker,” Freud’s concept of incest is redefined as white men’s desire to “re-enter” Black female wombs. The Black woman is characterized as “the original mother” (125), the mother of all world history. She alone has the power to “re-birth” white offspring who in their fantasies wish to be “born again,” “non-defective” (no longer “genetic mutations”) or Black instead of white (126). The lyrical gunmen of Hip-Hop



NOTES

NOTES

and Dancehall provoke panic today thanks to an alleged association of Black guns and male penises, even though white men’s guns are thought to be modeled on Black eroticism in The Isis Papers, where potency is not interpreted as merely masculine as it is in most psychiatry and psychoanalysis. At any rate, were Cress Welsing more like Lil’ Kim, she could have analyzed “wombs” as “symbols” for “guns” and avoided the trap of reinforcing gender and the sexism of racism or “white-supremacy” at the level of logic, imagination and the written word—Singleton’s indulgent Baby Boy reading of her notwithstanding. 23. This is a reference to U.S. District Judge Gerald Lynch’s decision to sentence “Kimberly Jones” to a year and a day in a federal prison, plus three years probation, for its lyrically illiterate construction of her as some sort of “gun moll” among Black males of “Hip-Hop” or “rap.”

7 The “Sound Clash” of The Naked Truth: Erotic Maroonage, Public Enemies, and “Rap COINTELPRO” 1. Hurricane G and Redman raucously stage another prison break and shout out Lil’ Kim on one of two “Soopaman Luva” song-skits from his Red Gone Wild: Thee Album (2007). On the first, Hurricane screams (after coming from court on a “bullshit charge”), “they tryna do me like Kim / throw me behind bars.” Then, on the second, she screams: “Nigga I ain’t neva scared / I ain’t givin no state time for shit I ain’t did.” 2. If he only knows Lil’ Kim as an icon (not an emcee) and a blonde, Ben Arogundade makes some important observations in Black Beauty: A History and a Celebration (2000): the wearing of false hair in varying colors is one of the oldest forms of black adornment, dating back to Ancient Africa, 1000 BC. Wigs were worn by the Egyptians and the Nubians over shaved heads or short “naturals” as sun protectors, as well as for social and ceremonial occasions. They were constructed of real hair, wool, cotton, or plant-leaf fibers, and were produced in both curly and straight varieties. Dyed variations were used for different occasions—black was generally for “daywear” whereas henna and indigo were mixed to create greens, reds, and blues for ceremonial scenarios. Gold was also popular. The wig became the catalyst for the “stay-on-hair,” commonly know as the weave, which is currently so popular among women of color. Thus, these falsies are as traditional a part of black beauty as braids or cornrows. This effectively makes today’s wig-weave-extension-wearing sisters nothing less than Afro loyalists, who are in fact guilty of nothing more than being old-fashioned in their choice of hairstyle. Their look is in fact more African than the Afro that so symbolized the blackness of the Civil Rights [or Black Power] era. (159) 3. No interviewers asked the artist about the message of this artwork for the album, which included an assortment of photos and images, no one of which can be said to be aesthetically identical to the rest. The means by which the chameleon is scripted for condemnation had obviously shifted by the time of The Naked Truth. That is, it has shifted from a surface-aesthetic condemnation to the condemnation of incarceration outright. 4. The music video for “Whoa” visualizes Lil’ Kim preparing a fine art heist on the night before she is supposed to turn herself in to prison. She says that she may as well go to jail for “something”—instead of what the federal government was sending her to



210

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

211

jail for, “nothing.” The original storyline for this music video involved her in a highspeed police chase that would lead to her arrest and imprisonment, involuntarily. This quotation is from the back cover/book jacket of Redden’s Snitch Culture. See Assata Shakur’s communiqués at http://assatashakur.org and http://afrocubaweb. com/assata.htm. “I’ve been this way; this is me. I’m just glad that it’s finally coming across,” Lil’ Kim tells The Source (Ratcliffe 2005, 101). Compare Morgan’s angle in The Village Voice with Ryan B. Patrick’s “Lil’ Kim’s Naked Truth” (2005) in Pride: Canada’s Leading African Canada and Caribbean Magazine: “Those expecting to hear a mea culpa in The Naked Truth will instead be treated to a bric-a-brac of glossy pop-rap production, brazen gangsta chatter and the requisite sexy rhymes and dirty talk” (16). Cooper’s major commitment to erotic maroonage is clearly not reiterated by Donna P. Hope’s Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (2006). This is most evident in its third and central chapter, “ ‘Love Punaany Bad’: Sexuality and Gender in the Dancehall,” where any love of female bodies or eroticism is automatically and presumptuously equated with “patriarchy.” Hope uses the aristocratic and colonial terminology of “courting” and “conquering” to categorize every male deejay’s relationship to “punaany” in lyricism from Shabba Ranks, Lecturer, Spragga Benz, and Red Dragon to Shabba Ranks again. Yet none of the lyricism she selects to analyze actually suggests an aristocratic courtship or a colonizing conquest of “punaany” beyond a love or desire for it that sometimes borders on and sometimes revels in worship. Her orthodox equation of all unabashed, public male desire for female bodies with the negativity of patriarchy reiterates the Victorian or puritanical attitude toward gender and sexuality promoted by the Western imperialist bourgeoisie, as does her equation of all unabashed, public female desire (for male bodies, in particular) in Dancehall lyricism, dance and performance with patriarchal objectification or victimization. Ever de-emphasizing the importance of lyricism in her cultural “research,” Hope even continues to refer to Lady Saw as Dancehall’s “Queen of Slackness,” reiterating the anti-sexual and pro-sexist patriarchal as well as bourgeois-puritanical feminist evaluation of sexuality, despite Lady Saw’s brilliant lyrical assault on the rhetoric of “slackness” versus “culture” in a song such as “What Is Slackness” (Give Me the Reason, 1996), the title of which Hope incorrectly and symptomatically transcribes simply as “Slackness.” This is why her Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica is truly “sociology” (a disciplinary enterprise, after all) instead of erotic maroonage. Epistemologically, and politically, it does not in this respect advance Cooper’s trailblazing work in Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Cutlure (1993) and Sound Clash. This question was at the center of a forum in May 2005 at Sankofa Video and Books in Washington, DC. Thanks to Tony Muhammed for drawing my attention to this track. A clearance controversy ensued involving Stephens’s song when Lil’ Kim was in prison and when Stephens’s was set to advertise her next album, Rebelution (2006). A lawyer and representative of the rapper, L. Londell McMillan reported that this mistake was not the fault of the artist herself, but that of Atlantic Records. What should not missed moreover is how Lil’ Kim’s “Durty” is meant to invoke a number of other voices (Millie Jackson, Adele Givens, Stephens herself, Shabba Ranks, and Mighty Sparrow), explicitly, not conceal them in the production of this genre-crossing, geography-crossing, and generation-crossing song.



