I was reading this article on the World Wide Wed, thought I'd share :) Happy reading!
This article is a study of sex, politics and lyrical literature across what could be called
“Hip-Hop & Hip-Hop Soul.” It champions the concept “sexual consciousness”
against popular and academic assumptions that construe “sexuality” and
“consciousness” to be antithetical--in the tradition of “the mind/body split” of the
white bourgeois West. An alternative, radical articulation of consciousness with an
alternative, radical politics of gender and sexuality is located in the musical writings of
two contemporary “iconic” figures: Lil’ Kim of “Hip-Hop” and Erykah Badu of
“Neo-Soul.” Underscoring continuities between these author-figures, one of whom is
coded as an icon of “sexuality (without consciousness),” conventionally, and the other
as an icon of “consciousness (without sexuality),” I show how Black popular music is
a space where radical sexual identities and epistemic politics are innovated out of
vibrant African/Diasporic traditions.
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 7, March 2007
24
The reputed “Father of African Cinema,” Ousmane Sembène is perhaps ironically famous
for what we can call his sexual consciousness, a consciousness of the politics of sex or
gender and sexuality, in his radical productions of Black independent film. For example,
Mooladé (2004) is about resistance to female “circumcision” or “genital excision.”
Guelwaar (1992) treats the theme of prostitution in Dakar, portraying sex workers as
survivors of oppression and the colonized elite as “beggars” or prostitutes to neo-colonial
“aid.” Xala or The Curse (1974) is a parody of the Black pseudo-bourgeoisie middleclass
in which the father of “flag independence” is characterized as impotent in matters of
both sex and political economy. Thus, Toni Cade Bambara once stated, mocking male
chauvinism: “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 36). Analogously, sisters have worked a critical
“sexual consciousness” beyond the alleged “high art” of cinema in and for Black popular
culture, particularly in the art and culture of Hip-Hop.
Lyrically lauded by the likes of Toni Morrison and bell hooks, Lil’ Kim is most famous
or infamous for this sort of consciousness, which is oxymoronic under status-quo schools
of thought. The world of music constantly pits “sexuality” against “consciousness” in its
commentary, especially when Black music is the subject at hand; internationally, it
divides music with “positive,” “progressive” or “political” content from “sex-driven”
music which is, supposedly, “sensational,” “scandalous” and “slack.” This line of
thinking goes well beyond contemporary critics and consumers. For over five hundred
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” and “sensuality” as an enemy to
“rationality” or rationalism. The European oppression of most of the world’s peoples,
African people most of all, it continues to use this bi-polar world-view to advance a racist
empire that is every bit as much sexist, class-elitist and homophobic as it is racist or
white-supremacist. Consequently, social and music criticism claiming to be “positive”
“progressive” and “political” might want to separate itself from this Western tradition of
thought, lest its “positive,” “progressive” “politics” be no less identified with white racist
imperialism, sexism, elitism and homophobia. A radical sexual politics is in order, and
such a politics of consciousness is brilliantly showcased in and beyond The Notorious
K.I.M., a paradigm-shifter and “lyrical force to be reckoned with” according to Hip-Hop
Immortals: The Remix (Malone n.p.).
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 7, March 2007
25
A Senegalese Hip-Hop enthusiast himself, Sembène has produced other films which
resonate well with a practice of rap resounding elsewhere. Ceddo (1976) returns his
spectators to “the matriarchal era” as Africans struggle against invasion and conquest by
Islam: Princess Dior avenges her father’s death by killing the Imam aiming to usurp the
throne. Cool, calm and collected, she shoots him in the genitals. The title character of
Faat Kine (2000) is a more modern, middle-aged woman who achieves economic
independence and, hence, a freedom from a host of sexist sexual constraints. A single
mother of means, she and her girlfriends enjoy sexuality to the max, even affectionately
referring to each other as “salope,” which can be translated as “bitch” (or “slut”), as they
turn the tables on male privilege in general. These royal themes of sex, power,
matriarchy promoted by “Ousmane-the-Axe” are totally in sync with Lil’ Kim’s “Big
Momma/Queen Bitch” aesthetics of rhyme; and this provides a perfect introduction to a
productive comparison of her and other “Hip-Hop Queens” in the African Diaspora, most
notably Erykah Badu of “Hip-Hop Soul.”
