THE LAST SUMMER OF MY TWEENS—1987—I GOT MY HANDS ON a cassette of Too $hort’s Born to Mack and was titillated by the first rap songs I’d heard with profanity. Beyond the curse words, the way $hort spoke about women gobsmacked impressionable me. On “Freaky Tales,” he boasts of several salacious escapades. On “Dope Fiend Beat,” the album’s very next song, he begins with his now-signature epithet—a singsong Biiiiiiiiiitch!—delivers a preamble, and launches into his first verse: “Bitches on my mind / I can’t hold back, now’s the time / All you loudmouth bitches talk too much / And you dick-teasin’ bitches never fuck.”
My mom seized the tape but never trashed it, and I soon sleuthed it and began clandestine listening. Not only did use language to describe girls/women that had been verboten by my mother and sanctified great-grandmother—the two most important women in my life—its lyrics proffered a kind of manual the next year, an album that became the standard-bearer for gangster rap. On “Dopeman,” Ice Cube raps, “Strawberry, Strawberry is the neighborhood ho,” characterizing a woman who’d have sex for crack in the hood. While $hort and N.W.A were laying a foundation of patriarchy and misogyny and sexism, I was at least a decade from learning the meaning of any of those words, much less considering them with informed acuity.