NOTES

NOTES

13. Lil’ Kim’s partner in rhyme on La Bella Mafia’s “Get in Touch with Us” (2005), Styles P offers a newer version of “F*ck the Police” on The Ghost Sessions (2007). 14. From behind bars, Damian “D-Roc” Butler would release his Life After Death: The Movie—Ten Years Later (2007) to explain the circumstances behind the U.S. federal government’s use of other Junior M.A.F.I.A. members in its efforts to incarcerate Lil’ Kim as well as himself, her former manager: Antoine “Banger” Spain testifies for the prosecution and escapes prosecution himself on pending credit card fraud charges. He was the first to place all of the imprisoned (including Suif “C-Gutta” Jackson) at the scene of the “HOT-97” shooting. While James “Lil’ Cease” Lloyd testified for the prosecution, free of any and all charges, Butler would refuse to testify and be found guilty of gun possession (after he was initially implicated in the actual shooting by a James Cruz, although Butler was never convicted of any shooting). The shooting in question occurred in 2001, but no weapons were found, as Butler’s Life After Death: The Movie—Ten Years Later attests; then suddenly he and Lil’ Kim were indicted in 2003 with the cooperation of “Banger” (in addition to Lil’ Cease, not to mention James Cruz), who would escape indictment and incarceration via cooperation with the pressuring state that could make use of “informants” (whether or not the information obtained is accurate, honest, etc.), thanks to legal and other matters completely external to this particular case or series of events. In corporate media coverage, however, the centrality of state violence, coercion, extortion, or the threat of state violence to the securing of indictments, informants and incarcerations is never explored or entertained; and this is especially telling in stories or scenarios in which (non-state) “violence” is supposed to be the hot-topical issue at hand. 15. Also, Malcolm X was fond of this adage, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” a statement recycled by Lil’ Kim of The Naked Truth as well. 16. On a track from Ms. G.O.A.T. (2007), “It Ain’t My Fault” featuring Sha, Lil’ Kim rhymes (before shouting out New York, New York): “And I always tell tha truth, even when I’m in court.” On another track, she says you can’t lie to a liar: “I reverse that shit.” 17. See DJ Cloak’s “WRBG: Revolutionary but Gangsta . . . on the Radio with dead prez” (2004) in PROUD FLESH 3. 18. Comically, Vanessa Juarez is onto something when she pens “Lil’ Kim vs. Kim Jong Il” (2006) for Entertainment Weekly magazine: “Last week, photographers spotted 4’11” raptress Lil’ Kim living it up after her July 3 release from prison. Meanwhile her wee namesake, 5’3” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, made headlines by test-firing missiles on July 4. Which Kim is more notorious? You decide . . .” (13). A list of comparative credentials and photos follow in two columns compiling characteristics of infamy as perceived in North America. Awaiting further verbal or nonverbal attack after the hanging of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Kim Jong Il would promise the United States that it has no monopoly on preemptive military strikes, nuclear or non-nuclear, a proclamation as symbolic as his test-firing of long-range missiles on “Independence Day.” Will the federal outlaw Lil’ Kim go on to rap her notoriousness in new, Kim Jong Il-affiliated ways? 19. See “How They Found National Geographic’s ‘Afghan Girl’ ” by David Braun (from March 2002 and 2003) at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/03/0311_ 020312_sharbat.html. 20. See Alexei Hay’s comments in the “Contributors” section of “The Negritude Issue,” One World 7:6 (December/January 2003, 18). 21. In a different spin on fashion, Leslie Feinberg’s Transgendered Warriors (1996) focuses on Joan of Arc’s peasant class and cultural background with its commitment to non-patriarchal values that the European aristocracy and the Catholic Church



212

213

considered “pagan” and, therefore, the very basis of her cross-dressing “heresy” (Feinberg 1996, 31–37). 22. A translation of Kimpa Vita’s version of “The Salve Regina (Hail, Holy Queen)” prayer is available in Thornton’s account of Dona Beatriz or Kimpa Vita as “The Kongolese Saint Anthony.” In part, it reads: “St. Anthony holds the keys to Heaven. St. Anthony is above the Angels and the Virgin Mary. St. Anthony is the second God . . .” (216). 23. Thanks to my good friend El Hadji Moustapha Diop for this vital piece of information: Samba Gadjigo’s Ousmane Sembene: Une Conscience Africaine (2007, 100–101) is a historical source of reference.



NOTES




“5 Questions for: Lil’ Kim.” 2003. Ebony (October): 22. Abodunrin, Femi. 1996. Blackness—Culture Ideology and Discourse. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth African Studies. Abu-Jamal, Mumia. 2004. We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party. Boston: South End Press. Achebe, Nwando. 2005. Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900–1960. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Adisa, Opal Palmer. 2006. Eros Muse: Poems & Essays. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Aidi, Hisham. 2001. “Hip Hop of the Gods.” Africana.Com (Gateway to the Black World): http://www.africana.com/articles/daily/index_20010427.asp (accessed April 27, 2001). Akil. 1993. From Niggas to Gods. Atlanta, GA: Nia Communications. Allah, Dasun and Joshua Fahiym Ratcliffe. 2004. “Ear to the Street: Law and Disorder.” The Source (June): 41–46. Alvarez, Gabriel, Dave Bry, Jermaine Hall, Bonsu Thompson, and Elliot Wilson. 2004. “So Sexy: XXL’s 69 Freek-a-Leek-iest Rap Songs.” XXL (July): 88–98. Amadiume, Ifi. 1985. Passion Waves. London: Karnak House. ———. 1987a. African Matriarchal Foundations: The Case of Igbo Societies. London: Karnak House. ———. 1987b. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books. ———. 1995. Ecstasy. Lagos: Longman Nigerian. ———. 1997. Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, & Culture. London and New York: Zed Books. ———. 2000. Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women Struggle for Culture, Power & Democracy. London: Zed Books. ———. 2003. “Prophecy, Authenticity, Oppositional Models: Writers and Politics in Africa.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3 (Fall): 5–26. ———. 2006. Circles of Love. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ———. 2007. Voices Draped in Black. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Angelou, Maya. 1978. And Still I Rise. New York: Random House. Armah, Ayi Kwei. 2006. The Eloquence of the Scribes: A Memoir on the Sources and Resources of African Literature. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh (African Publishing Cooperative). Arogundade, Ben. 2000. Black Beauty: A History and a Celebration. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Bâ, Amadou Hampâté. 1981. “The Living Tradition.” The General History of Africa: Methodology and African Pre-History, Vol. 1. Ed. Joseph Ki-Zerbo. Berkeley, CA: University of California and UNESCO: 166–206.



Works Cited

WORKS CITED

Badu, Erykah. 2000. Mama’s Gun. Motown Records. Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1993. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2008. Betrayed: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era. New York: Columbia University Press. Bambaataa, Afrika. 2003. “The Foundation (as Told to Kimberly Burgess).” Vibe (September): 130. Bambaataa, Afrika and the Millenium of the Gods. 2004. Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light. Tommy Boy Records. Bambara, Toni Cade. 1970. “On the Issue of Roles.” The Black Woman: An Anthology. Ed. Toni Cade Bambara. New York: Mentor: 101–110. ———. 1993. “Interview conducted by Claudia Tate.” Black Women Writers at Work. Ed. Claudia Tate. New York: Continuum Books: 12–38. Banjoko, Adisa. 2004. “Afrika Bambaataa: A Beautiful Mind.” AllHipHop.Com (October): http://www.allhiphop.com/features/index.asp?ID=935 (accessed October 15, 2001). Baraka, Amiri (Jones, LeRoi). 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. William Morrow. ———. 1968. “The Changing Same: R&B and New Black Music.” Black Music. New York: William Morrow: 180–212. ———. 1969. Black Magic: Poetry, 1961–1967. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs Merrill. Barnett, Amy DuBois. 2003. “Queen Bee Is Back: The Queen Bee and the Head Honey Talk Straight about Money, Power, Respect.” HONEY (April): 83–87. Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick. 2004. “The Vodou Lwa.” The Descent of the Lwa (Journey through Haitian Folklore): The Works of Hërza Barjon. Ed. Babacar M’Bow and Claudine Michel. Santa Barbara, CA: Center for Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara: 12. Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bialczak, Mark. 2004. “7 Questions for Lil’ Kim.” The Post-Standard STARS (Sunday, November 7): 2. Bin Wahad, Dhoruba, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur. 1993. Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries. Ed. Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, and Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e). Birchmeier, Jason. n.d. Review of Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core. All Music Guide: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:gxfqxqehld6e~T1 (accessed October 15, 2008). Blackman, Inge. 1993. Ragga Gyal D’bout. Blackman Vision. Bobbito. 2003. “Bobbito Plays the Tracks. Lil’ Kim States the Facts” Vibe (August): 68. Boggs, James. 1970. Racism and the Class Struggle. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Bogus, SDiane. 1992. “The ‘Queen B’ Figure in Black Literature.” Lesbian Texts and Contexts. Ed. Karla Jay. New York: New York University Press. Boyd, Todd. 1997. Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the ’Hood and Beyond. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2003. The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop. New York: New York University Press. Boyd, Valerie. 2003. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney: Scribner. Brown, Elaine. 1969. Seize the Time. Hollywood, CA: Vault. ———. 1992. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Anchor Books.



