Bitches Ain't Shit

"Bitches Ain't Shit" is the final song of Dr. Dre's debut solo rap album, The Chronic, which was released in December 1992 as Death Row Records' first album. Though never a single, "Bitches Ain't Shit" was a huge underground hit. The song's popularity was a major contribution to the success of The Chronic ' s sales.

The song proved controversial, due to its prevalent themes of misogyny.

Death Row
In 1986, Ice-T's song "6 in the Mornin'," diverting from electro rap and "funk hop" some fanfare in the Los Angeles area's rap scene, was gangsta rap's inaugural anthem, reaching gold sales. Forming in early 1987, the group N.W.A recast gangsta rap into a grim, menacing presentation. Despite scarce radio play outside the County of Los Angeles, and despite two, early departures over money—secondary record producer Arabian Prince in 1988, then primary rapper and ghostwriter Ice Cube in late 1989 —N.W.A advanced gangsta rap to platinum sales, but disbanded in 1991 once primary record producer Dr. Dre left. Freed from N.W.A's brash persona, Dre held creative control and preeminent industry cachet.

Dre wanted to only produce, but his N.W.A. ghostwriter the D.O.C. convinced him to still rap, too. Starting Death Row Records with their manager Suge Knight, they drew Dick Griffey, whose SOLAR Records had the office space, recording studio, and major distributor Sony Music. In April 1992, SOLAR issued their first rap song, "Deep Cover," which hit drew Sony's interest in Death Row. But soon, outrage at "Cop Killer," heavy metal, by Ice-T's band Body Count, repelled Sony, as "Deep Cover" had similar theme. Death Row gained Warner Music distribution via Interscope Records. Knight excluded Griffey, and reportedly "Deep Cover" as album track was replaced by a newer song, "Bitches Ain't Shit."

The Chronic
Assisted by Daz and by Warren G on drum programming and sampling soul and funk classics, Dre shaped a new sound, and new aura: gangsta funk, G-funk. In late 1993, Death Row Records' second album—Snoop Doggy Dogg's debut solo album Doggystyle —secured gangsta rap in mainstream, popular music. Yet in late 1992, there was Dr. Dre's debut solo album The Chronic. With key visual motifs in music videos, its sonic motifs, eerie yet elegant—with grooving bass lines and bassy thumps under catchy, melodic hooks and Snoop's relaxed, melodic raps—debuted gangsta rap on popular radio. "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" pervaded it, and was a 1994 Grammy nominee, while "Let Me Ride" won a Grammy. "Bitches Ain't Shit," while similarly musical, was "gruff" and "sinister" and yet comedic, a gonzo style.

Album recording, across nine months in 1992, began in Calabasas, California, in Dre's house —which in late June sustained severe fire damage —but mainly occurred in the City of Los Angeles section Hollywood at the studio Galaxy Sound, owned by SOLAR Records' owner Dick Griffey. Its audio console was advanced, yet its neighborhood had was suffering urban decay, and from late April to early May was beset by the L.A. riots. Guest rapper and studio fixture Kurupt questioned "what kind of album The Chronic would have been without the riots." Recording, he says, "was coming from the middle of it all." In any case, "Bitches Ain't Shit" was among "the most hard-hitting songs on The Chronic." For the album's 2001 reissue, the song was added to the track list as a proper song, unlike in 1992, where it was included as a hidden track on the album.

Synthesis
In the album's 1992 issue, after the final listed track, "The Roach," subtitled "The Chronic Outro," is a long silence. Opening the truly final but unlisted track, Snoop intones, a capella, "Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks" —the hook's first line, spanning the four metrical beats that occur during one bar —trailed by a breakbeat, spanning the second bar, from the band Trouble Funk's 1982 hit "Let's Get Small." Then opening, to loop once per bar, is the rhythm section—a cymbal strike solely on the one count or the primary downbeat, which also meets a kick drum's bassy thump "At its core, a Western popular music drum pattern usually consists of three rhythmic layers: "The downbeat layer normally features the bass drum. In many cases, the primary and/or secondary downbeats (first and third beats of the common-time bar) are played as part of the rhythm in this layer. "The backbeat layer is often played on the snare drum, and it frequently plays one or both of the backbeats (beats two and four of the bar). "The pulse layer is usually played on the hi-hat cymbals or the ride cymbal. It often presents a (more or less regular) sequence or pulsation of notes. In most patterns, the pulsation is faster than the quarter-note beat." [Senn O, Kilchenmann L, Bechtold T & Hoesl F, "Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners' attitudes", PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0199604] Here, note indicates not a pitch but instead a span: a whole note, lasting four beats, spans the whole bar, and so a quarter note, lasting one beat, spans from any beat until the next beat. (On the relation between note duration and beat fraction, see Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–23.)  A cymbal's pulsing faster than four beats per bar is viewable in portions of a drum cover of the Chainsmokers, "Don't Let Me Down (Illenium Remix)" [Matt McGuire "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 5 Jun 2016]. (The first cymbal strike is on beat #1, stranded vocal starts on beat #2, and reaching vocal starts on beat #4.) Although Dr. Dre's cymbal, struck every four beats, namely, once per bar, pulses four times slower than the native pulse, the same principle of attack on a 1/2 beat or a 1/4 beat, and so on, is how Dr. Dre's bass drum syncopates offbeat and how the bass riff grooves. that returns aflutter, syncopating offbeat, between a snare drum's lively taps, steady, syncopating backbeat, namely, on the two count and the four count, "Humans' ability to perceive regularity in rhythm, even when the rhythm itself is not uniformly regular, relies on the mechanism of metre perception. Involving the perception of regularly alternating strong and weak accents, metre in music forms nested levels of isochronous pulses that can be hierarchically differentiated based on their accentual salience." [Witek MAG, Clarke EF, Wallentin M, Kringelbach ML & Vuust P, "Syncopation, body-movement and pleasure in groove music", PLoS One, 2014;9(4):e94446] In other words, metre is uniformly spaced "beats" as timepoints altogether manifesting a regularly recurring pattern of silence, attack, and strength, while a music piece manifests multiple of such patterns overlapping. Metaphorically, then, metre is "an abstract grid" as the "scaffolding for rhythm" and yet, thereby, is "an aspect of rhythm" such that, expounding flexibly upon the metre, "rhythm is flowing metre, and metre is bonded rhythm." [Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London & New York: Continuum, 2007), p 136, quoting others]. "Syncopation is one of the most studied forms of rhythmic complexity in music. It can be defined as a rhythmic event that violates listeners' metric expectations" [Witek et al., PLoS One, 2014;9(4):e94446]. Metre's most basic level is the bar, while popular music's bar structure is denoted 4/4, a span of four beats [Keith Wyatt, Carl Schroeder & Joe Elliott, Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), pp 22–23]. By a 4/4 bar's traditional metre, beat #1 is strongest or the primary stress, thus the downbeat, while beat #3, also strong, is the secondary stress or the other downbeat, whereas beats #2 and #4, weak or unstressed, are the backbeats [Senn O, Kilchenmann L, Bechtold T & Hoesl F, "Groove in drum patterns as a function of both rhythmic properties and listeners' attitudes", PLoS One, 2018;13(6):e0199604, sec "Materials and methods: Pattern category"]. The downbeats tend to get kick/bass drum attack, yet the backbeats usually get attack by an accenting instrument, standardly snare drum [Ibid., Wyatt et al., Ear Training, 2005, p 23]. Whereas the kick's thump is bassy, the snare's tap is sharper [Trevor de Clercq, "Rhythmic influence in the rock revelation", in Russell Hartenberger & Ryan McClelland, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp 190–191. "As a result, beats 2 and 4 are arguably more accented in rock on a regular basis than beats 1 and 3", which, despite their "structural importance", premise "the familiar joke among popular musicians that 'friends don't let friends clap on beats 1 and 3.' " [Ibid.] Yet besides a metric downbeat's contrast from a backbeat, an instead rhythmic downbeat contrasts from an upbeat. For instead an orchestra, led by the conductor's wand movement, beat #4 is the upbeat, weak, setting up the forthcoming downbeat, beat #1, strongest [John W. Wright, Matt Fisher & Lisette Cheresson, eds., The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind, 3rd edn. (New York: St Martin's Press, 2011), p 195. Yet in popular music, upbeat often implies not metric structure but instead rhythmic structure, which varies both stress and timing, whereby both metric downbeats, #1 and #3, as well as both backbeats, #2 and #4, are in fact downbeats, simply beats or, more specifically, whole beats, whereas an upbeat is any midpoint between beats, thus a 1/2 beat, positioned where the word and occurs when counting a whole bar, "One and two and three and four and." [Ibid.] Meanwhile, given genre conventions, a music theorist explains, "It is not quite right to say that syncopation is the stress of a normally unstressed beat—often stress will be expected on such beats—but rather, it is stress that is not placed on the metrical downbeat." "For instance, funk has stress on '4'—the 'backbeat'—and tango on '2 and.' " [Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London & New York: Continuum, 2007), p 138. while a bass guitar's grooving bass line, a riff that is the replayed start of Funkadelic's 1976 song "Adolescent Funk," spans the bar—while both backbeats also meet a chord perhaps on synthesized keys. A chord is multiple notes played at once, standardly three notes related as a triad, which a casual listener might call simply "a note" or, if a piano chord, simply "a key". Yet if literally a single note, it could sound empty. In each "Bitches Ain't Shit" bar, these backbeat chords—that is, chords on beats #2 and #4—may be synthesized and may mimic piano chords. But these chords' origin and nature, apparently two chords, the first on both backbeats of a bar, and the second chord on both backbeats of the next bar, and so on, alternating like so, remain unclear as to this Wikipedia article [this footnote added 24 Mar 2020]. Maybe talking about these alternating chords is the vice president of Complex Media's content operations, who writes, "There's this ping at the end of each bar of Dr. Dre's 'Bitches Ain't Shit.' It changes pitch with the bass line. You've heard that shit before? Oh man, I'm like Pavlov's f–ing dog when I hear that—my neck becomes an involuntary muscle: It refuses to not snap. I'm a rap Philistine, which, in non-faux-rap-intellectualspeak means I'm a beats man. And that's one of my favorite beats, ever." [Jack Erwin, "For my rap brothers with daughters: Loving (and hating) hip hop on Father's Day", Complex.com, 21 Jun 2015] (Being a "beats man" and thus "smugly commonplace or conventional"—"philistine", Dictionary.com, visited 1 Jan 2022—may allude to purported purists who, although hip hop began as dance music, tout "lyricism" instead.) Unclear is why this discussion identifies the "ping" at only each bar's end—not also each bar's approximate midpoint—and how "the ping" also "changes pitch with the bass line". It is the cymbal strike, only beat #1, that both ends the bar and starts the next bar. Yet indeed, beat #4 is the bar's final beat, whereupon the bass riff soon initiates to attain primary stress on beat #1, then articulates till beat #2—having the first "ping"—and then resonates till about beat #4, having the "ping" that may seem to trigger the bass riff to repeat. Simultaneously, an eerie, high-pitched whine or ring, a type of motif called "the funky worm" and created on a Moog synthesizer—a keyboard that can synthesize bass, too —manifests while Snoop, restarting from its first line, raps the full hook. It has four lines, each a bar. As he restarts the full hook, a sample emerges—to recur often in the song—from New York City rapper MC Shan's 1986 hit "The Bridge." [https://www.whosampled.com/sample/59123/Dr.-Dre-Snoop-Dogg-Daz-Dillinger-Kurupt-Jewell-Bitches-Ain%27t-Shit-MC-Shan-The-Bridge "Direct sample": Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg feat. Daz Dillinger, Kurupt & Jewell, "Bitches Ain't Shit", The Chronic (Death Row, 1992)] / MC Shan, "The Bridge", Down by Law (Cold Chillin', 1986), WhoSampled.com, visited 11 Mar 2020. "The Bridge", itself, is contextualized by John Leland, "Singles", Spin, 1988 Dec;4(9):112. Explaining some backstory and tangents as well as his own record production of "The Bridge" is Marley Marl, " 'Classic Recipes': Recreating MC Shan 'The Bridge' w/ Akai MPC Renaissance", Dubspot "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 8 Mar 2013, wherein timestamp 03:50 begins his discussion of how he created the song's signature motif by reversing play of an instrumental sample of the group Magic Disco Machine, "Scratchin' ", Disc O Tech (Motown, 1975). For further details and backstory, including the full instrumental of "The Bridge" and the ensuing "Bridge Wars" that, highly competitive but nonviolent, ensued between MC Shan, a native of Queens neighborhood Queensbridge while member of the Juice Crew, versus reaction by Boogie Down Productions issuing "South Bronx", see Ben Merlis, Goin' Off: The Story of the Juice Crew & Cold Chillin' Records (Berlin: BMG Books, 2019). As a BDP member insofar as BDP record producer, it is Ced Gee—otherwise a member, along with Kool Keith, of the historic Ultramagnetic MCs—who anchors the story, starting with hip hop's Bronx origin near his childhood apartment building. Starting the 11th bar is Dre's verse.

