“Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks.” This Snoop Dogg lyric is perhaps emblematic of why hip hop hasn’t always had the best image when it comes to women. Ever since the inception of the genre and its rise to prominence in pop culture, it has been lambasted by critics for demeaning and sexualising women, alongside glorifying a nihilistic, dog-eat-dog, “gangsta” lifestyle. Feminist writers have long indicted rap music for justifying domestic violence by portraying women as untrustworthy gold diggers, as well as for its female hypersexualisation in order to titillate a male audience.
Which is why it’s intriguing that in the current instalment of the decade-long feud between rap artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar, the main point of contention isn’t the usual squabble over how many women they’ve slept with. Instead, the battle concerns who has mistreated and exploited women, leading to some particularly vicious allegations being thrown around.
Drake drew first blood in the latest round of hostilities with a three-part diss track titled “Family Matters”, calling Lamar a domestic abuser who “beat on your queen”. In “Meet the Grahams”, Lamar retaliates by attempting a psychological dissection of his rival composed through a set of letters addressed to members of Drake’s family. In a letter to Drake’s mother, Lamar calls him a “a sick man with sick habits”, comparing him to Harvey Weinstein who should “get fucked up in a cell for the rest of his life”, and says he “hates black women, hypersexualises ’em with kinks of a nympho fetish”. He goes even further in “Not Like Us”, explicitly calling Drake and his inner circle paedophiles who run a child-trafficking ring.