216

217

———. 2002. The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Brown, Fahamisha. 1999. Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Brown, Jamie Foster. 1999. “Lil’ Kim: Rap’s Hard-Core Queen Bee Is Back in S2S with One of Her Best Interviews, Ever!” Sister 2 Sister (August): 38–55. Butler, Judith. 1993. “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary.” Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge: 57–91. Butler, Paul. 1995. “Racially based Jury Nullification: Black Power in the Criminal Justice System.” Yale Law Journal 105: 677–725. Caramanica, Jon. 2002. “Lil’ & Loud: Raunchy Rapper and Film Star Is Four Feet, 11 Inches of Trouble.” Maxim (May): 133–138. Césaire, Aimé. 1992. “Interview with Aimé Césaire.” Conducted and Translated by Marie-Line Sephocle. Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Ed. Mbye Cham. Trenton, NJ: African World Press. Cham, Mbye. 2004. “Film and History in Africa: A Critical Survey of Current Trends and Tendencies.” Focus on African Films. Ed. Françoise Pfaff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 48–68. Charnas, Dan. 2007. “ ‘Naked Truth’: Lil’ Kim, More Than Skin Deep.” The Washington Post (Wednesday, September 28): C01. Chase-Riboud, Barbara. 2003. Hottentot Venus: A Novel. New York: Doubleday. Chinosole. 2001. The African Diaspora & Autobiographics: Skeins of Self and Skin. New York: Peter Lang. Chinweizu. 1978. The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite. New York: NOK, International. Chuck D (with Yusuf Jaw). 1998. Fight the Power: Rap, Race and Reality. New York: Delta. Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall (Eds.). 1990. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. Boston: South End Press. Clarke, Cheryl. 2005a. “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N J, and London: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2005b. The Days of Good Looks: The Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980–2005. New York: Carroll and Graf. Cohodas, Nadine. 2004. Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington. New York: Pantheon Books. Cole, Bethan. 2000. “The Big Lil: She’s Come a Long Way, This Baby.” i-D 196 (April): 148–156. Conway. Rondell. 2005. “Lil’ Kim: The Naked Truth” (Review). Vibe (December): 210. Cooper, Carolyn. [1993] 1995. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1995. “ ‘Lyrical Gun’: Metaphor and Role Play in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Massachusetts Review 35, 3&4: 429–447. ———. 2000. “Lady Saw Cuts Loose: Female Fertility Rituals in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Dancing in the Millenium: Conference Proceedings. Compiled by Juliette Crone-Willis. Washington, DC: Society of Dance History Scholars, July. ———. 2002. “Hip-Hopping across Cultures: Crossing over from Reggae to Rap and Back.” Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Ed. Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards. Kingston: Ian Randle and Oxford: James Currey: 265–280. ———. 2004. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



WORKS CITED

WORKS CITED

Cooper, Carolyn. 2007. “Erotic Maroonage: Embodying Emancipation in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Unpublished paper from the Ninth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University (November 1–3), available online (http://www.yale.edu/glc/belisario/Cooper.pdf [accessed October 15, 2008]): 1–12. Cortez, Jayne. 1969. Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares. New York: Bola Press. ———. 1973. Scarifications. New York: Phrase Text. ———. 1982. Firespitter. New York: Bola Press. ———. 1984. Coagulations: New and Selected Poems. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. ———. 1996. Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere. New York: Serpent’s Tail. ———. 2002. Jazz Fan Looks Back. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press. Cortez, Jayne and The Firespitters. 1996. Taking the Blues Back Home. Polygram Records. Cress Welsing, Frances. 1991. The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors. Chicago, IL: Third World Press. Dadié, Bernard. 1969. Béatrice du Congo. Paris: Présence Africaine. d’Almeida, Irene Assiba. 1994. Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Davey, D. 2007. “Snitching Is Big Business.” David D’s Hip-Hop Blog: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=15116190&blogID=25674058 1&MyToken=1353736f-0428–4064-adec-41e87c56da9a (accessed October 15, 2008). Davis, Angela Y. 1975 [1998]. “Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape.” The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Ed. Joy James. Oxford: Blackwell: 149–160. ———. 1993. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories. Davis, Robb Leigh. 2003. “Livin Good with Lil’ Kim: Hip-Hop’s Queen Bee Puts Some Bling in Your Spring.” Next 10.44 (May 9): 12–13. Dawson, Imani. 2004. “Hair Wars.” Vibe (February): 97. Dikobe, Maude. 2003a. “Calypso Rose: The Grand Dame of Calypso.” The Diaspora: African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley (Spring): 3–4. ———. 2003b. “Doing She Own Thing”: Gender, Performance, and Subversion in Calypso. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley: Department of African American Studies. Diop, Boubacar Boris. 1990. Les tambours de la mémoire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1977. The Genetic Kinship of Pharaonic Egyptian and Negro-African Languages. Dakar: Ifan/NEA. ———. [1960] 1987. Pre-colonial Black Africa. Translated by Harold J. Salemson. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. ———. [1959] 1989. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Matriarchy and Patriarchy in Classical Antiquity. London: Karnak House. Douglas, Marcia. 2005. Notes from a Writers Book of Cures and Spells. London: Peepal Tree Press. Dre, A.L. 2004. “Major Figures: Afrika Bambaataa.” The Ave Magazine 5: 70. Dumas, Henry. 1970. Ark of Bones and Other Stories. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Echewa, T. Obinkaram Echewa. 1992. I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. New York: E.P. Dutton. Edwards, Gary and John Mason. 1985. Black Gods: Òrìsà Studies in the New World. Brooklyn, NY: Yoruba Theological Archministry. Elliot, Missy “Misdemeanor.” 1997. Supa Dupa Fly. East/West Records.