Backstory
Bass guitarist Colin Wolfe was first hired by Dre at Ruthless Records for its R&B singer Michel'le. Wolfe played the bassline also on Dre's debut solo single, "Deep Cover." In 2014, Wolfe recalled, "One day, I was alone in the control room and Dre and Daz were up in the back room, trying to mess around on the keyboard for the 'Bitches Ain't Shit' bass line. So I stepped in the doorway and I could hear what they were trying to do. I said, 'Man, look out, y'all trying to do this.' I straight did it, recorded it, and then I was like, 'Yo, I got another part,' and did the high Moog part right after that."

Via the funk group Ohio Players' 1972 single "Funky Worm," such a "high Moog part" is nicknamed "the funky worm" and made on a Moog synthesizer, also behind Bernie Worrell's otherworldly P-Funk sounds. With N.W.A, Dre released two songs employing it—Ice Cube, in 1987, rapping "Dope Man," and Dre with MC Ren, in 1991, rapping "Alwayz into Somethin' "—a signature sound of The Chronic. A leading record producer of 1980s pop rock, Jimmy Iovine, who granted the album major distribution, recalls, "Dre's sonics just sounded better than anything else on my speakers."

Backstory
Dre's verse was written by the D.O.C., his usual ghostwriter, a rapper whom Dre discovered in Dallas, and who helped Dre form Death Row Records. The four "Bitches Ain't Shit" guest vocalists, unsigned and poor, frequented the studio like a social club. Snoop's circle brought his younger cousin Daz and Kurupt—soon a rap duo, Tha Dogg Pound—while R&B singer Jewell, already present, hereby pioneered women's singing on gangsta rap. Yet most prominent is Snoop. In early 1991, Dre drew Snoop, who would turn 20 in October, from the Long Beach, California, trio 213: Snoop, his cousin Nate Dogg, singer, and Warren G, producer and rapper, stepbrother of Dre.

In April 1992, unheard since N.W.A's May 1991 album and breakup, Dr. Dre reemerged by a debut solo single—title track of the film Deep Cover—while debuting a guest but in essence lead rapper, Snoop Doggy Dogg. Despite intense anticipation for Snoop, his album recorded awaited release Dre's, which largely doubled as Snoop's debut album. Early on, working with Snoop to write the "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" lyrics, the D.O.C. focused, beyond Dre's verses, on imparting to Snoop, already gifted, an extra lyricism, "the formula." Snoop brought from Long Beach an intoxicated, lighthearted gangsterism, and the elders coached him, sealing the aura that this team would mint.

Arrangement
The four "Bitches Ain't Shit" male rappers' vocals never skip a beat—effecting teamwork, like a tag team —Snoop's hook of 4 bars twice, Dre's verse of 16 bars, Daz's verse of 8 bars, Snoop's hook of 4 bars once, Kurupt's verse of 12 bars, Snoop's verse of 22 bars, and Snoop's hook of 4 bars twice. During the latter two of the song's three hook sections, a nondescript but male voice, whispering below Snoop's vocals, incessantly chimes, "Bitches ain't shit"—at least twice per bar—fleeting across the stereo field, voicing on the left, then on the right, then in the center, back and forth. After the song's final hook recital, rapper Dre, silent since the first verse, reenters on the next beat, which starts the next bar, by starkly deadpanning, "Bitches ain't shit." Reverb effect echoes Dre's declaration across the full bar till the following bar's first beat. On this beat, Jewell's vocals enter, effecting an R&B outro—initially wordless Wooo 'ing for two bars—and then her first clear word, if mere ad lib, is on her own third bar's first beat as she sings, "Yeah." In the following adaptation of vocal rhythm to typing, the uprights indicate true barlines, which separate the musical bars, also termed measures. Jewell's first lyrical line, I don't give a fuck about a bitch, spans roughly six beats or roughly 1 & 1/2 bars arranged within three consecutive bars. First, in this abstraction of these, the word and, being the syllable immediately before as well as after a beat #, strikes a 1/2 beat, which, midway between beats, may be called an "upbeat" between two "downbeats": ''|. . . and Four (#4) and | ONE (#1) and Two (#2) and Three (#3) and Four (#4) and | ONE (#1). . . |''. Improvised here, the symbol ^  will denote silence at the 1/2 beat, so instead of counting, "One and two and three", we count, "One. Two. Three". A long dash, —, symbolizes silence for a full beat, so instead of counting, "One and two and three", we count, "One. —and three". Inward arrows, > <, are only where Jewell rapidly vocalizes "give a" as two 1/4 beats in a 1/2 beat's span. Boldface denotes any stressed beat, some of which a performer freely chooses, personalizing the rhythm. BOLD UPPERCASE denotes a stressed beat given primary stress, generally dictated by the metre, whereby dramatic or unceasing departure may derange the performance. Stress variation concerns metre and rhythm, whereas pitch variation, atop these, helps create melody, but pitch, not covered here, differs from stress, which is depicted here for Jewell's first two lyrical lines, prefaced by her ad lib 's closure: ''|. . . -oh- (#4) -hh | YEAH (#1) — (#2) — (#3) I don't (#4) >give a< | FUCK (#1) — (#2) a-bout (#3) ^  a (#4) bi- | -ITCH (#1) — (#2) but I'll (#3) let her (#4) kno- | -OW (#1)  ^  that (#2) she can't (#3)  ^  fade (#4)  ^  | THIS (#1). . . |. Jewell's first three actual words on her #1 counts—the beats that receive primary stress both vocal and instrumental—are thus seen to be yeah, then fuck, then bitch [Sound recording, "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre'' "Official Artist Channel" @ YouTube, 19 Apr 2020, timestamp 03:26, where Snoop raps his last bar, Dre echoes one bar, and then Jewell enters].

