On Monday (Dec. 2) Damon Dash spoke to TMZ and addressed his past misogyny, which he regrets.
The way Dash sees it these days, there was no real punishment for disrespecting women during his hip-hop heyday. He also talked about the video for JAY-Z’s 2000 cut “Big Pimpin’,” where Dash poured a bottle of champagne on one of the female extras.
“When I was young and in hip-hop, I [knew] that with disrespecting women you got a positive response from it,” he explained. “I look at the things like ‘Big Pimpin’ and I’m embarrassed by it. I wouldn’t want my daughter to go through that, and if I ever saw my son Boogie doing that we would have some serious issues. When I had daughters, I realized that I would never do anything to a girl that I wouldn’t want done to my own daughter.”
https://youtu.be/qStQccpB-Gw
JAY-Z expressed regret about “Big Pimpin” as well. He did it during a 2010 interview with The Wall Street Journal, around the time he was promoting his book “Decoded.”
“Some [lyrics] become really profound when you see them in writing. Not ‘Big Pimpin.’ That’s the exception,” he admitted. “It was like, ‘I can’t believe I said that and kept saying it. What kind of animal would say this sort of thing?’ Reading it is really harsh.”
Snoop Dogg had a slightly different take than JAY-Z about the lyrics he wrote in the past that degrades women. He didn’t express regret like the New York native, but he did show similar growth. In fact, Snoop said his misogynistic lyrics should be used as a barometer to measure how far he’s come.
“Definitely, my attitude has changed towards women,” he said in an interview with Sky News. “I am more sensitive and more vulnerable writing-wise and accepting a woman for being a beautiful person, as opposed to me saying she is a b—- or a h–, because that was how I was trained when I first started, so I have no regrets.”
Snoop also said that marriage changed him and it helped him recognize how big of a role women played throughout his life.
“As I grew I fell in love with my wife and started to love my mother, my grandmother and my daughter. I understood what a woman was and I started to write about and express that,” he explained. “Once I figured out there was room to grow and learn and to be a better person, then I incorporated that in everything I was doing. I don’t feel like you can be ashamed or mad about not knowing. If you don’t know, you don’t know.”
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In his interview with The Wall Street Journal, JAY-Z said that hip-hop needs to get back to making songs about love, because the genre’s most celebrated albums deal with it head on.
“We have to find our way back to true emotion,” he stated. “This is going to sound so sappy, but love is the only thing that stands the test of time. “‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ was all about love. Andre 3000’s ‘The Love Below.’ Even N.W.A, at its core, that was about love for a neighborhood.”
Who knows if the younger generation will take Jay’s advice and carry on the tradition of making brilliant love songs like Andre 3000’s “Prototype,” Goodie Mob’s “Beautiful Skin” or LL Cool J’s classic “I Need Love.” But so far there are some young rappers who’ve gone that route and they’ve lyrically bared their souls. Like the 27-year-old Atlanta rapper J.I.D. on his cut “All Bad.”
“Baby, do you love me? I know that you do / I been trying so hard, I know you feel like you feel it too / I’m gonna step into the shade, I don’t want the sun in my face / But I don’t want to walk away without me saying what I have to say,” he raps.
Kodak Black is another rapper from the younger generation, who hasn’t been afraid to talk about love and show vulnerability in his music.
“I’m scared to show you how I feel / I ain’t got no heart but you the one that makes me feel / How would you take it if I show you how I feel? /It’s something about you, I ain’t even know that I could feel … Ain’t about the sex girl / we could Netflix, we could chill,” rhymed the 20-year-old on “Save You.”
In addition, there’s a good chance that all of the sexual assault claims in entertainment that have surfaced will affect hip-hop directly and make rappers more sensitive to how women are treated. So far, Drake has been clearly affected, and he showed it during a recent concert in Australia.
“If you don’t stop touching girls, I will come out there and f— you up,” he yelled after he saw one man touching women in the crowd.
But so far, there hasn’t been a large number of male rappers that have spoken out against sexual harassment against women since the scandals hit, and the veteran lyricist Eve said she finds that disappointing.
In an interview with Newsweek, the rapper turned talk show host said that she hopes hip-hop will change for the better and says at the moment, it’s as misogynistic as it ever was.
“Guys shouldn’t be rapping about it. Guys shouldn’t be calling girls bitches, sluts,” said Eve. “That should not be done. I do not condone it at all, but it needs to be a bigger change.”