218

219

Fanon, Frantz. [1961] 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Originally published as Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero). ———. [1959] 1965. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Monthly Review. Originally published as L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: François Maspero). ———. [1952] 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Originally published as Peau noire, masque blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil). ———. [1964] 1988. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. Originally published as Pour la révolution africaine: écrits politiques. (Paris: François Maspero). Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgendered Warriors. Boston: Beacon Press. Ford, Ryan. 2003. “Fast Talk: Georgie Porgie’s X Girl Sheds Lyte on Everything from Slick Rick to Sex.” The Source: The Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture & Politics 164 (May): 84–85. Foster, Saptosa. 2004. “Bridging the Gap.” The Ave Magazine: 48–50. Freud, Sigmund. 2000 [1905]. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Fricke, Jim and Charlie Ahearn (Eds.). 2002. Yes, Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project’s Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade. New York: De Capo Press. Gadjigo, Samba. 2007. Ousmane Sembene: Une Conscience Africaine. Paris: Homnispheres. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Gerima, Haile. 1989. “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys and Dinknesh vs. Lucy.” Questions of Third Cinema. Ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willeman. London: BFI : 65–89. Giovanni, Nikki. 1970. Re: Creation. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press. Goines, Donald. 1973. Black Girl Lost. Los Angeles, CA: Holloway House. Goldman, Vivien. 2003. “The Rascal Republic Takes on the World.” Black President: The Art & Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Ed. Trevor Schoonmaker. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art: 16–25. Gonzales, Michael A. 1997. “Mack Divas: Foxy Brown and Lil’ Kim.” The Source (February): 62–67. Gordon, Lewis R. 1998. “The Problem of Biography in the Study of the Thought of Black Intellectuals.” Small Axe 4 (September): 47–63. Green, Tony. 2004. “The Learning Curve.” Vibe (February): 92–97. Grunitzsky, Claude. 2005. “The Prophet” (A Feature Article and Interview with Lauryn Hill). Trace 57 (July/August): 92–101. Hampton, Fred, Jr. 2006. “We Respect No Colonial Borders” (Interview). Workers World (April 1): http://www.workers.org/2006/us/hampton-0406/index.html (accessed October 15, 2008). ———. 2007. “PROUD FLESH Inter/Views: Fred Hampton, Jr.” PROUD FLESH 5. Harris, Michael “Ice Blue.” 2005. “Lil’ Kim: Naked Truth” (Review). The Source (October): 117–118. Hazzard-Donald, Katrina. 1996. “Dance in Hip-Hop Culture.” Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture. Ed. William Eric Perkins. Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 220–235. Henderson, Stephen. 1973. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow. Herskovits, Melville J. 1958. Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.



WORKS CITED

WORKS CITED

Himes, Chester. 1973. Black on Black: Baby Sister and Selected Writings. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. [1969] 1989. Blind Man with a Pistol. New York: Vintage Books. Holt, Lydia. 2003. “Pussy!” Fierce 1:1: 7. hooks, bell. 1994. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1997. “Hardcore Honeys: bell hooks Goes on the Down Low with Lil’ Kim.” Paper (April): 66–70. Hope, Clover. 2008. “New World Order.” Giant 22 (February–March): 90–97. Hope, Donna P. 2006. Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Hopkinson, Natalie and Natalie Y. Moore. 2006. Deconstructing Tyrone. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press. Horton-Stallings, LaMonda. 2001. A Revision on the Narrative of the Trickster Trope in Black Culture for Alternative Readings of Gender and Sexuality (Written by Herself). Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University: Department of English. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1942. Dust Tracks on a Road. Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott. ———. [1934] 1981. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Ed. Toni Cade Bambara. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island: 49–68. Ibrahima, Baba Kake. 1976. Dona Béatrice: La Jeanne d’Arc congolaise. Paris/Dakar/ Abidjan: ABC/NEA. Irigaray, Luce. 1974. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Originally published as Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit). ———. [1977] 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Originally published as Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit). Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. Jones, Gayl. 1991. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Juarez, Vanessa. 2006. “Lil’ Kim vs. Kim Jong Il.” Entertainment Weekly 887 (July 21): 13. Junior M.A.F.I.A. 1995. Conspiracy. Undeas/Big Beat/Atlantic Records. Kay, Jackie. 1997. Bessie Smith. Bath, UK: Absolute Press. Keyes, Cheryl. 2004. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. King, Aliya S. 2003. “Revolutions: Review of Erykah Badu’s Worldwide Underground.” Vibe (November): 147–148. Kool Mo Dee. 2003. There’s a God on the Mic: The True 50 Greatest MCs. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Kristeva, Julia. [1969] 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. [1974] 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press. LaChapelle, David. 1995. Rize. Lionsgate Films. ———. 1999. Hotel LaChapelle: Photographs by David LaChapelle. Boston, New York, and London: Bulfinch Press. Liking, Werewere. [1983] 2000. It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral and Love-across-a-HundredLives. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.



220

221

“Lil’ Kim—Photographed by David LaChapelle—New York, May 1999.” 2004. Rolling Stone (September 30): 95. Lil’ Kim. 1996. Hard Core. Undeas/Big Beat/Atlantic Records. ———. 2000. The Notorious K.I.M. Atlantic/Undeas/Queen Bee Records. ———. 2003. La Bella Mafia. Atlantic/B.I.G. Entertainment/Queen Bee Records. ———. 2005. The Naked Truth. Atlantic/B.I.G. Entertainment/Queen Bee Records. ———. 2007. Ms.G.A.T. Queen Bee Records/Money Maker Company. Lisberg, Adam. 2007. “He Won’t Go to the Poky, and He Soon May Be in the Money.” NY Daily News (July 3): 4. Lorde, Audre. 1978. The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1982. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. ———. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. ———. 1986. Our Dead Behind Us. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1993. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Light. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. [1991] 2004. “Above the Wind.” Conversations with Audre Lorde. Ed. Joan Wylie Hall. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press: 184–200. Madden, Annette. 2000. In Her Footsteps: 101 Remarkable Black Women from the Queen of Sheba to Queen Latifah. New York: Gramercy Books. Maiya, April. 2007. Life After Death: The Movie—Ten Years Later. Spire Candidate. Malone, Bonz. 2003. Hip-Hop Immortals: The Remix. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press. Mambety, Djibril Diop. 1999. La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil/The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun. California Newsreel. Marrero, Letisha. 2004. “Standing Firm.” The Source (January): 86–87. Marriot, Robert. 2000. “Blowin’ Up.” Vibe (June/July): 124–132. Marshall, Paule. 1983. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Plume. Mataka, Laini. 1988. Never as Strangers. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. ———. 1994. Restoring the Queen. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. Mbemba Dia Benazo-Mbanzul, Rudy. 2002. Le procès de Kimpa Vita: La Jeanne d’Arc congolaise. Paris: L’Harmattan. McDonnell, Eveyln. 2008. “Getting Spiritualized with Neo-Soul’s Boho Big Mama.” Interview (May): 32–33. McDowell, Deborah. 1985. The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism and Theory. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. McGee, Sherri A. 2003. “Rhapsody in Badu: Riffs on Life from a Native Songwriter.” Heart & Soul 10: 8 (October): 66–71. McIver, Joel. 2002. Erykah Badu: The First Lady of Neo-Soul. London: Sanctuary. Meadows-Ingram, Benjamin. 2003. “Props: King of New York.” Vibe (April): 186. Meek, James Gordon. 2007. “Bush Commutes Libby’s ‘Excessive’ 30-Month Term.” NY Daily News (July 3): 4. Mercer, Paul. 1954. “The Fon of Dahomey.” African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples. Ed. Darryl Forde. London: Oxford University Press: 210–234. Moore, Carlos. 1982. Fela Fela: This Bitch of a Life. London: Allison & Busby. moore, jessica Care. 1997. The Words Don’t Fit in My Mouth. Brooklyn: Moore Black Press. ———. 2002. The Alphabet Verses The Ghetto. New York, Detroit, and Atlanta: Moore Black Press. ———. Forthcoming. The Poetry of Emcees: A Comprehensive Anthology of Hip-Hop Generation Writers Known to Rock the Pen. New York, Detroit, and Atlanta: Moore Black Press.