In vocal metre, or timing of stresses, which often rhyme, the rap verses mostly include stress on the bar's last beat, the four count, whereas Jewell's singing most stresses the first beat, the one count, the strongest bass and only cymbal attack. By this, Jewell's first line, I don't give a fuck about a bitch, gathers from her third bar's last beat to peak on her fourth bar's first beat, when she sings "fuck" while Dre states "bitches." First heard four bars earlier, Dre's deadpanned Bitches ain't shit—now echoing across Jewell's first full bar of lyrics—proves to be a refrain, issued across every fourth bar. Jewell, unperturbed, sings of her own outlook and lifestyle until exposing one tenet. In four straight bars, she stresses at beat one the line's last word when belting, "And I don't give a fuck!"—the first time here, Dre's refrain adding bitches—and then, switching to sexual theme, she raps, switching stress to beat three, then to beat four. Her final few words abruptly go a cappella and, echoing, fade out while Dre's refrain, still on time, returns once more and fades across two bars echoing.

Dr. Dre's verse
Based on an early rap feud, Dre's verse never directly comments on women. Rather, complementing brief skits and the single "Fuck wit Dre Day," it is the album's final smear of Eazy-E. Dre's former N.W.A groupmate, Eazy had founded the group and owned its label, Ruthless Records. Never identifying Eazy by his stage name, Dre's lyrics identify him first by his legal name, Eric Wright, but otherwise call him "bitch" and "she." These jabs attend Dre's glossing their music alliance and friendship amid Compton nightlife, followed by nationwide success with hit songs while they grew apart, and ultimately Wright's lawsuit against Dre, allegedly resulting since, Dre raps, "bitch can't hang with the street." Tracing the turning point to Wright's, more specifically, "hanging with a white bitch"—unnamed in the song's lyrics—Dre thus alludes to veteran music manager Jerry Heller, counting N.W.A among his clients. Wright and Heller—manager of Dre's first group, too, the World Class Wreckin' Cru —had cofounded Ruthless.

(In real life, feeling underpaid as an N.W.A rapper and Ruthless Records' prime record producer, Dre, although signed as exclusive to the label, left it. Dre teamed with the D.O.C. and their manager Suge Knight to form Death Row Records.  But Eazy sued, alleging that Suge had coerced the April 1991 release of three artists —Dre with girlfriend Michel'le and the D.O.C. —Death Row's legal jeopardy whereby the label lost Epic Records distribution under Sony Music. Then at Dre's offer of The Chronic with artwork and video concepts nearly complete, other labels stonewalled him, until Jimmy Iovine, excited by its sound, took on the legal imbroglio and took Death Row into Interscope Records distribution by Warner Music.  By a legal settlement, Interscope owed Ruthless part of Dre's earnings for six years, and the independent giant Priority Records, an early distributor for Ruthless, became The Chronic 's official seller. Eazy's musical retort —"Real Muthaphuckkin G's"—became his biggest solo hit. )

Daz & Kurupt
Although both touting hedonism, Daz, operating systematically, like a gigolo, stalks profit and eyes leisure, whereas Kurupt, derisively mistrustful, chases sheer thrills. Here, women resemble a faceless breed of indulgent but disloyal nymphomaniacs, who if shown men's affection would repay it by becoming the men's adversities as traitors and perhaps parasites.

Snoop Dogg
Snoop skims a saga of finding himself as "a nigga on sprung," "up in them guts like every single day," and "in love like a motherfucker," walking into his debacle with her, "a bitch named Mandy May." Early on, despite "the homies" advising him that she was "no good," he had "figured that niggas wouldn't trip with mine," his being, after all, "the maniac in black, Mr. Snoop Eastwood." But, "on a hot, sunny day," his "nigga D.O.C." and "homie Dr. Dre," retrieving him from a jail stint, pose, "Snoop, we got news."

Now wise to her "tricking" during his "county blues," Snoop, who "ain't been out a second," already must inflict some "chin checkin.' " So he pulls up to "my girl's house," he says, and will "kick in the door," but first goes, "Dre, pass the Glock." At the doorstep, drawn to "look on the floor," Snoop finds, "It's my little cousin Daz, and he's fucking my ho"—a discovery that prompts Snoop to "uncock" the pistol. Snoop admits, but affirms, "I'm heartbroke, but I'm still loc," and, at long last, swears Mandy May off: "Man, fuck a bitch."

The hidden jam
"Bitches Ain't Shit," in predating the cultural effects of Snoop's debut solo or November 1993 album, met a society that, despite misogynistic rap lyrics by Too Short and by 2 Live Crew since the 1980s, still expected popular songs, rather, to romanticize women. Although too hardcore to be a Chronic single, it was among the album's "unheralded favorites," spurring talk of "the beat"—that is, the whole instrumental stream —and of the "flow" by vocals, whereby Snoop's, mellow in the era, at times hinted singing. Altogether, this hidden track, a huge underground hit, as explains its guest rapper Kurupt, "was one of the things that helped sell The Chronic the most."

Interviewed, asked her sentiments on "Bitches Ain't Shit," one young woman, incidentally black, echoed many women's view by commenting, "I shouldn't like it, but I love the song 'cause it's the jam." In October 1993, rap journalist Dream Hampton, remarking aside the controversy over it, called it, in the rap genre, "the best song on the best album of a pretty slow year." Surveying the genre across 1993, music critic Alan Light called the album a "sonic masterpiece." Since the November 1992 release of "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang," the album's singles, lyrically mild, pervading popular radio, shifted the rap genre's spotlight, for the first time, from the East Coast or New York to the West Coast. The Chronic, rapidly, "recast hip hop in the mold of L.A. rap."

Snoop was charged with involvement in a homicide in August 1993, but was bailed out and continued becoming one of America's biggest superstars.   "Bitches Ain't Shit" was notorious, but began reshaping popular music's culture. But meanwhile, even some rap fans still disputed that rap songs, being strongly rhythmic, often sampling other songs, and allegedly not melodic, are in fact music. "Bitches Ain't Shit" critique usually exclaimed either "the beat" or the "flow" —end of the analysis—or anxiety and allegation at its lyrics written in prose format. Expert analysis of the musicality in rap songs' construction, including metric and rhythmic structures within Snoop's style was mostly beyond a "poorly conversant music public," reading about controversial lyrics.

The runup
All in 1990, many rap records gained the Parental Advisory label, Newsweek smeared rappers as, in one reading, "ignorant black men who scream obscene threats," and in Florida a federal judge, triggering ban laws, ruled a rap album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, obscene, US history's first in music. But, hearing the lewd party music in court, jurors laughed, and acquitted the group, 2 Live Crew. By contrast, recorded amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots, The Chronic reflects this climate —anger, angst, and mayhem, present in Dre's life, too —interspersed by visions of leisurely life for a West Coast rap "G." For the December 1992 album release by Death Row Records, its intermediary label, Interscope Records—cued by its own parent, Time Warner's major label, Warner Music —had Dre remove the track "Mr. Officer,"  whose hook wishes a policeman's death. In October 1992, rapper Tupac Shakur, Interscope Records, and Time Warner had been sued for the April 11 fatal shooting of a Texas Highway Patrol officer.

In June 1992, homicide on an undercover, corrupt detective already themed Dre's debut solo single "Deep Cover," a hit issued in April—by Dick Griffey's SOLAR Records, a soul label in Los Angeles, via Epic Records under major label Sony Music —but national outrage arose, instead, about a March release by a side project of L.A.'s original gangsta rapper, Ice-T. "Cop Killer," on his band Body Count's eponymous album of heavy metal music, was condemned by US Vice President Dan Quayle, US President George H. W. Bush, and the NRA. Time Warner, also owning the Six Flags amusement parks, faced boycott threats. By August, about 1 000 stores withdrew the album. Sire Records, whose roster included Madonna as well as Ice-T since his 1987 debut in major distribution, cancelled his new rap album. In January 1993, Sire's owner, Warner Bros. Records —itself owned by Warner Music—freed all Body Count artists from contract. Yet after The Chronic, despite a related, civilian homicide in June 1993, opposition regrouped about misogyny.

