Lupe Fiasco's "Bitch Bad"

"Bitch bad, woman good / Lady better, they misunderstood..."

This is the chorus to Lupe Fiasco's much-blogged about song, "Bitch Bad." I'm going to have to a agree with Alyssa Rosenberg : it's great that misogyny is being addressed in a hip-hop song, but there's something a little condescending in its gender politics. Rosenberg says:

"But what irritated me about “Bitch Bad” is its desire to get credit for bringing up a provocative issue without the accompanying responsibility for calling anyone out. “Disclaimer: this rhymer, Lupe, is not usin’ ‘bitch’ as a lesson,” he rhymes, “But as a psychological weapon / To set in your mind and really mess with your conceptions / Discretions, reflections, it’s clever misdirection.” But the only meaningful discussion between “lesson” and intellectual provocation is the responsibility the speaker has for making a point at the end. Given how heavily the rest of “Bitch Bad”‘s lyrics rely on media psychology—in the verse about how girls consume media, he might as well be cribbing from the Parents’ Television Council—he’s on particularly shaky ground in terms of declaiming having any particular message. Watching him dig deeper on that insistence that he can’t be taken too seriously, telling Rolling Stone “I’m not trying to say this is what’s going to happen, or potentially what’s going to happen. Because you don’t know, the characters are fictional, based on true events. I know personally what has affected me, but that’s me personally,” is irritating."

I also take issue with the inevitable examination by the media of misogyny in hip-hop at the expense of other genres. When critics talk about aspects of the music industry toxic to women, the onus always seems to fall on hip-hip when there's a long-standing tradition of sexism and misogyny in rock music that gets overlooked.