Hip-Hop Queens: Baduizm à la The Notorious K.I.M.
Both Badu and Lil’ Kim emerge as break-out Black female artists from the mid-to-late
1990’s, authoring musical-cultural trends that simply did not exist prior to their
respective solo debuts, Hard Core (1996) and Baduizm (1997). If many might 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,
to boot. Finally, Badu’s willfully “gangsta” vibe on Worldwide Underground (2003)
seals the deal. The Brooklynite K.I.M. and “Southern Girl” Badu are in many ways more
than compatible. The same cannot actually be said of other artists who systematically
seek to imitate Lil’ Kim, stylistically, and superficially, such as Foxy Brown, Trina, Eve,
Remy Martin and Jackie-O as well as some older artists who have made themselves over
anew, erotically, such as Da Brat and Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot. Further, besides
nearly every other female rapper in her wake, even middle-class Black radio “shockjock”
Wendy Williams can be said to continue this imitative trend, ironically, in her
ghost-written or co-authored book, Wendy’s Got the Heat (2004). “Lil’ Kim,” a musical
icon of “sexuality,” and “Erykah Badu,” a musical icon of “consciousness,” can be shown
to have much in common lyrically, despite the preconceived images of the critical
establishment. When sexual consciousness is entertained, both easily emerge as queens
of consciousness and sex-radicalism, both, via Hip-Hop.
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 7, March 2007
26
In hindsight, Badu’s image was first cast nationwide in the context of her first single, a
Bluesy “bohemian” number which 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.” Later, Black Muslims
merge with Kemet when Badu reprises “On & On” in concert for Live (1997). “Reprise”
explicates her song-text meticulously, after enormous success, breaking it down bit by
cosmological bit:
Y’all know what a cypher is? [“Yeah!”] It’s all kinds of ciphers. But a
cypher can be represented by a circle, which consists of how many degrees?
[“360!”] What? 360 degrees. And my cipher keeps moving like a rolling
stone. So in my song when I say that, my cipher represents myself or the
atoms in my body and the rolling stone represents the Earth. The atoms in
the body rotate at the same rate on the same axis that the Earth rotates,
giving us a direct connection with the place we call Earth; therefore, we can
call ourselves Earth. Okay? On my hand I wear an ankh. This is an ankh.
An ankh is an ancient Kemetic symbol. The word Kemet is the original name
for Egypt.
Going on with her exegesis, her talk takes an erotic turn; and this makes all the sense in
the mind of Badu:
…This symbol can be found on the walls of the Hieroglyphics, in Kemet. And
this symbol represents Life. Alright? This portion represents the womb.
Sistas, put your hands on your wombs. This portion represents the male
principle, with the birth canal. Bruthas, put your hands on your male
principles! [Roars] And this portion represents the fallopian tubes.
120/120/120: 360 degrees of Life and Completion. You and Me. Life. In all
I do, I try to represent Life. Give birth to different things: Melodies, Music,
Prayers. Babies...
The physics and metaphysics of reproduction, the pleasure of life-giving organs and
organisms are affirmed as creative (not “crude”) activity and processes. They are not
puritanically veiled or avoided. The oneness signified by Badu’s ankh, a huge physical
presence on stage at her early shows, recalls the oneness or communion of Lil’ Kim’s
Hip-Hop anthems with Biggie Smalls: The Notorious B.I.G. and K.I.M. also ask their
Black audiences on Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” (Conspiracy, 1995) to grab their
“privates,” their “principles,” to “represent” as a collective unit, a classic call-andresponse
chorus. Sex is simply part of “Life” for Baduizm, too.