Harlem rallies
On Sunday, May 9, 1993, in his Mother's Day sermon, senior pastor Calvin Butts—leading the Abyssinian Baptist Church, in New York City's Harlem section—vowing a symbolic act, solicited offending music samples. Butts thus became the first black public figure to decry gangsta rap. On Saturday, June 5, amid a few hundred supporters outside of Abyssinian—historically the city's largest and preeminent black church —Reverend Butts, as vowed, mounted a steamroller. But dozens of counterprotesters, decrying censorship, blocked its path. One shouted, "You're steamrolling our dreams," and "who we are." Another alleged, "He's attacking us black rappers," not "the white power structure." Skipping ahead to the preplanned finale, then, Butts and followers, taking the boxes of CDs and tapes unexpectedly unscathed, boarded a bus to Midtown Manhattan.

On the 550 Madison Avenue sidewalk, they laid, and some trampled, the boxes of gangsta rap. There, at Sony Music headquarters, "representative of an industry which," Butts felt, "laughs at black people all the way to the bank," he blared, over megaphone, "Recognize that this poison kills!" But that summer in Harlem, young men casually wore T-shirts emblazoned Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks. Eventually, some two dozen women organized, and for three days on the thoroughfare 125th Street aimed megaphones demanding that street vendors withdraw the shirts. Such apparently sold on Los Angeles sidewalks, too, maybe till 1995. By then, Reverend Butts—who, romanticizing "the black community," had called gangsta rap "antithetical to what our culture represents" —had receded from the battle. But in 1994, US Congress had invited Butts to speak about gangsta rap.

National battle
In September 1993, C. Delores Tucker, chair and 1984 founder of the National Political Congress of Black Women, a lobbying group in Washington, DC, reentered the public eye to take up the battle against gangsta rap. Swiftly becoming the battle's national leader, she expanded it against offensive rock lyrics, too, but especially targeted "Bitches Ain't Shit," The Chronic, and Death Row Records. Of a background in civil rights activism and state political office, Tucker demanded congressional hearings. Illinois representative Cardiss Collins, already chair of Congress' standing committee on commerce and consumer protection, convened them in 1994 on February 11. There, Tucker called gangsta rap, especially Snoop's, "pornographic smut." Congress convened again for the inquiry on May 5. No government action ensued. Tucker, a Democrat, soon teamed, however, with Republican conservative, onetime US education secretary, William Bennett.

In May 1995, Tucker and Bennett aired a TV commercial, in four major cities, attacking Time Warner, and gained an ally in Senate majority leader, Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole.During 1995, Tucker and Bennett, codirector of conservative advocacy group Empower America, recently director of US antidrug policy, and once the US secretary of education, appeared in a television commercial against music that allegedly "celebrates the rape, torture, and murder of women". In May, Dole joined the battle against "violent and sexually degrading music". They all targeted Time Warner apparently since its major music company Warner Music Group, as the only publicly traded American music company, was singularly vulnerable to public pressure. But, as foreign companies, like Germany's Bertelsmann Music Group, or BMG—the major label parenting, for instance, Arista Records, offering distribution to Bad Boy Entertainment—were delivering even more gangsta rap, Time Warner alleged itself targeted by political opportunists. Still, while gaining only some 2.5% of its own income from Interscope, Time Warner was in some 40% of households via cable television, and needed congressional approvals to expand in cable. [On the Tucker and Bennett teamwork against Time Warner, see Ken Auletta, "Fighting words", The New Yorker, 12 Jun 1995, p 35. On that and Time Warner's counteraccusation, see Richard S. Dunham & Michael Oneal, "Gunning for the gangstas", Business Week, 1995 Jun 19;3249:41. Toward the BMG tangent, see Christina Saraceno, "Bad Boy and Arista part ways", Rolling Stone, 21 Jun 2002. On Dole joining, and the pressure on Time Warner amid an important congressional bill on cable reform, see Julia Chaplin,"Dogg Fight", Spin, 1995 Oct;11(7):46. On Time Warner's profits and ownerships, which, besides the major label Warner Music Group, included some intermediary labels, too—Atlantic, Elektra, Reprise, and Warner Bros.—and on Warner Music Group dropping Interscope to likely nil consequence for either Time Warner, Interscope, Death Row, or music lyrics, see Julia Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65.] Time Warner called them political opportunists, but divested from Death Row's intermediary, Interscope Records. Interscope's 1991 cofounder Jimmy Iovine was promptly dined by four of the other five major labels, the then Big Six's rivals to Warner Music. At Interscope's options, Iovine reacted, "I'm just happy we got our company back." Interscope chose MCA, soon renamed Universal. Suge Knight, too, expressed relief, and his Death Row label, unfazed, steamrolled onward. Death Row actually counterattacked, in August 1995 suing Tucker [Cynthia Littleton, "Time Warner, rap foe sued by Death Row", UPI, 18 Aug 1995], and in March 1996 publicizing alleged dirt that its hired private investigators, Palladino & Sutherland, found on her [Chuck Philips, "Anti-rap crusader under fire", Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar 1996]. The lawsuit was later withdrawn [Elaine Woo, "C. DeLores Tucker, 78; civil rights pioneer led a spirited campaign against gangsta rap", Los Angeles Times, 14 Oct 2005]. But soon, Death Row imploded, by troubles in house, signaled and spurred by Dre's departure to form Aftermath Entertainment in March 1996, by Tupac Shakur's shooting death amid Death Row posturing in September 1996, by CEO Suge Knight's imprisonment for parole violation in March 1997, and basically completed by Snoop's departure, going to Master P's No Limit Records, in January 1998 [Neil Strauss, "Rap empire unraveling as stars flee", The New York Times, 1998 Jan 26, § D, p 1]. Cf., Thomas Harrison, Music of the 1990s (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), p 51. Harris notes that Tha Dogg Pound saw its October 1995 or debut album, Dogg Food, "delayed, as sharesholders of their parent record company, Interscope/Time Warner, had decided that they would protest the lyrical content of the album". Harris claims that, "coupled with the shareholder's protest, Suge Knight's incarceration, Snoop Dogg's exit, and Tupac Shakur's death ended the label's hold on the hip-hop scene". As Harris concedes, "the album did enjoy high sales". But in Harris's estimation, "this was the last high-selling album released on Death Row in the 1990s". On the contrary, released months later, in February 1996, 2Pac's All Eyez on Me was a juggernaut. Merely, by February 1998, Tha Dogg Pound's Daz was the last high-selling artist still with Death Row [Strauss, NYT, 1998]. And in 1995, Interscope, not having shareholders, had sided against Warner, a quagmire resolved by their splitting, as Warner was the only major label with American shareholding [J Chapman, "The race card", Spin, 1996 Jan;11(10):65]. And even without Interscope and its next major label, MCA/Universal, there was the giant independent label Priority Records, unfettered in distributing gangsta rap, like N.W.A and the Geto Boys, ready to pick up Death Row's distribution [Strauss, NYT, 1998 & Randall Sullivan, Labyrinth: The True Story (Grove Press, 2007)]. In fact, it was Priority that had distributed Tha Dogg Pound's album Dogg Food [Chapman, Spin, 1996]. In the late 1990s, as G-funk's era closed, The Chronic grew into a popular classic.   And yet "Bitches Ain't Shit" would refuel recurring rebuke and debate over this slang term for women, such depictions of them, and, more broadly, its album's pivotal role in popularizing the values of idealized street gangsters.

Female listeners
Bay Area rapper Too Short had smeared types of women since 1985, or 1983, more vaguely. "Bitches Ain't Shit" apparently "scorned all women," and "presented misogyny with an explanation." Although the words bitch and ho can be playful or even loving, the song scorns any trust or love for such. While many were instantly offended, women fond of the song often explained, "It's not about me." Especially from women, a near apology emerged: Oh, I just like the beat. But in one view, this adopts a sexist stereotype: "men work the intellect, and women work the body." At least some girls who ignored accosts by passerby boys were harassed by chants from the hook.

In perhaps 1995, a New York rap mogul promoted a party where one Sarah Jones was, "like some video ho, singing along to 'bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks.' " She noticed, "This is not me. You know, I disagree!' " Wistful for classic hip hop, she wrote a poem, "Your Revolution," its motif ''Your revolution will not happen between these thighs.  Read as slam poetry, it helped her get an Off-Broadway show, and in 2000 was televised on cable TV series Def Poetry Jam.  DJ Vadim then produced a version to music.  In 2001, the Federal Communications Commission, deeming it indecent, fined a Portland radio station for playing it, but reversed after Jones became the first artist'' ever to sue the FCC.