WORKS CITED

WORKS CITED

Morales, Robert. 1998. “The Vibe Q: Toni Morrison.” Vibe (May): 94–98. Morgan, Joan. 2005. “From a Different Place: The Notorious K.I.M. Lets the Sex Boasts Go and Spits from Gut.” The Village Voice (November 1): http://www.villagevoice. com/music/0544,196664,69741,22.html (accessed November 1, 2005). Mugo, Micere Githae. 1987. “Towards a Definition of African Orature Aesthetics.” Third World Book Review 2:3: 39–40. ———. 1998. “Women and Books.” Mapping Intersections: African Literature & Africa’s Development. Ed. Anne V. Adams and Janis A. Mayes. Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press: 51–60. Murphy, Keith. 2003. “Killer Bee: After a Three-Year Break from the Game, Lil’ Kim Is Back—And She’s Deadlier than Ever.” King (May/June): 84–90. Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien. 2001. “From Legba to Papa LaBas: New World Metaphysical Self/Re-Fashioning in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.” The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 350–366. Nas. 2004. Street’s Disciple. Columbia Records/Sony BMG Music Entertainment. Neimark, Philip John. 1993. The Way of the Orisa: Empowering Your Life through the Ancient African Religion of Ifa. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. Newton, Huey P. 1971 [2002]. “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community: April 17, 1971.” The Huey P. Newton Reader. Ed. David Hilliard and Donald Wise. New York: Seven Stories Press: 200–208. ———. 1974 [2002]. “Eve, the Mother of All Living.” The Huey P. Newton Reader. Ed. David Hilliard and Donald Wise. New York: Seven Stories Press: 313–316. ———. 1974 [2002]. “The Mind Is Flesh.” The Huey P. Newton Reader. Ed. David Hilliard and Donald Wise. New York: Seven Stories Press: 317–330. ———. [1972] 1995. To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton. New York and London: Writers and Readers. Nightjohn (Arnett Kale Powell and Adebayo Alabi Olorunto). 2005. The Hiphop Driven Life: A Genius Liberation Handbook. Baltimore, MD: African World Press. Noble, Denise. 2000. “Ragga Music: Dis/Respecting Black Women and Dis/Reputable Sexualities.” Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. Ed. Barnor Hesse. London and New York: Zed Books: 148–169. Nzegwu, Nkiru. 2005. “Iyoba Idia: Mother of the Nation and the Hidden Oba of Benin.” Benin: A Kingdom in Bronze. Ed. Babacar M’Bow and Osemwegie Ebohon. Fort Lauderdale, FL: Broward County Library Division/Benin City, Nigeria: Ebohon Cultural Center: 34–68. Ogundipe, Ayodele. 1978. “Esu Elegbara, The Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty: A Study in Yoruba Mythology.” Ph.D. dissertation. Indiana University. Ogunnaike, Lola. 2006. “Big House Didn’t Break Lil’ Kim, Rap Diva.” The New York Times (August 31): E1, E7. Okonjo, Kamene. 1976. “The Dual Sex System in Political Operation: Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria.” Women in Africa: Social and Economic Change. Ed. Nancy Hafkin and Edna G. Bay. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 45–58. Okpewho, Isidore. 1985. The Heritage of Africa Poetry: An Anthology of Oral and Written Poetry. London: Longman. Oyewole, Abiodun and Umar Bin Hassan (with Kim Green). 1996. On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of the Last Poets. New York: Henry Holt.



222

223

Oyêwùmí, Oyèrónké. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Paniccioli, Ernie. 2004. Who Shot Ya? Three Decades of Hiphop Photography. New York: Amistad. Patrick, Ryan. 2005. “Lil’ Kim’s Naked Truth.” Pride: Canada’s Leading African Canada and Caribbean Magazine (October 5–11): 16. Pelton, Robert D. 1980. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Pendleton, Tonya. 1999. “When and Where I Enter: The Lil’ Kim Story (by Kim Jones as told to . . . ).” Honey 1 (Spring): 52–58. Perkins, William Eric (Ed.). 1996. Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Perry, Imani. 1995. “Toasts, Jam and Libation: How We Place Malcolm X in the Folk Tradition.” Teaching Malcolm X. Ed. Theresa Perry. New York and London: Routledge. Petty, Sheila (Ed.). 1996. A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Pfaff, Françoise. 1984. The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, A Pioneer of African Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———. 1997. “Sarraounia: An Epic of Resistance—Interview with Med Hondo.” With Open Eyes: Women and African Cinema. Ed. Kenneth W. Harrow. Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Editions Rodopi: 151–158. Ratcliffe, Joshua “Fahiym.” 2005. “The Great Escape.” The Source (October): 96–101. Redden, Jim. 2000. Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State. Venice, CA: Feral House. Reich, Wilhelm. [1933] 1971. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. [1936] 1971. Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-regulating Character Structure. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. [1948] 1973. The Cancer Biopathy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reid, Victor Stafford. 1983. Nanny Town. Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House. Rickford, John Russell and Russell John Rickford. 2000. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Rodney, Walter. 1990. Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Rolling Stone (September 30, 2004): “The Photographs: The Fifty Greatest Portraits and the Stories Behind Them—A Special Issue.” Roper, Randy and Eric Perrin. 2006. “Microphone Freaks: The Freakiest Artists of All Time.” Ozone 52 (December): 64. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. New York and Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Rotter, Jeffrey. 2003. “Queen Mutha: She Came from the Heart of Brooklyn and Ascended the Throne of Hip-Hop. Bow and Scrape, Playas, It’s Lil’ Kim.” Nylon (June/July): 92–97. Rudi, M., 2003. “Lil’ Kim Jumps Back with La Bella Mafia.” Black Beat (August): 16–19. Rux, Carl Hancock. 2001. “The Girl with Balls.” Manhattan FILE 4:10: 62–66. Sales, William W., Jr. 1994. From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Boston: South End Press. Sanchez, Sonia. 1970. “there are blk/puritans.” We a BaddDDD People. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press. ———. [1969] 1986. “Memorial.” Generations: Selected Poetry, 1969–1985. London: Karnak House: 11.