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 7, March 2007
27
The Live version of “On & On” confirms this fact in another fashion. Badu spits a rhyme
at the end of this rendition. She’s not just some “Neo-Soul songstress.” She’s a dope
MC: “I thank it’s time to take tha jam deep into da hype/Hardcore cold-hypin tha mic/I
just so happen to be Tough with a capital ‘T’/Cain’t no weak ass, trick MC keep up rough
with me.” Badu has always said she is Hip-Hop, to the bone. Here, she disses “weak ass,
trick MC’s” and shouts out “hard-core.” This should shock those who think “sexuality”
and “consciousness” are diametrically opposite in nature, by definition. Yet, for nonbelievers,
she takes it further: “Yeah, I’m dope on a rope/They wanna play tug-owar/
Jealousy appears/between both your ears/Cuz I been doin this shit for years/Never
goin out wack/I’m a female mack/So saps, git back/while my dollars stack.” These lines
leave her “mackin’” with a “head-wrap,” literally, “gettin’ money” and rapping in a style
that allows for no dichotomous separation of her from Lil’ Kim, whose song “Crush on
You” supplies the music sampled in the background. The verse seems to require this
interpolation-reference, or vice versa.
These matters might 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.” What put the “-izm” in Baduizm after all? The artist’s own “organic,” ghettodriven
definition said it is “what you smoke, it gets you high” (McIver 91). Of course, it
also refers to what “gets you off.” Baduizm relates to orgasm as much as anything (i.e.,
knowledge and spirituality). Her aesthetic erotica gets more sexually explicit on
“Booty,” the seventh track on Mama’s Gun. Like “Next Lifetime” on Baduizm as well as
Live, “Booty” has a huge a problem with monogamy. It makes it strictly circumstantial,
rather than “moral,” rejecting its conventional constrictions: “I don’t want him, cuz a
what he done to you/You don’t need him/cuz he ain’t ready/See, I don’t want him if he
ain’t made no arrangement wit you/And you don’t need him, cuz da boy ain’t ready.”
This bawdy attack on pretentious postures becomes more pointed still. Badu continues to
snap: “You got a Ph.D, Magna Cum Laude/But ya nigga love me wit a GED.” This
recasting of one-on-one relationships as an optional, reciprocal arrangement, not an
unquestionable ideal, is hardly the stuff of bourgeois family values, gender,
heterosexuality or “consciousness.” Yet Badu’s “-izm” is present on Mama’s Gun as a
matter of principle.
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,” concerning Black oppression,
not “part of the problem,” as it were: “On & on & on & on/Wake tha fuck up cuz it’s
been too long/Say, wait a minute, Queen, whut’s yur name?/I be that gypsy flippin life
game, from tha right brain.” She 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/Badu, Badu.”
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28
A “conscious” elitism is mocked as Badu pokes fun at her own name, shrewdly. The
“Badu, Badu” scat becomes synonymous with “non-sense,” or “shit-talkin’” that the
masses can’t understand. The scat is no longer the cosmic tongue of Jazz. It is suddenly,
tactically, the “scatology” of excrement. Jazz was itself vernacular or “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 wakes us “tha fuck up” and hips us to certain “hip”
hypocrisies of “consciousness” on Mama’s Gun, scoffing at puritanically self-important
postures with pleasure.
Badu mixes sexuality and self-critique and adds a gangsta to the “-izm” on Mama’s Gun
as well as Worldwide Underground. Sex and guns are far more associated with a Lil’
Kim (“Head of La Bella Mafia”) than a Badu in the minds of most music critics and
consumers of Black popular culture. For those who consider themselves among the
“conscious,” typically, even apostles of “consciousness,” this association is quite
revolting. Even though Black people are warred upon and in need of freedom, by any
means, according to the heroic Black consciousness of Malcolm X, these critics are
loathe to be “positive” about guns aimed in any direction, under any circumstances. This
evident 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 (McIver 2002, 204-5).
No less than Lil’ Kim, therefore, Badu refuses any reading of society that sees guns as
simply “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,” or patriotism, but a poetic pledge. “The Warrior’s Reminder” is printed,
significantly, in the shape of a moon; a crescent placed inside a circle formed by a
tambourine:
i am awake/my mind is free/i am creative/i love myself/my willpower is
strong/i am brave/i practice patience…i want to grow/i know i will/i take on
responsibility/i hide myself from no one/I’m on my path/warriors walk alone/i
won’t let my focus change/taking out the demons in my range…that’ s
mama’s gun.