In 1995, Dream Hampton, about her first writing assignment, reviewing the debut or 1990 album of H.W.A., or Hoes With Attitudes, recalled "boys' most twisted notions of womanhood—that 'bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks.' " The Source 's September 1993 issue has Hampton profiling Snoop but noting, "Women like him because of, not in spite of, his verse on 'Bitches Ain't Shit,' " among her own "two favorite songs this summer." New York rapper Jadakiss, a man, called women the "main ones" seeking "entertainment" by Snoop and "that 'Bitches Ain't Shit' shit." In 2008 in Detroit, a female open mic's planning held a female focus group, which, scorning the proposed name, advised Bitches Ain't Shit.Kellie D. Hay & Rebekah Farrugia, Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), pp ix–xi & pp 25–27. Hay & Farrugia, both professors in the communications department at Oakland University, located in Michigan, discuss at length Piper Carter, author of a foreword in the book. Carter had grown up living in Detroit and New York, and attended college both at Howard University, located in Washington, DC, and at the State University of New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, located in New York City. After several years as a fashion photographer in New York, Carter returned to Detroit, but found Detroit's rap scene stultifying, especially for women, and sought to form a rap club for women. Carter's effort led to a "no-misogyny open mic" named the Foundation for Women in Hip Hop, active from 2009 to 2015, which drew local, national, and international media coverage. In 2012, after several weeks of attending the open mic, which was held each Tuesday night, Hay & Farrugia began interviewing and shadowing Carter. Carter recalls initially having gone throughout the community while expressing her wish to "build a hip-hop community where women can get on", but Carter found that "no one cared" and that they felt it "a dumb and horrible idea". Still, two local rappers who were already established—Invincible as well as Miz Korona—lent support, stimulating more support. Carter then "went back to the collective body" and suggestting "calling the women and hip-hop group the Foundation and the first thing—and I thought everyone would think it's genius—and the first thing I heard was, 'That's the dumbest name. Why don't you call it Bitches Ain't Shit?' " "They were like, 'You should have girls in bikinis with Jello shots.' I was like blown back. These were coming from women!" which "younger women were upset" and "actually wanted to do the misogyny and they preferred that. Not only did they suggest it, they were actually fighting me and pissed off because I didn't want to do that stuff. Now this proves the need; I'm definitely calling it this. If it's upsetting them that much, it's going to be called that." [pp 26–27]

In 2015, chairperson of theatre arts Amy Cook, in research on casting, indulged her urge "to sing along about how 'bitches ain't shit.' " Her own dissimilarity, being white and female, versus from the rappers, thus her likelihood to get cast as "one of the various 'bitches,' " expands her "leap" into an "outlaw" persona fit to counter any threat. "I take on the position of the powerful, the angry, the sad, the person aggrieved by 'bitches.' " Further, amid the female/male distinction's social primacy, when beholding such a "strategic miscasting, or counter casting," Cook explains, "the spectators must consider the nature of their expectations." Cook finds, then, "a cultural power in the counter casting."

Snoop effect
In 1990, rappers MC Lyte as well as Queen Latifah, both icons and female, discredited gripes about misogyny in rap. Lyte, 19, rejecting protest at the word bitch, advised women to just end their own fandom of rappers like Too Short and N.W.A. Latifah, 20, traced allegedly sexist lyrics to real types of women. Yet on N.W.A.'s final or May 1991 album, in the song "One Less Bitch," mostly a Dr. Dre rap, Eazy-E says, in part, "a fool is one who believes that all women are ladies. A nigga's one who believes that all ladies are bitches. And all bitches are created equal." "To me, all bitches ain't shit!" The Source chief editor Kim Osario recalls, "Once Snoop said, 'Bitches ain't shit,' it was a wrap for us."

Vibe 's debut issue, September 1993, has Snoop in its cover story reasoning that his debut "Deep Cover" evaded what scandal beset Ice-T's "Cop Killer" by his own hook's using a police code for homicide, 1-8-7. As to his infamous hook, interviewer Kevin Powell "cornered" him about bitch meaning "women" or, allegedly, "black women." Snoop reportedly answered, "It's just a word, you know, that you grew up with. It's some shit that's hard to shake." Ice-T, later discussing Snoop, likened ghetto idiom's bitch to nigga, disputed the gravity that outsiders impute to ho, and posed, "All men are dogs. How many times have you heard women say that?" "Bitches Ain't Shit" may be some fallout from that slur.Courtney Long, Love Awaits: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love and Life (New York: Bantam Books/Doubleday, 1996), cites that 1985 movie The Color Purple and 1989 book Disappearing Acts, wherein female characters apparently triumph over male characters, drew accolades, but adds that black men retaliated with rap songs including "Bitches Ain't Shit". Long suggests that black women then coined the Niggas ain't shit as well as the All men are dogs "clichés" as "defensive and reactionary comebacks" [p xiii. Whereas the Purple movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and nominated 14 times for an Oscar, was of 1985, the Disappearing book, by [[Terry McMillan]], was of 1989, when Publishers Weekly reported its "flash and energy" but lag in "depth and breadth", while the narrative carries "her politics" via some dialogue effecting "a position paper" or "an old-fashioned kind of novel, the kind with a Message" ["Disappearing Acts: Terry McMillan, author, Viking Books", PublishersWeekly.com, PWxyz, LLC., 1 Aug 1989]. A Hollywood movie was released in 2000. Yet as to Courtney Long, author of the 1996 suggestion that women "coined" All men are dogs once "Bitches Ain't Shit" lyrics "punched back" at reports of "outstanding artistic works" elevating women over men, Long's prior book is a 1995 and, per Google Books, "the nonfiction equivalent to the bestselling Waiting to Exhale" [Courtney Long, Dearest Brothers, Love Awaits, Much Peace, Your Sisters: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love, and Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1995)]. In 1992, before "Bitches Ain't Shit" release in December, the novel Waiting to Exhale, "by any standard an astonishing success", Terry McMillan's book after Disappearing Acts and likewise published by Viking Press, was a New York Times bestseller for 11 weeks by August 9 [Daniel Max, "McMillan's millions", The New York Times, 9 Aug 1992, §6, p 20]. Its paperback rights drew $2.64 million, among the highest ever for a reprint, and Hollywood studio sought rights [Ibid.] The movie adaptation, starring an ensemble cast, in 1995, was the first American black "chick flick" and "was heavily criticized for its male-bashing and materialism" [Deborah Barker, "The Southern-fried chick flick: Postfeminism goes to the movies", in Suzanne Ferriss & Mallory Young, eds., Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008), p 112. Further, "it presents a liberal interpretation of the heterosexual feminist complaint that 'all men are dogs.' " [Carla Freccero, Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York & London: NYU Press, 1999), p 94. Allegedly, the movie's subtitle may as well be All Men Are Dogs [Paul Willistein, "Men may hold breath watching 'Waiting to Exhale' ", MCall.com, The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 22 Dec 1995]. Also in 1995, the 1992 book itself, Waiting to Exhale, was associated with All men are dogs griping as a longstanding convention while "brothers are no better" via rap songs that call women "bitches" and degrade them as sex objects [Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. & Colleen Birchett, Africans Who Shaped Our Faith (Chicago: Urban Ministries, Inc., 1995), p 41. A dozen years later, one Ronnell "Chewy" Coombs depicts the rap lyric as men's whining, and such pimp talk as pretense, somewhat independent of the All men are dogs phrase, which itself is attributed to women's own tendencies preexisting [What Real Niggaz Want from a Woman (Brooklyn, NY: Hip-Hop Fever Promotions, L.L.C., 2008), p 27. All men are dogs doctrine had long been conventional by American black women, allegedly thus fostering a mirroring by their sons to manifest a "Dog Syndrome" [Kimberly Springer, "Strongblackwomen and black feminism: A next generation?", in Jo Reger, ed., Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp 17–18. In 1981, some researchers drew recollections from a sample of American young women black and found that their most commonly recalled teachings by their mothers about men were declarations like "no good" and "dogs" [Gloria I. Joseph & Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black & White Feminist Perspectives (New York: Anchor Press, 1981 / Boston: South End Press, 1986), pp 112–113 or –115]. All men are dogs was present [p 114. Aside from specifically black women, a 2004 article in a popular women's magazine criticized the prevailing pop feminism as "Bad Dog" feminism, allegedly dehumanizing and denigrating men, as by All men are dogs mantra, an "astonishingly" old tactic of female bonding [Emily Nussbaum, "Is this girl power? Men are dogs, men are babies, men are stupid. Come on! Man-bashing may be good for a laugh, but it's no good for women", Glamour (Condé Nast), 2004 Jun;102(6):120–131, p 122.

Dre's carefully crafted "G"—a sociable street gangsta ever at leisure until violent on threats to his comforts and privileges —spawned untold copycatting.   And the "Bitches Ain't Shit" track—"the final wisdom Dr. Dre left us on The Chronic" —lays bare the basic values of the aura. This was refined in Snoop's breakthrough, early rap brand, intoxicated on alcohol and marijuana, mellow and debonair, but, while loyal to the homies, guntoting and misogynistic. Amid the rap genre's snowballing corporate consolidation underway, Snoop's persona fed rap's massive commercialization, like his endorsements of St. Ides malt liquor and Tanqueray gin, in the 1990s. Traditional R&B rapidly diminished.

In 1999, rap magazine Ego Trip named "16 Memorable Misogynist Rap Music Moments." They date to 1985: the pioneer, Too Short, still at #3, "The Bitch Sucks Dick." Ahead of that, the #2 moment, is "Bitches Ain't Shit." This trails only Snoop with, the next year, more male camaraderie and teamwork,  now featuring Warren G, Nate Dogg, and again Kurupt: the Doggystyle track "Ain't No Fun (If the Homies Can't Have None)." Also never a single, yet another huge underground hit, "Ain't No Fun" is often recalled with "Bitches Ain't Shit." Snoop's second underground hit swiftly fulfilled what Snoop's first had presaged: the end of popular music's tenacious idealization of women.