WORKS CITED

WORKS CITED

Sanchez, Sonia. 1999. Like the Singing Coming off the Drums. Boston: Beacon Press. Sarko, Anita. 1999. “A Big Ol’ Music Story: Starring Lil’ Kim.” Interview (November): 122–126. Saxon, Shani. 1997. “Feelin’ Bitchy: Millie Jackson, The Queen of Raunch, Meets Her Lady-in-Waiting, Lil’ Kim.” Vibe (February): 78–79. Schwarz-Bart, Simone (with Andrée Schwarz-Bart). 2001. In Praise of Black Women. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Originally published as Hommage à la femme noire (Belgium: Edition Consulaires, 1988). Scott, David. 2000. “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” Small Axe 8 (September): 119–207. Sembène, Ousmane. 1963/1966. Borom Sarret/La Noire de . . . (Black Girl). New Yorker Films. ———. 1974. Xala (The Curse). New Yorker Films. ———. 1977. Ceddo. New Yorker Films. ———. 1992. Guelwaar. New Yorker Films. ———. 2000. Faat Kiné. New Yorker Films. ———. 2004. Mooladé. New Yorker Films. Shakur, Assata. 1987. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. ———. 1998a. “Assata Shakur Speaks (Letter to the Pope).” Rap Pages 7:5 (May): 44. ———. 1998b. “A Message to My Sistas.” http://assatashakur.org/sistas.htm (accessed October 15, 2008). ———. 1998c. “An Open Letter from Assata Shakur.” ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN / Afrikan Frontline News Service (March 31): http://afrocubaweb.com/assata2.htm (accessed October 15, 2008). ———. 1998d. “Thoughts on Cuba, Black Liberation, and Hip-Hop Today” (as told to Cristina Veran). The Source: The Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture & Politics (January): 136. Shange, Ntozake. 1982. Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. New York: Picador. Sharaf, Myron. 1983. Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. 1997. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2007. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip-Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York University Press. Sisk, Richard, and Kenneth R. Bazinet. 2007. “Move ‘Corrupt’ or Correct? It Depends on Who You Ask.” NY Daily News (July 3): 4. Smiterman, Geneva. [1994] 2000. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Somerville, Siohban. 2000. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Soyinka, Wole. 1989. Ake: The Years of Childhood. New York: Vintage. Spears, Arthur K. 1998. “African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscenity.” African-American English: Structure, History and Use. Ed. Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh. London and New York: Routledge: 226–250. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. Springer, Eintou Pearl. 2005. “Attibon Legba.” Loving the Skin I’m In. San Juan: Lexicon Trinidad: 78–80.



224

225

Stallings, L.H. 2001. “Using the African-American Oral Tradition to Rid America of Traditional Language Taboos.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 3:2 (April): 14–27. ———. 2007. Mutha Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Tadjo, Véronique. 2002. If I Were a King, If I Were a Queen. London: Milet. Tannenbaum, Rob. 2000. “Diva, Inc.: Lil’ Kim, the Hell Kitten of Hip-Hop, Parlays Her Wild Style into a New Record, a Web Site, and a Hot New Line of Clothes.” Harper’s Bazaar (April): 196–197. ———. 2003. “Who Does Lil’ Kim Think She Is?” Blender (May): 156. Teish, Luisah. 1994. Carnival of the Spirit: Seasonal Celebrations and Rites of Passage. New York: Harper Collins. Thompson, Bonsu. 2004. “Let’s Get Serious.” XXL Presents Hip-Hop Soul (Spring): 48–53. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1976. Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1984. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1993. Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas. Prestel, Munich: Museum for African Art, New York. Thornton, Big Mama. [1953] 1995. “Hound Dog.” Ball N’ Chain. Arhoolie Productions. Thornton, John K. 1998. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. T’Shaka, Oba. Return to the African Mother Principle of Male and Female Equality. Oakland, CA: Pan Afrikan, 1995. Van Allen, Judith. 1976. “ ‘Aba Riots’ or Igbo ‘Women’s War’: Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women.” Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change. Ed. Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 59–85. Van Deburg, William L. 1993. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Sertima, Ivan. 1989. “Trickster, the Revolutionary Hero.” Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African American Storytelling. Ed. Linda Goss and Marian E. Barnes. New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone: 103–112. Various Artists. 1996. Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood: The Soundtrack. Island Records. Various Artists. 2002. Africa Raps. Trikont Records. Walker, Alice. 1981. “Nineteen Fifty-Five.” You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. New York: Harcourt: 3–20. Walker, Rebecca. 2003. “The Bluest Eye.” One World (December/January): 60–66. Walker, Robin. 2006. When We Ruled. London: Every Generation Media. Wall, Cheryl. 2005. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, Robert F. [1962] 1998 Negroes with Guns. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. ———. 2005. Self-Respect, Self-Defense, & Self-Determination. San Francisco, CA: Freedom Archives. Williams, Robert L. (Ed.). 1975. Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. St. Louis, MO: Institute of Black Studies. Williams, Sherley Anne. 1979. “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.” Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction. Ed. Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Steptoe. New York: MLA: 72–87.



WORKS CITED

WORKS CITED

Williams, Wendy. 2003. “Wendy’s World: Erykah Badu Takes Mind Games to a Cosmic Level.” Honey (October): 109. Williams, Wendy (with Karen Hunter) 2003. Wendy’s Got the Heat. New York: Atria Books. ———. 2004. The Wendy Williams Experience. New York: Dutton. Wynter, Sylvia. 1972. “One Love—Rhetoric or Reality?—Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism.” Caribbean Studies 12:3: 64–79. ———. 1976. “Ethno or Socio Poetics.” Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics 2: 78–94. ———. 1990. “After/Word—Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman.’ ” Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press: 355–372. ———. 1992a. “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Voices of the African Diaspora: The CAAS Research Review 8:2 (Fall): 13–16. ———. 1992b. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Toward a Deciphering Practice.” Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Ed. Mbye Cham. Trenton, NJ: African World Press: 237–279. ———. 2000. “Africa, the West, and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man.” Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory, and the Moving Image. Ed. June Givanni. London: BF I: 25–76. ———. 2003. “Un-settling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, after Man, Its Over-representation.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3 (Fall), “Special Issue: Coloniality’s Persistence.” Guest Editor Greg Thomas: 257–337. ———. 2006. “PROUD FLESH Inter/Views Sylvia Wynter.” PROUD FLESH 4. X, Malcolm. 1992. February 1965: The Final Speeches. New York: Pathfinder. ———. [1965] 1993. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Pathfinder Press.



226

Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 159, 169, 172, 173–4, 190 Achebe, Nwando, 55, 126 Adisa, Opal Palmer, 3 “African Cinema of Liberation,” 85–7, 106–9, 196 Aido Hwedo, 81 Amadiume, Ifi, 17, 33, 35–7, 38–40, 47–9, 52, 53, 54–6, 58, 78, 93, 100, 125, 128, 177–8, 200n2, 201n16, 201n17 Amina (or Aminatu), 127 Andall, Ella, 76, 111 Angelou, Maya, 191–2 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 29 Bâ, Amadou Hampâté, 29 Badu, Erykah, 61, 75, 87, 88–95, 99, 102–5, 107–9, 144, 193, 204n5, 204n7, 204n12, 206n19 Baker, Houston, 166 Baldwin, James, 150 Bambaataa, Afrika (and the Zulu Nation), 1, 6, 7, 18, 57–8, 62, 66, 83, 93, 107, 160, 191, 193, 195–6 Bambara, Toni Cade, 5, 73, 86, 107 Baraka, Amiri, 56, 85, 109 Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, 83 Bin Wahad, Dhoruba, 171, 173, 190 “bitchez,” 46–7, 50–1, 62–3, 68–70, 83, 96, 181–2, 200n11 Blackman, Inge, 142 Black Studies, 158 Blender (magazine), 57, 64, 123 Bloody Mary, 148–9 Blues, 3, 15, 18, 20, 43, 74–5, 76–8, 84, 108, 112 Boyce Davies, Carole, 130, 207n9