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 7, March 2007
29
Her plush Worldwide Underground project would focus on “freaky” instrumentation,
thanks to her new production team for this third studio album: “Freakquency.” Even so,
Badu’s vocals run with dead prez on “The Grind,” quite militantly; and she packs her
maternal-lyrical pistol again on “Danger (Other Side of the Game, Part 2),” which blares:
“Got a box a money/that I keep unda my bed/But we don’t spend it though/Might need it
fo mo Ye-Yo/We keep this money/just in case we need to make a run/Gotta keep a clip in
Mama’s gun/A run.” Any ambiguities about her gun being literal or metaphorical are
apparently erased. The whole song is about living life “in the zone,” the very dangerous
zone that the drug trade represents--with a raw adrenaline rush, while Badu continues to
shout out “sophisticated gangsterism” and “pimpism” on Worldwide Underground’s
“Woo.” Interestingly enough, publishing credits on her previous albums had always read
“Divine Pimp Pub,” another reality which legions of listeners must have overlooked,
another reality which connects her to rather than separates her from the songbook of Lil’
Kim.
Sex Radical Royals/Royal Sex Radicals: Queens of Consciousness
Indeed, quite like The Notorious K.I.M. or “Big Momma/Queen Bitch” content-wise with
respect to sexuality, “gangsterism,” gun talk, drugs, female “pimpsterism,” and mic
postures, Badu and her “-izm” moved further into what Ifi Amadiume (1989, 1997) calls
“matriarchy,” African matriarchy--via Kemet, Yorubaland and Dahomey--when she
staged an appearance with dead prez on New York City’s WBLS as a part of “The
Wendy Williams Experience.” A portion of this interview was poorly transcribed in
Honey magazine (October 2003), or its “Wendy’s World” column which was for a time a
regular feature. Mocking rumors about her sex life involving Andre 3000 from Outkast,
Common and M-1 from dpz, Badu surprises and upstages DJ Williams in a bit of guerilla
theater on the radio. She tells her that she is actually involved with 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 “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, putting Black
children in white schools and mindless sex, Badu scorns them all as an “American way of
thinking.” Though Williams claims we are “Americans,” by virtue of being in
“America,” Badu insists (very Malcolm X-like): “Well, maybe you are. But we not. I’m
not. We aren’t.” It’s “an African mentality” that Badu aggressively upholds.
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 7, March 2007
30
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.” “Mind Sex” is a track off dead prez’s debut album, Let’s Get Free (2000);
and both members were in the studio to support Badu’s “polyandry” (i.e., multiple
partners or “polygamy” for women). Bambula men say what they are trained to say, it is
said. They “betta not” have sex of any kind with anyone other than Badu, while Badu
can have sex with anyone she likes. 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. Then, she 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]”
(Williams 109). The transcript of this exchange published in Honey bore a sour subtitle:
“Erykah Badu Takes Mind Games to a Cosmic Level.” It is the body politics of Baduizm
that disturb certain status-quo mentalities, inasmuch as they disturb, unsettle and negate
certain notions of “consciousness” in the absence of a concept of sexual consciousness
which may be more readily thought with regard to Lil’ Kim.
Williams was obviously thrown off by this unexpected show of raunch. It would have
been different story altogether had this whole display come from Lil’ Kim. 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 middleclass
“respectability” and puritanical hypocrisy for so-called “consciousness.” This
would be an anti-sexual “consciousness” which conceals, when possible, its own “guilty
pleasures” in confined and concealed, privatized spaces. From these spaces, Black and
other promoters of puritanism can emerge to denounce those who are bold enough to
renounce or disregard white bourgeois “morality,” to expose it even as immoral itself. It
must take such boldness of vision to see Erykah Badu’s brilliant sexuality, and to
recognize and endorse Lil’ Kim’s carnal, conscious intelligence. Unfortunately,
however, this is not the kind of “queen” that “Wendy Williams” is.
The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 1, no. 7, March 2007
31
European imperialism is well-known for depicting African rulers as “ruthless” and
“despotic,” while enshrining their own monarchies as “divinely” ordained if not
“democratic.” These concepts of monarchy and democracy are culturally specific,
extremely repressive and, indeed, racist, elitist and sexist. For colonial slavery and neoslavery
alike, 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 non-white populations in and out of Africa. Crucially, anti-imperialist
historians and scholar-activists such as Cheikh Anta Diop (1959) and Walter Rodney
(1972) have exposed this mis-representation of African politics, unearthing far more
populist or people-oriented sets of institutions than previously recognized after the
onslaught of Europe. Oba T’Shaka would even argue for a “royal democracy” in Return
to the African Mother Principle of Male and Female Equality (1995). Also unearthed are
institutions of matriarchy and “mother-right” erased by the West’s invention of “kings”
and “chiefs” in Africa for self-serving agendas. This history and “herstory” are
epitomized in all the work of Ifi Amadiume, especially in Re-Inventing Africa:
Matriarchy, Religion, & Culture (1997). 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).