Female reply
Ahead of Beyoncé as solo icon, Vibe profiled the lead singer's R&B group Destiny's Child. "Chockful of sophisticated, ball-busting, and often comical hits that berated brothers," its second or June 1999 album, The Writing's on the Wall, "earned the group reputations for being everything from gold-digging male bashers—a charge the girls heatedly deny—to new-millennium feminists out to challenge the bitches-ain't-shit posturing that plagued much of late-'90s R&B and hip hop," recalls the February 2001 issue. By contrast, of March 2000, rapper Trina's debut album Da Baddest Bitch imparts "sexually explicit tales riddled with braggadocio and vulgarity."  Late to reply, Trina redoes the 1992 hook's fellatio as her "Niggas ain't shit" hook's cunnilingus directive. Yet in 1996, rapper Lil' Kim, by a track name on her debut solo album Hard Core, hailed herself as the "Queen Bitch."  And though Canadian singer/rapper Peaches' 2003 effort to offend American men may appear stunted by patriarchy, Angus Whitehead, " ' Stick it to the pimp': Peaches' penetration of postmodern America's mainstream", in Tristanne Connolly & Tomoyuki Iino, eds., Canadian Music and American Culture: Get Away From Me (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2017), wherein pp 259–260 skim the Canadian singer/rapper Peaches' shtick of chronically trying to offend men by vulgar sexual objectification of men when she is not issuing political judgments, yet the next page alleges a different reason that American music fans have not widely embraced her despite her "strong US following". At her American concerts in 2003, "crowds yelled, 'fuck you, bitch', 'get off the stage, gay man'." Peaches, however, viewed this as her success antagonizing patriarchal views. Americana's vexation at Peaches allegedly revealed "enduring inequality" since Dr. Dre can glorify pimps over hos in "Bitches Ain't Shit", but "even in 2016, an American mainstream has a problem with women intelligently articulating, parodying, and playing with the hitherto male preserve of graphic, macho sexual attitudes", as in the "nuanced, witty pedagogy" of Peaches, who is quoted, "The music must first be good. Then I can offend, make people think, and make them dance" [p 261. On the other hand, Matt Lemay ["Peaches: Fatherfucker", [[Pitchfork.com]], Condé Nast, 29 Oct 2003], scorns her 2003 album, Fatherfucker, as mostly mindless and numbing, despite Lemay praising her prior or 2000 album, The Teaches of Peaches, as disarmingly direct and instinctive [Sound recording, "Peaches—F*** the Pain Away", XL Recordings "Verified" channel @ YouTube, 11 Aug 2014]. Lil' Kim's second or July 2000 album answers "Bitches Ain't Shit" artfully.

Lil' Kim's 2000 song "Suck My Dick" is, in English professor Greg Thomas's view, an "anti-sexist faceoff" where Lil' Kim "talks back," delivering "a royal reply," to the 1992 "classic" and "flips its sexual script," such that ultimately, "Snoop and Dre get tricked themselves, lyrically." Lil' Kim interpolates their 1992 hook's four bars only to finish her final verse and segue to her own hook, original. Her hook, a duo with a man—his only vocals—is after each of her three verses. In verse one, Lil' Kim identifies with enterprising, ghetto, intoxicated women, boasts of combat prowess and sexual power, but poses, "Imagine if I was dude, and hitting cats from the back." Soon aping a man, she is still rapping, " 'Ey, yo, yo, come here so I can bust in your mouth"—how she closes verse one—when a man, starting the hook over her vocals, yells, " 'Ey, yo, come here, bitch." Thus dragged into the hook, she snaps, "Nigga, fuck you," is asked, "Why you acting like a bitch?"—her reply,  'Cause y'all niggas ain't shit—and her hook's own fellatio directive, hypothetical, is what, "if I was a dude, I'd tell y'all."

In verse two, Lil' Kim, supplier of many intoxicants, wants only money and cunnilingus, but "got this nigga now" who, tipsy, "asked me did I love him." Aping a demeaning vocal sample in 2 Live Crew's hook of "Me So Horny"—on 1989 album As Nasty as They Wanna Be—Lil' Kim replied, "I love you long time," got "some head" and "the piss sucked out" without requiting, and secretly recorded it to show her "girls." Ending verse two, she brags, "Niggas know he gave me all his cake"—a double entendre for money—"I peeled the Benji's off and threw the singles back in his face." Thomas reads, "The male 'nigga' is now"—derided by the stripper—"the 'trick' who gets done." In verse three, a "dude named Jaleel," seeming a rich socialite, offered Lil' Kim "10 grand just to belly dance" and "come all over his pants," but "showed up with his homeboy named Julio," and "was a phony." Recalling her gun in his mouth—Fool, give me my money!—she relabels him "just a nigga frontin'." She chimes, "Niggas ain't shit, but they can still trick," and limits them to sucking till she climaxes and jumps up.

Pop revised
In 2003, Lil' Kim reemerged with her third solo album and her "Queen B" persona, leading women's effort—perhaps first attempted near 1970—to reappropriate the word bitch, this time amid lingering "Bitches Ain't Shit" ethos. Proclaiming the title bitch, women blunted the slur and reframed it to buoy their own ambitions. But since their 1996 albums, both Lil' Kim and, debuting then, her main rap contemporary female, Foxy Brown—who would slur each other as various types of "bitch" —had employed profane boasts of vanity and lewdness, avarice and violence, more gangsta rap. (The 1974 blaxploitation film Foxy Brown's beautiful, indomitable protagonist regained currency in 1995, Debbie Clare Olson, "Films, exploitation", in Melissa Hope Ditmore, ed., Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Volume 1 (Greenwood Press, 2006), pp 165–166 calls blaxploitation "exploitation films". They are usually set in "exaggerated" areas, either the Deep South or the inner city, with characters that exaggerate the vices and ills of sex, drugs, and violence. Blaxploitation films were produced for only about five years, but depicted stereotypes of pimps and prostitutes remained prevalent in popular media even in 2005, since the films allegedly had the "ability to create and then naturalize certain stereotypes, particularly for those marginalized groups". Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown, based on 1974 film Foxy Brown, was tribute to blaxploitation films. Another allegation is of blaxploitation films is "gratuitous violence and nudity" as "ever-lingering misogynistic barriers", although " 'Foxy Brown' introduced blaxploitation film audiences to strong, sexy, and outspoken women for the first time" [Sari Rosenberg, "April 5, 1974: 'Foxy Brown' starring Pam Grier was released", MyLifetime.com, A&E Television Networks, 5 Apr 2018]. In 1994, cultural critic Nelson George described the lead actor, Pam Grier, as a cult figure liked even by many feminists. Grier was a rare nonwhite woman who had star vehicles developed for her physical beauty and ability to punish men who challenged her [Greg Braxton, "She's back and badder than ever: Pam Grier's '70s blaxploitation films are a big kick again, making the star a hot retro hero", Los Angeles Times, 27 Aug 1995]. And by August 1995, or 20 years after her film career's pinnacle, Grier was in high demand by young fans [Ibid.]. after her cameo in a Snoop music video of 1994. ) By allegedly roundabout reinforcement of "Bitches Ain't Shit," both rappers were accused of "resurrecting Jezebel" —purportedly endemic stereotypes of women, especially of black women—a model sustained since 2010 by Nicki Minaj and 2015 by Cardi B. In any case, Lil' Kim's persona stressed loyalty—especially to her one "nigga"—and in some ways grew women's senses of liberties. Per a 2009 analysis, Lil' Kim's 2000 song "Sucky My Dick" —retorting "Bitches Ain't Shit"—"moves beyond any rigid gender or sexual identity."