Brown, Elaine, 38, 44, 112–13, 125, 128, 202n10, 206n1 Brown, Sterling, 150 Bush, George W., 184–5 Butler, Judith, 207n2, 209n21 Calypso Rose, 130 castration, 25, 78–9, 114, 150 Césaire, Aimé, 57, 65 Cheney, “Dick,” 183–4 Chinosole, 193 Clarke, Cheryl, 3, 80, 108, 153, 206n18 Cleopatra, 22, 128, 207n7 clitoris, 21, 52, 67, 70, 115, 142, 145–6, 154–5, 200n13 Common, 61, 62–3, 69, 93, 94 “consciousness,” 12, 25, 29, 30, 33–4, 35, 42, 49, 51–2, 55, 56, 58, 85–109, 112, 136, 140, 158, 159–60, 190, 192 Cooper, Anna Julia, 103 Cooper, Carolyn, 58, 59, 61, 65, 76, 83–4, 134, 135, 154, 161, 166, 174, 176–7, 182, 190, 199n17, 211n9 Cortez, Jayne, 42–4, 46, 202n13 Countdown to Lockdown, 168–9 counter-insurgency, 2, 163, 167–8, 169–74, 179–81, 182, 183, 189–90, 193 Coup (The), 191 Cress Welsing, Frances, 134–5, 157, 209n22 “criticism,” 2, 37–8, 46, 68, 87, 97, 135–7, 145, 149, 153, 156–8, 166–7, 175–6, 190, 192–5 crossroads, 71–9, 111–12, 129, 131–2, 202n9, 202n13, 202n15



Index

INDEX

Dadié, Bernard, 186–8 Dancehall, 58–9, 74, 77, 82, 108, 142, 147, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 161, 174, 176, 178, 209n22 Davey, D., 169–70 Davis, Angela, 44, 54, 73 dead prez, 92, 93–4, 99, 156, 193, 212n17 “democracy,” 99–101 Digable Planets, 76, 140 Dikobe, Maude, 130, 207n8 Diop, Boubacar Boris, 186 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 17, 36, 38, 54, 58, 91, 100, 125 DJ Kool Herc, 1, 93, 107, 129 Dolemite, 74, 118 Dona Beatriz, see Kimpa Vita Douglas, Marcia, 71, 202n15 dual-sex system, 38–9, 41, 53, 90 Dumas, Henry, 74 “Ebonics,” 20, 51–2, 55, 68, 82, 178, 181–2 Eleni, 126 erotic maroonage, 135, 157–8, 163–90, 176–7, 178, 182, 190 Eshu-Elegba, 57–84, 90, 111–12, 125, 129–32, 136, 147, 149, 174, 181–2, 195, 201n8, 202n9, 202n10, 202n11, 202n13, 202n14, 203n13, 203n15, 208n7 Fanon, Frantz, 55–6, 73, 98, 150–1, 156, 161, 165, 174, 182–3, 186 fascism, 5, 159, 169, 174, 182 Fela, 91, 153, 208n13 female kings, 111–32 Five Percent Nation of Islam, 61, 63, 88 Flaunt (magazine), 186–8 flexible gender systems, 46–53, 56 folklore, 53, 59, 67, 69, 72–7, 82, 84, 150, 192, 201n9 Freud, Sigmund, 157 Gay and Lesbian Studies, 5, 134–5, 157–8 Genre (magazine), 144 Gerima, Haile, 107, 108, 178 Giddings, Paula, 103 Givens, Adele, 179, 211n12 Gordon, Lewis, 165–6 Grandmaster Flash, 1, 107, 129

Hampton, Fred, Jr., 156, 208n18 Hatshepsu(t), 125, 128 heresy, 14, 15, 28, 212n21 Herskovits, Melville, 71–2 Hill, Lauryn, 61, 103, 104–5, 176, 179, 192 Himes, Chester, 18, 133, 155–6, 197n6 “Hip-Hop Cops,” see counter-insurgency Holy Ghost, 62, 63, 81, 83, 109, 200n2 Hondo, Med, 107, 108, 205n16 Honey (magazine), 93–4, 99, 103, 105 hooks, bell, 35, 194 Hope, Donna, 211n9 humanism, 14–15, 17 Hurston, Zora Neale, 78, 120–1, 208n20 Idia N’Iyesigie, 127 Immortal Technique, 140, 169, 173 Irigaray, Luce, 142, 208n8 Jackson, George, 150–1, 163–4, 174 Jackson, Millie, 76–7, 179, 211n12 Jazz, 15, 74, 75, 91 Jeru The Damaja, 138, 140, 201n6 Joan of Arc, 186–8, 212n21 Johnson, Robert, 73–4, 77 Jones, Grace, 154 Junior M.A.F.I.A., 4, 12, 18, 21, 30, 68–70, 89, 97, 112, 115, 118, 119–20, 123–4, 137, 153, 166, 180, 181, 212n14 Conspiracy, 4, 24, 37, 63, 68–70, 89, 115, 139, 147, 149 Kandé, Fatou, 107 Keyes, Cheryl, 77, 194 Kimpa Vita, 187–8, 213n22 King (magazine), 130–2, 141 King Ahebi Ugbabe, 126–7 Kristeva, Julia, 19, 197n7 KRS-One (and the Temple of Hip-Hop), 18, 160, 194–5 LaChapelle, David, 152, 207n10, 208n12 Lady Saw, 58–9, 154 Les Nubians, 37 Libby, “Scooter,” 183–4 liberalism, 172–3, 194, 195 Liking, Werewere, 105–6, 204n14 Lil’ Kim (texts) “All about the Benjamins,” 139, 147



228

“All Hail tha Queen,” 43, 53, 208n17 “The Game’s in Trouble,” 161, 182 “Get Money,” 68–70, 119, 198n9, 200n15 “Gone Delirious,” 146 Hard Core, 4, 8, 11–31, 37, 82, 89, 115, 116, 118, 121, 124, 128, 135, 141, 164, 191 “Big Momma Thang,” 15–16, 24, 37, 46–7, 138, 153, 197n3 “Dreams,” 23, 24–5, 26, 138 “Drugs,” 20, 22 “Intro in A-Minor,” 15, 23 “No Time,” 20–1, 25, 138 “Not Tonight,” 22–3, 138, 153 “QUEEN B@#$H,” 22–3, 37, 51 “Spend a Little Doe,” 18, 25, 163 “We Don’t Need It,” 21, 25, 138 La Bella Mafia, 4, 8, 31, 42, 59, 70, 77, 78, 79, 83–4, 95, 96, 98, 111–32, 148, 164, 207n6 “Came Back for You,” 83–4, 121, 164–5 “Can’t F**k with Queen Bee,” 128, 207n4, 207n7 “Can You Hear Me Now?,” 42, 78, 184 “Get in Touch with Us,” 121, 139, 164–5, 212n13 “Heavenly Father,” 123–4, 200n8 “Hold It Now,” 70, 121, 184 “The Jump Off,” 37, 120 “Magic Stick,” 70, 135–6, 153 “Tha Beehive,” 70, 121, 124 “This Is a Warning,” 121, 139 “This Is Who I Am,” 59, 64, 121 “Lady Marmalade,” 135–6, 192–3 “Makes No Sense,” 40–1, 63, 81, 148 Ms. G.O.A.T., 4, 6, 18, 82, 128, 153, 191, 195, 208n14, 212n16 The Naked Truth, 4, 9, 112, 118, 159–90, 210n3, 211n8 “All Good,” 175, 180, 184, 188 “Durty,” 77, 167, 178, 181 “Gimme That,” 176, 182 “Last Day,” 174, 182, 183, 202n20 “Lighters Up,” 178–9 “Quiet,” 180 “Shut Up, B***h,” 98, 165 “Slippin,” 180 “Spell Check,” 180–2, 184 “Whoa,” 112, 165, 174, 181, 210n4

