Break It Down: U.N.I.T.Y.

Instinct leads me to another flow... every time I hear a brother call a girl a bitch or a ho...



No other song so plainly and so poignantly talks about street harassment than Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." This was one of the first "message" songs I fell in love with, and it stuck with me through the next twenty years or so.

Although released around time riot grrrl was just bubbling up from the surface, riot grrrl's politics made me feel less empowered than ever. Maybe it was a reality I was unprepared for hitting me smack in the face, but I never felt a sense of agency from punk rock's power, just alienation. Listening to "U.N.I.T.Y. I did.

I realize it's unfair, dangerous even, to pit one against the other, but the women-fronted punk of the early 90s is too often presented as a generation of women's entry into feminism. Riot grrrl had a host of problems: namely, it was inaccessible to those outside indie and punk's knowing few. (At least at first. By the time I'd heard of riot grrrl the mainstream media had reduced it to a sartorial statement.) Its problems of inclusion were a big part of feminism's past, and one of its greatest failures. It's easy to forget that not everyone comes to feminism by birthright.

The thing is "U.N.I.T.Y." was never explicitly feminist, which as a teen would have been a big turn-off. Not so much because I couldn't identify, but because I hate having feminism laid out to me in absolutes.

There were a lot of stealthily feminist hip-hop songs released in the 90s: along with "U.N.I.T.Y." there was "Ladies First," TLC's "Ain't To Proud to Beg," and "Unpretty" and Salt-n-Pepa's "None of Your Business." And they got a fair amount of airplay bringing those ideas to the masses, something riot grrl ultimately failed to do.