Meanwhile, during 2002, certain singers, rather, including Usher and Alicia Keys, were leading a revitalization of R&B's soul tradition, after a decade of the rap genre, with its "Bitches Ain't Shit" model, invading the R&B genre. But by 2005, in the rap genre itself, "Bitches Ain't Shit" had seemingly stood, as New York rapper Jadakiss would hyperbolize, "since the beginning of time." And yet, in 2012, at The Chronic 's 20th anniversary, Billboard magazine still found, at this track, "an elephant in the room here: the misogyny is ugly and thick, even for a rap record," as "women are treated like disposable sperm receptacles." The album was, by then, both a rap classic and a popular classic, anyway, roundly celebrated at its 25th anniversary. "A misogynistic hip-hop masterpiece and relic of the past," wrote one music journalist during the commemoration. Another journalist, meanwhile, called it "rap's world-building masterpiece." In 2020, the Library of Congress entered it in the National Recording Registry. By then, music artists of over 40 songs had borrowed from "Bitches Ain't Shit." In the process, it had become, additionally, "a gorgeous piano ballad" —a 2008 description of the 2005 cover version by rock artist Ben Folds —which entered the main popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100."Chart history: Ben Folds—Hot 100", Billboard.com, Billboard Media, LLC, visited 20 Jun 2020. "Bitches Ain't Shit" spent one week on the Hot 100, where it held #71 for the week ending on April 2, 2005. The single's A side, "Landed", in two weeks on it, peaked at #77 on February 26, 2005. Although this webpage's droplist menu, now simply an unsorted list, no longer has subheaders, there once were groupings, relevant in this case to distinguish popular via consumer uptake versus pop via music genre. Whereas the Hot 100 is a "popular" songs chart, there are "pop" songs charts, rather, like the Adult Top 40, where "Landed" peaked at #40 on August 13, 2005, and where "Brick", by his earlier band, Ben Folds Five, peaked at #11 on March 21, 1998 ["—Adult Top 40"]. Meanwhile, on another "pop" songs chart, the Mainstream Top 40, "Brick" reached #17 on March 28, 1998 ["—Mainstream Top 40"]. Yet on Billboard 's other "popular" songs chart, Triple A Songs, where "Brick" had placed #9 on February 14, 1998, the Ben Folds song "You Don't Know Me", featuring Regina Spektor, peaked at #28 on November 15, 2008, and "Phone in a Pool" peaked, also at #28, on September 9, 2015 ["—Triple A Songs"]. Outside of "popular" and "pop" but under a "rock" chart is Alternative Airplay, wherein Folds has five songs, the first four as Ben Folds Five and the fifth as Ben Folds: "Battle of Who Could Care Less" for 12 weeks at #22 peak on April 26, 1997; "Brick" for 26 weeks at #6 peak on February 7, 1998; "Song for the Dumped" for 9 weeks at #23 peak on June 13, 1998; "Army" for 11 weeks at #17 peak on May 29, 1999; "Rockin' the Suburbs" for 11 weeks at #28 peak on September 22, 2001 "Chart History: Ben Folds—Alternative Airplay", Billboard.com, Billboard Media, LLC, visited 14 Aug 2021]. Note that the Billboard 200, rather, is a "popular" albums chart.

Development
In July 2003, Ben Folds issued an EP, which covered the Cure's 1985 song "In Between Days." In 2005, still writing solo but again playing as a trio of piano, drums, and bass, Folds had his second solo studio album, Songs for Silverman, set for April 26 release by Epic Records. For the lead single, "Landed," issued on February 1, he sought a B side. Having wanted since college to put a melody to rap group Public Enemy's 1990 song "Can't Do Nuttin' for Ya, Man", he soon "found it too symmetrical for a good melody," effecting "too much of a Cat in the Hat vibe to sound serious with sad chords."

Folds sought in his rap collection a classic with vocals more varying from English poetry's classic metre, iambic pentameter. He found "Bitches Ain't Shit," chose only Dr. Dre's and Snoop Dogg's lyrics" —thus omitting the other three verses, whose boasting, gloating, and slurring impart most of the misogyny —slowed the tempo, and, Folds says, "just added pretty chords and one of my best melodies." With only Dre's and Snoop's sagas of endured betrayal, the hook—chiming "ain't shit but hos and tricks" best fit to "suck the dick" —sounds, in Folds's view, "like a sad Johnny Cash song with a lot more vulgarity."

In some views, his piano version, alike a minstrel show, mocks blacks, or, exposing "musical misogyny" as "absurd bullshit," takes the original, "flips it on its head, and makes Dr. Dre look like an idiotic buffoon." Yet by consensus, it parodies Ben Folds "whiteness." "It's touchy," he says, "because someone could say, 'You think all rap is like this.' But no, it's specifically gangsta rap." Calling his own genre "punk rock for sissies," he depicts a man "hurt" or "wrecked." About the rap song, he asserts, "Dr. Dre is no dummy: there's comedy in it, there's Quentin Tarantino, and then there's also serious stuff in it."

Composition
The cover version, while importing lyrics, is a new composition. Ben Folds on piano, Lindsay Jamieson on drum kit, and Jared Reynolds on bass guitar, the song sounds like classic Ben Folds until the middle eight —traditionally, an interlude of eight bars markedly diverting from the song's established sound —which adds a synthesizer, played at high pitch, evoking the rap song's eerie ring ubiquitous, "the funky worm." More specifically, where the Snoop verse recalls abrupt separation from his beloved "bitch named Mandy May" by jail time, the rap song—whose funky worm simply endures—reintroduces "The Bridge" instrumental sample, which plays across these two bars. Lacking a sample to reintroduce there, the rock song starts its middle eight, commonly but perhaps falsely called "the bridge" of a song. These eight bars also span release from jail, "news" about his "girl," and need to assault whomever the complicit man. Thereafter, the Dre song's Snoop verse—totaling 22 lyrical lines arranged on 22 musical bars—spans six more lines/bars, which meanwhile vary the bass riff.

In the rap Snoop verse, his journey to her house and arrival with handgun span two bars of bass riff absent, then his kicking the door in and shock by the sight span two bars of bass riff halted—with the bass strings strummed till each bar's midpoint but there stopped of resonance—whereas his uncocking the gun and forsaking "a bitch" span two bars of bass riff normal, how it remains in Snoop's immediate hook recital, then, and thereafter. By contrast, the rock song's bass play at car ride and gun grab rests except to attack both orthodox stresses—the one and the three of four counts per bar—and likewise at door kick, but upon the sight, all music play vanishes for a bar. The next two bars play only a chord of treble keys—struck near beat one, and then only resonating—while Folds, newly speaking, covers uncocking, but omits forsaking. This bar has covered the line's only first half: I'm heartbroke, but I'm still loc'd. The next bar is silent till beat two, when a bandmate finishes the line—Man, fuck that bitch—and then cues "three, four," how the next beat unites the band in full attack and singing of the Snoop hook.

Yet two choruses—the known Snoop hook and a new Dre hook—play in the cover. More specifically, Dre's verse, still the song's first verse, loses its closing line—So recognize, then pass to Daz—while its prior three lines/bars are rearranged as four bars and phrased as a hook. Before this, the song opens with Folds on piano keys sparsely—only one chord every half bar—then resting while his bandmates speak, "Bitches ain't shit." Folds then sings, solo, the Snoop hook and then Dre's verse, which closes as the Dre chorus joined by singing bandmates. Jamieson then sings, solo, the Snoop verse's first eight bars, which set up the middle eight—multiple singers and synth at high pitch—and then Folds sings, solo, the last six bars till just short of their cap, added by Reynolds. His three, four count cues united singing of the Snoop chorus. Folds then sings Dre's verse again—yet atop brighter keys and livelier drums—this time with backing, accenting vocals. Dre's verse again closes as the Dre chorus. The very beat after it, its first line/bar becomes a refrain—Bitches can't hang with the streets—sung every other bar till song end. (In the rap song, the beat after Snoop's final hook recital starts Dre's refrain, every fourth bar till song end, Bitches ain't shit.)

Release
Between the February 1 release of Songs for Silverman 's lead single "Landed" and the album's April 26 release, Folds bypassed record labels to directly issue "Bitches Ain't Shit," on March 8, by only Apple's iTunes. Soon, his own website presold "Bitches Ain't Shit" on a forthcoming, expanded album version on vinyl, an LP record. And it was the B side of the "Landed" single 's vinyl edition, the 7'' or 45 RPM format. By then, these appeared to be "unusual marketing ideas." "Bitches Ain't Shit" is also on his October 2006 compilation album of covers, Supersunnyspeedgraphic, the LP. Playing live, rather, "Ben Folds sitting at a piano evokes an old-fashioned crooner or lounge act."

Reception
In 2007, across June into August, John Mayer toured America with two Grammy Awards for his Continuum as the prior year's best pop album with a best pop song, "Waiting on the World to Change." On that tour, up to 15 000 per arena, an opener was Ben Folds, who, father of twins, age 7, and nearing divorce, had just completed his own tour. Folds admits that he was causing problems on the tour, and that "the biggest problem" was otherwise, or elsewhere, "a very successful single." Mayer's fans reliably booed "Bitches Ain't Shit." Feigning bewilderment by the scorn, as if it had made him lose track, Folds would replay the song till the crowd quieted or, as he urged, sang along.

Whereas many cover versions succeed unto themselves, the irony of this one—swapping genres, subcultures, and largely races —partly relies on recognition of the original song, gangsta rap. Folds recalls, however, that the John Mayer crowds, not angered by the word niggas—which the piano ballad renders ostentatious —disdained the curse words and lewdness, especially the fellatio lyrics. Since the demographic was, like his own, whites of middle class, Folds deemed the scorn trivial and felt Fuck 'em. In 2019, stating uncertainty how to explain this, Folds called it "childish," and likened it to chronically pushing on a sore tooth, "something in the human psyche that just doubles down."