229

The Notorious K.I.M., 4, 8, 15, 24, 30, 33–56, 63, 96, 98, 101, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 128, 181 “Aunt Dot,” 67, 147–54, 155, 204n13 “Custom Made,” 140 “I’m Human,” 37, 184, 200n1 “Lil’ Drummer Boy,” 116–17, 164 “No Matter What They Say,” 70, 208n11 “Off the Wall,” 24, 47, 135 “QUEEN B@#$H II,” 121, 138–9 “Revolution,” 2, 6, 42, 44, 154 “Single Black Female,” 140 “Suck My D**k,” 46–53, 67, 70, 139, 141–2, 145, 147, 148, 149 “You Can’t Win,” 208n10 “Player’s Anthem,” 69, 119 “Rockin’,” 25–6, 138 “Time to Shine,” 63, 115–16 “Whatchu Workin Wit?,” 123, 146–7 “Will They Die 4 U?,” 145–6 “You Get Dealt With,” 145 linguistics, 12, 15–24, 39, 48, 49–52, 66–7, 74–5, 82, 84, 115, 181–2 Lorde, Audre, 41, 44–6, 79, 80–1, 200n6, 202n15 lyrical gun, 133–58 Magogodi, Kgafela oa, 196 Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 76, 164, 170 Mambety, Djibril Diop, 6–7, 196 Marley, Bob, 73, 105, 133–4, 140, 154, 157, 178, 195, 199 Maroons, 9, 73, 74, 128, 135, 157–8, 176–7, 178, 182 Marshall, Paule, 68, 133, 155 Marx, Karl, 150 “materialism,” 37–8, 120 matriarchy, 17, 33–56, 58, 93, 100, 101, 107, 178, 195 Mawu-Lisa, 71, 80, 81–2, 84, 90–1, 94, 204n5 McDowell, Deborah, 56 Medusa, 149 mic-naming, 4, 117, 120–1, 184, 207n5 “misovire,” 105–6, 107, 204n14 monarchy, 99–108, 111–32 moore, jessica Care, 144, 197n2 Morrison, Toni, 35, 77



INDEX

INDEX

Muhammad, Cedric, 172–3 multilingualism, 20, 81–2, 202n17 Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien, 80 Nas, 61, 75, 78 Neimark, John, 61, 67 Newton, Huey P., 2, 3, 113, 156, 201n15 “niggaz,” 50–1, 62–3, 68–70, 96, 150, 181–2, 200n11 Nightjohn (The Hiphop Driven Life), 11, 26–9 Noble, Denise, 142 Notorious B.I.G., 12, 22, 53, 68–70, 89, 112, 118, 119, 120–4, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147, 149, 150–1, 153, 166, 167, 175, 180–1, 207n5 Nzegwu, Nkiru, 54 Nzinga, 127–8 “obscenity” (so-called), 12, 13, 29, 45, 199n16 Ogun, 73, 136 Ogundipe, Ayodele, 59–61, 64, 65, 71 One World (magazine), 184–6, 212n20 orality, 11–31, 55–6, 108, 109, 129, 197n1 Oshun, 58–9, 61 Oya, 58 Oyêwùmí, Oyèrónké, 65–6, 100 Pelton, Robert D., 79 “phalluses,” 42–53, 59–72, 111–12, 130–2, 137–9, 140–2, 143–7, 155, 156, 181, 208n8, 209n21 photographs, 140–3, 152 polymorphous, 134–5, 155, 157, 158, 207n3 Pryor, Richard, 53 Public Enemy, 134, 140, 160–1, 171, 183 Puritanism, 11–13, 15, 19, 21, 28–30, 34–5, 41, 55, 56, 84, 89, 91, 95, 102, 105, 106, 108, 113, 136, 144, 149, 167, 176, 178, 183, 209n22, 211n9 Queen Bees, 3–5, 78 Queen Tiye, 125–6 Rainey, Ma, 77, 134 Ranks, Shabba, 133, 134, 156, 178, 211n9, 211n12

“Rap COINTELPRO,” see counter-insurgency Rapso, 74, 130, 207n9 Redman, 116–17, 210n1 Reggae, 15, 58–9, 74, 82, 108, 161, 174, 176 Reich, Wilhelm, 24, 159, 174, 198n13 Rickford, J., and R. Rickford (Spoken Soul), 74–7 RuPaul, 25, 70, 150, 181 Sanchez, Sonia, 11–12, 30, 108, 199n18, 208n16 Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 126, 127 Sembène, Ousmane, 85–7, 106–7, 108, 204n1, 204n2, 205n15, 205n17, 213n23 sexology, 24–6, 29 sex strikes, 39–41 sexually explicit female rapper, 37–8 sexually independent female rapper, 37–8 sexual poetic justice, 33–56, 58, 84, 136, 148, 153, 155, 163 sexual revolution, 2, 5–6, 7, 34, 42, 46, 56, 115, 191, 195–6 sexual self-determination, 38 Shakur, Assata, 169, 171, 173, 188, 190, 211n6 Shakur, Tupac, 34, 171, 184, 199n18 Signifying Monkey, 59–61, 67, 72–3, 74–5, 79, 80, 118, 201n9 Sister 2 Sister (magazine,), 147, 149 Smith, Bessie, 35, 77, 78, 133, 135, 155, 202n14 Smith, Clara, 78 Source (The) magazine, 98–9, 167–8, 175, 211n7 Soyinka, Wole, 33 Spears, Arthur K., 12 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 146 Springer, Eintou Pearl, 57, 73 Stallings, L.H., 67, 82, 192, 201n3, 202n12 Stephens, Tanya, 154, 178, 211n12 Tadjo, Véronique, 100–1, 105 telekinesis, 30 Thompson, Robert Farris, 57, 111–12, 129–30



230

triangular, cinema, 108 trickster, 18, 42, 59, 65, 67, 68, 71–2, 79–80, 83–4, 90–1, 111–12, 124, 144, 149, 181, 186, 192, 195, 201n3, 202n11 Tubman, Harriet, 144 Van Sertima, Ivan, 79–80 Vibe (magazine), 17–18, 35, 92, 117, 120–4 “violence,” 42–6, 47, 51, 87, 113, 116, 133–58, 159–90, 191, 195–6, 212n14

231

Washington, Dinah, 43, 44, 94, 166, 200n7, 204n7 Williams, Robert F., 92, 136, 208n6 Williams, Wendy, 93–4, 95–9, 102, 204n9 Women’s Studies, 5, 134–5, 157–8 Woodson, Carter G., 55, 104 Wynter, Sylvia, 13–15, 26–7, 109, 135, 159–60, 182–3, 199n15, 200n3, 204n3 X, Malcolm, 6, 11, 28, 51, 92, 121, 140, 157, 160, 161, 169, 180, 212n15 XXL (magazine), 102, 153, 208n15



INDEX

Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil' Kim's Lyricism

Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany

In the Flesh

In the Flesh

Flesh In the Furnace

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Not in the Flesh

In The Flesh

In the Flesh

Flesh In the Furnace

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Not In The Flesh

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

In the Flesh

In the Flesh

Not in the Flesh

Not in the Flesh

In the Flesh

Flesh In The Furnace

Not in the Flesh

In the Flesh

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Philosophy in the Flesh

In the Flesh

Hiphop Literacies

Pleasure in the Sand

Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil' Kim's Lyricism

Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany

In the Flesh

In the Flesh

Flesh In the Furnace

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Not in the Flesh

In The Flesh

In the Flesh

Flesh In the Furnace

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Not In The Flesh

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

In the Flesh

In the Flesh

Not in the Flesh

Not in the Flesh

In the Flesh

Flesh In The Furnace

Not in the Flesh

In the Flesh

In the Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Not In The Flesh

Philosophy in the Flesh

In the Flesh

Hiphop Literacies

Pleasure in the Sand

Recommend Documents