In the African Diaspora, among the masses in particular, Black rhetorics of royalty trump
“democracy,” and slavery repeatedly. This royalism does not fit the profile of class
elitism; nor is it uniformly patrilineal or patriarchal as is royalty in Europe. 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?” (Davis 13). Despite the
English language terminology, the original repressive logic of monarchism--proper--this
is literally subverted as queens come before kings in her lyrical (“Big Momma/Queen
Bitch”) matriarchy, or “mother-right.” Her majesty is a matter of politics operating at the
level of the grassroots. It is not a matter of inheritance. Unlike the relatively rare
queendom in Europe, 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 superimposed. Many African queendoms have boasted a radical sexual
politics instead, no less so abroad under empire in the West. In the symbolics of Hip-
Hop, accordingly, this queen is a queen because she runs things in the interests of other
queens anointed in and by the masses: Lil’ Kim insists that she is “Queen of all queens”
on The Notorious K.I.M.’s “I’m Human” (2000) because she represents for her sex like
no one else in a wickedly male-dominated world. The blue-blood, patrilineal and
patriarchal, Western individualist conception of royalty folds rhetorically in the face of
such Black popular expression.
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32
As for the “Queen of Neo-Soul,” Badu confronts a particular set of problems the more
and more erotic her artistic performance gets. There is no “King of Neo-Soul,”
revealingly. He isn’t dead. “He” simply never was. There is no such conception. The
royal Badu would return to her brief radio stint in “The Learning Curve,” a feature in
Vibe magazine scripted and photographed 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 humorous, polyandrous WBLS appearance was still a hot topic of
discussion: “I went up there with the idea of saying things to be entertaining and
fun…But people took what I said seriously” (Green 96). The role of a queen with many
husbands, lovers or sexual partners, none of whom will ever be “king” (or “king” of her,
specifically), was entertaining for Badu but not for this audience of “Neo-Soul”
consumers.
XXL Presents Hip-Hop Soul would pick up where Vibe left off, but it darts back in a
sensationalist direction. This feature is entitled “Let’s Get Serious.” It asks if Badu is “a
heaven-sent angel of righteousness or some sort of voodoo sex goddess” (Thompson 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 all others. 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.” It is not her “intellect,” art or
music that attracts these questions. It is her “personal” life. 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” (51). She both acknowledges her like for “hundreddollar
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 limited and flawed: “Nothing has changed about me...But I don’t know if people
know that…” (52).
In “Let’s Get Serious,” superficialities of “consciousness” were cut up even further with
the benefit of hindsight: “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” (Emphasis hers, 51). This
is key.
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33
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
called “Hair Wars: Vibe Takes a Look at Badu’s Most Famous Dos and Don’ts.” This
segment is pretty mindless, and typically so. Still, it makes Badu’s point about how
“saviors” are identified by appearance, not substance; how “certain” people want the
look of “consciousness,” the “trend” of it, rather than what would be the substance of
“consciousness” itself; and how completely unconscious the “conscious” are about their
routine notions of consciousness, musical and non-musical.
This would certainly explain why The Notorious K.I.M. could not be seen as a savior by
this society, especially outside Hip-Hop, and among “Hip-Hop Soul” elites--
notwithstanding “Marc Jacobs featuring Lil’ Kim as Joan of Arc,” a stunning ten-page
(pre-imprisonment) high-fashion layout published in Flaunt magazine (in September
2005). Hers is not the “look” of “consciousness” or pseudo-consciousness typically
promoted by bourgeois and pseudo-bourgeois spectators of popular culture. Her look or
their preconceptions about it blinds these critics to the substance of consciousness for
which she spits and stands as a lyricist no matter how radical this consciousness might be
because her material is so conscious and relentless in its assault on their sexually
conservative commitment to the elitist repression of the white bourgeois West.
