Latto & Femininity In Hip-Hop (Article)
What up world. Sky Bento back once again on the check-in. Hope you & yours are doing well, drinking your water, brushing your teeth, protecting your energy and such. We at the midpoint of the Summer now. Smack dab in between Day Trills. It been 90’s all week. I still ain’t heard Summertime by Will Smith somehow (except when I clean the crib), but Brent Faiyaz came out the cut with one of the best albums of the year so it’s okay. Last week I wrote about toxicity in hip-hop, something I’d been thinking of a lot myself lately. Now with perfect timing, Latto has dropped her new video “PXSSY” and it’s already getting called a feminist anthem. Not the type of feminist anthem that people said “WAP” was, this joint is actually unabashedly coming at misogynist culture. “WAP” was collaborative, it was about the joys of having a vagina. “PXSSY” is about the POWER of having a vagina. So let’s dive right into it.
As always these are just my opinions and do not reflect the views of TDN as a staff, record label, or as a m************ crew. Feel free to crucify me on twitter @plzsaythebento after you read this.
As you can guess, that’s the video for Latto’s new record, “PXSSY”. Now let’s back it up a bit. This is a post Nicki Minaj AND Cardi B world we’re living in. And before anybody come at me, I mention both because while Nicki is the better rapper and more of an elite MC, Cardi B made female rap more accessible. So now, we live in an age where there’s a bunch of female rappers. And despite what you may have heard, they do not all sound the same and sell sex. Rico Nasty. Cupcakke. Tierra Whack. Noname. City Girls. Rapsody. Flo Milli. Coi Leray. Young M.A.. BIA. Lizzo. And of course, Dr.. I mean Doja Cat. Listen to what these rappers actually rap about. Outside of specific songs dedicated to sex, there really might just be a line or two about sex. The rest is usually full of flexes in other ways outside of more conceptual records like Rapsody provides. In short, bragging about p**** is just like bragging about d***. We all just bragging about f******. Braggaodocio is one of the hearts of rap music, literally being an established trope since the humble beginnings of the genre and culture in the Bronx.
Women have always been in on the action since the genesis. Roxanne Shante. MC Lyte. Salt-N-Pepa. MC Sha-Rock. Queen Latifah. JJ Fad. Sweet Tee. It goes on & on. It’s just that now, we live in the liberated age. With information being widespread because of the internet, everything is normalized and people are free to be themselves in whatever way they so choose. Hip-hop is the land of second chances. It became a way for victims of the system to turn their lives around for themselves and their families. As hip-hop progressed it became more all encompassing. Rappers became more vulnerable and through that more people from all walks of life picked up the craft for better or worse. So naturally when the Supreme Court pulls some b****** like banning abortion, a record has to come out in retaliation right? And just as “The Bigger Picture” could only come from an unexpected artist like Lil Baby, we get the Supreme Court diss record from none other than Latto. With Latto’s issues with a certain male rapper clearing a verse for her album, maybe she’s been waiting to get some of this off of her chest.
The interesting thing is how Latto flips the title. She uses it in the same insulting way men do to demean each other. She’s also using it as a symbol for feminine power. She points out how misogyny often comes from fragile masculinity. “Y’all the reason we make music teaching b***** how to use it,” she raps in the point blank second verse. The whole song is very in your face there’s really not too much to break down. But if I can bring it back to ““WAP” for a second, I remember Fox News was up in arms over the song like Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion came together over a bottle of Casamigos at 3:42 AM and developed a new type of atomic bomb. We gotta collectively stop the fake outrage over women selling sex in music. If you don’t want your children listening to it, cool go try not to let them. It’s everywhere you say? So is McDonald’s and you only gonna use that “we have food at home” excuse so many times. I’m not a parent and I’m not going to tell nobody how to be a parent. I just think Latto’s new song provides a lot of context that men don’t see when when we see female rappers rap about sex. It can be so easy to group all female rappers together if you’re not paying attention to anything besides their gender. It can be even easier to say they all rap about sex if you not actually listening to what they have to say.