She had addressed this class subject in the premiere issue of Honey with Tanya
Pendleton. The interview’s title is, provocatively, “When and Where I Enter: The Lil’
Kim Story.” 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; 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
(Pendleton 58).
The R&B-oriented artists for whom these MCs provide a constant, puritanical contrast
are pinpointed for a common political cause, 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 among Black female artists in particular.
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34
The music of Lil’ Kim is by no means more “commercial” than the music of 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) signifies a
hypocritical falsity. And utterly exposed again is this notion of “consciousness” that is
simply about the politics of race, sex and class, politics which are systematically hostile
to her sexual consciousness and its massive, revolutionary promise.
Conclusion
“I’m a queen, and I can’t say I’ve run across a full-blown king”
-- The Notorious K.I.M.
Of all those discussed by Irene d’Almeida in Francophone African Women Writers:
Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (1994), Werewere Liking may be most radically
relevant for a discussion of this royal sex-radicalism, thanks to her It Shall Be of Jasper
and Coral (Journal of a Misovire): A Song-Novel (1983/2000). A “misovire,” combining
Greek and Latin as a new coinage, she could be defined as a “man-hater,” since a
misogynist is a “woman-hater.” A “misanthrope” is conventionally defined as “a hater of
[society] or mankind.” Yet this is not how Liking defines “misovire” herself. For her,
she is “a woman who can’t find an admirable man” (d’Almeida in Liking xix). 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). Liking champions
and commits herself to the “fight” to “taste true pleasure again” (90-91), a divine pleasure
and art that is officially incompatible with gender and all established “-ism’s.” This text
is for a time when, as she states, “I am no longer a misovire and there are no more
misogynists” (112).
Whether “misovires” specifically or not, “Hip-Hop Queens” come to mind, again, as
these cultural and political connections across writing, visual arts and music are
extraordinarily profound: Werewere Liking appears in a caravan of poets traveling from
Gorée Island in Senegal to Timbuktu, Mali, for example, in Tara: Search for the Word
(2000), a film by Fatoumata Kandé-Senghor, who is also filming a documentary on rap
(Radikal Spirit) in Senegal with Waru Studios--even as it is Hip-Hop enthusiast Ousmane
Sembène who is hailed as an original architect of an anti-elitist African cinema of
liberation along with Haile Gerima of Ethiopia and Med Hondo of Mauritania. A trinity
of sorts, Hondo, Gerima and “Ousmane-the-Axe” are hailed as the founders of Black
radical filmmaking, on the continent, in very much the same vein that DJ Kool Herc,
Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash are hailed the founders of Hip-Hop revolution
in the Americas.
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35
Sembène’s sexual politics are well-established. 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
89-138). Hondo is most well-known for his warrior-queen epic, Sarraounia (1986), a
FESPACO award-winning production that speaks marvelously to many of the stances of
musical matriarchs like Lil’ Kim and Erykah Badu.
An elder intellectual critic in Black Studies, Sylvia Wynter quotes Nas’s I Am (1999) for
her “Un-Settling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2000). She also
argues passionately for a new “order of consciousness” in “Africa, the West and the
Analogy of Culture,” a powerful article from June Givanni’s Symbolic Narratives/African
Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (2000). She would note 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 would also
pinpoint its mind/body split, its basic, artificial opposition of “rationality” and “sexuality”
(or “sensuality”), as a central part of the problem. Nevertheless, this is the notion of
“consciousness” upheld by intellectuals and critics, all over the world now over the past
five hundred-plus years; and this is why “consciousness” calls to be completely
rethought--in radical resistance to oppressions and repressions of all kinds. A
contradiction in terms for the dominant society, the concept of sexual consciousness can
go a long way in this direction toward the subversion of “Western Man” and the creation
of “a new humanity,” or “a new society,” which is neither racist nor sexist nor bourgeois
or class elitist nor homophobic, etc. Amiri Baraka once wrote, in “leroy” (1969): “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” (Baraka 1991 223). So what part of this hegemonic order of
“consciousness” must we most definitely leave alone? Musically and otherwise, our
sexual consciousness should reprise or revolutionize consciousness in general and “Black
consciousness” in particular in the face of a historically anti-Black, anti-African system
of power--and pleasure--as well as “knowledge.”
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