Some others felt that Folds was belittling a rap classic. In 2019, Folds recalled that the "most compelling argument" he ever saw was between his friend Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide and Michael Doughty of Soul Coughing, two musicians, yet Folds perhaps did not clarify Doughty's complaint in this debate via internet. Questlove, visiting Folds, admired the artistic respect paid to the original. A rock critic calls the rap song, which closes Dr. Dre's 1992 album, "a sumptuous slice of Olympic-level sexism that's almost as memorable as Ben Folds' emotional, piano-ballad version." "When it came out," Folds says, "I remember bouncers—big black dudes with bald heads standing right in front of me while I'm playing—they'd hear the lyrics to Dr. Dre and they're like, 'Yeah!' They thought that was great."

Altogether, whatever offensiveness by the cover version was trivial until about 2010.Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg popularized a brand of rap music stridently apolitical, consumerist, and ruthlessly acquisitive, allegedly in line with the socioeconomic policies termed neoliberalism [Gosa TL, "Fifth element", in Williams JA, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Cambridge UP, 2015, p 56. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism was an American consensus [Allen A, "Feminist perspectives on power", § 3.3, in Zalta EN, ed., SEP, 2021 Winter]. It premised postfeminism, "a shift from collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity" conceived as "girl power" freed from both patriarchy and feminism to pursue her own interests [Banet-Weiser S, Feminist Media Histories, 2018 Spring;4(2):152–156]. But allegedly, as a consumer media culture, "the neoliberal capitalist context that enables postfeminism is one that privileges whiteness and the middle class as ideal subjectivities" [Ibid.]. Then, "the 2008 financial crisis made it seem that capitalism had flunked a test, and the damage fell disproportionately on the younger members of society. This has spawned a contingent of young journalists and bloggers who have begun to identify themselves as Marxists" [Bowman CG, Connecticut Law Review, 2016 Nov;49(1):117–170, p 168. Socialist feminism thus "made a comeback" [Allen, § 3.3], and via the internet, especially Twitter, started feminism's fourth wave by 2010 [Hall KMQ, Meridians, 2016;15(1):86–105, Grady C, "The waves of feminism—", Vox.com, 20 Jul 2018]. Meanwhile, to stem leak of his September 2008 album, including its "Bitch Went Nuts" track, Ben Folds issued several "fake" songs, including "Bitch Went Nutz" [with a Z, benfoldsTV @ YouTube], written "earnestly" from a Republican lawyer's viewpoint having taken to an office party his girlfriend, who spews her "left, liberal views" [Downs D, "Why I leaked it: Ben Folds comes clean—", [[RollingStone.com]], 13 Aug 2008]. Into 2009, rock covers of gangsta rap, still multiplying, were a "tradition" and the Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" a standard [Appleford S, Spin, 2009 Jun;25(6):44. Yet in November 2008, uploaded to YouTube was a video of the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, singing it while staging the performers to appear not of the middle class but instead of the leisure class Wade L, " 'Bitches Ain't Shit' gets the Glee treatment", Jezebel.com, 15 Sep 2010]. In 2010, a popular feminist blog aired this "example of resistance" against Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" via "race, class, and gender contradictions" to "expose it as grossly misogynistic" [Ibid.]. Three months later, once Folds played a theater near Barnard College and covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy", rap, by a white woman, a local columnist lamented "the whole Ironic Cover thing, which is a problem right now, generally", and noted that he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dr. Dre cover, "way more problematic" [Harvilla R, "Live: Ben Folds swears profusely—", VillageVoice.com, 15 Dec 2010]. In 2012, a feminist writer historicized that his Dr. Dre cover, allegedly misogynist and racist, "was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop" [Anderson LV, "Where do I start with Ben Folds?", Slate.com, 17 Sep 2012]. In 2013, a few black feminists started BLM [Bridewell AT, First-Gen Voices, 2016 Feb;5(1):13. Developing "arguments that centralized black cis and trans women in the fight for justice" [Steele CK, Fem Media Stud, 2021;21(5):860–863], black feminists, blaming white women for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, accrued influence within feminist activism against President Trump [Watters J, Wm & Mary J Women & L, 2017 Nov;24(1):199–207]. Others likewise attributed his "rise" to neoliberalism, which allegedly had employed "crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted" [Monbiot G, "Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems", TheGuardian.com, 15 Apr 2016]. Amid the 2020 crises, black feminism advanced socialist feminism toward a "mass movement" [Taylor KY, "Until black women are free—", NewYorker.com, 20 Jul 2020]. In June, a "reevaluating" of popular music resulted, with a Southern duo's name change from Dixie Chicks to The Chicks and the "deeply problematic" Ben Folds "Bitches Ain't Shit" drawing his own retraction attempt [Steinberg B, "Hear us out: June saw musicians imagining—", InsideHook.com, 30 June 2020]. By 2020, Folds had had five songs on Billboard 's popular charts, starting in 1998 with his breakthrough his "Brick" and into 2015. Both in 2005, two of the five songs reached the main popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100. "Landed," highly promoted by Epic Records' major label Sony Music, on the Hot 100 for two weeks, peaked on February 26 at #77. The other, "featuring" bass guitarist Jared Reynolds and drummer Lindsay Jamieson as "Mr. Reynolds" and "Lin-Z," a rendition ironically sentimental, "had spread by word of mouth and was now doubling my audiences," if regrettably raising share of "drunken college boys," Folds recalls. "Bitches Ain't Shit," on the Hot 100 for the one week ending April 2, placed #71.

"The cackles and singing from the audiences," writes a researcher, "suggest that they are hailed by the song, welcomed in, and engaged to be a part of it. And they like it." In gist, "the collision" of character's role versus performer's mold bares "the network" of unseen implications. Prefacing an April 2007 performance, Folds recalled "one nasty letter" and a few times of almost been beaten up, "once by a kind of uptight hippie woman who said it was demeaning to women." He referred her to "the lyrics department"—Dr. Dre—while her daughter, age 13, "apparently loves the song." At this Michigan State University show, the first line, Bitches ain't shit, drew a male yell So true!, yet the reception, eager and joyous, was evidently led by female voices. This remained so in April 2017 at a theater in Eastern Pennsylvania. In 2008, book publisher Rough Guides anthologized the song in the Best Music You've Never Heard.

Rejection
A 2005 album review recalls, about Ben Folds, "his tricksy piano songs were the first to teach us that alt. rock didn't need to arrive strapped to a Marshall amp." Perhaps likewise, "Folds has always been defined by what he is not—not hip, not fresh, not underground"—till Songs for Silverman, "more mature," lent "solid core to his musings." His solo debut or 2001 album's title track, "Rockin' the Suburbs," evoked nonidentity by satirizing him as a white male of middle class. Yet after 2009, that "identity" plus "scrutiny" of his old songs found they "aren't terribly reassuring to feminist listeners." In a 1998 issue of Bitch, a writer sensed in Folds fans a type "who feels threatened by feminist empowerment." Rita Hao, Fall 1998, "And now a word from our sponsors: Feminism for sale", in Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler, eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Reprinted therein is allegation of "that most bizarre of phenomena, the nervous Ben Folds Five/Verve Pipe fan who feels threatened by feminist empowerment ('How come them chicks get their own concert tour and us guys don't?')" [p 115. In 1996, playing a festival, Sarah McLachlan had found a planner hesitant to bill two female performers in a row, whereupon she began the Lilith Fair [Yohana Desta, "Lilith's Fair ladies take girl power on U.S. tour", TheEagleOnline.com, The Eagle (American University), 31 Mar 2010]. Until its revival in 2010, it was held for three years, 1997 to 1999, traveling to cities across America [Ibid.]. "Never in pop history have female singers been quite so aggressively, shrewdly marketed on the basis of gender alone," reported Newsweek [Staff, "The selling of girl power", 28 Dec 1997]. In its first year, selling more tickets than the conventional traveling festivals Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. [Ibid.], the Lilith Fair was "a cultural movement lauded by fans for its feminist ideals and lambasted by critics for its lack of diversity" [Melissa Maerz, "The oral history of Lilith Fair, as told by the women who lived it", Glamour.com, Glamour, 5 Jul 2017]. Some women wondered, "Why does this have to be so crunchy and folky? How come you don't have Courtney Love, or 7 Year Bitch, or Elastica?" "Why isn't Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliott on this?" [Rachel Tashjian, "12 photos from the 1998 Lilith Fair, the best festival fashion ever", Garage.Vice.com, Vice Media, 11 Jun 2018]. "But while many massive artistic undertakings meet criticism with defensiveness, Lilith Fair came back the second year with a lineup that was much more diverse, racially and musically. You might even consider it legendary" [Ibid.].

By December 2008, artfully feigning clubhouse ladies, the a capella choir of Columbia University's women's college, Barnard College, sang Folds's "Bitches Ain't Shit." The choir is named Bacchantae, "the official a cappella group of Barnard College" ["Who is Bacchantae? ", Bacchantae.com, visited 15 Dec 2021]. Individually called the Bacchants, the 2021 roster was tasked, "Describe yourself in 3 words", whereby the president Bacchant, atop the webpage, has responded, "100% that b*tch" ["Meet the Bacchants!: Seniors—class of 2021", Bacchantae.com, visited 15 Dec 2021]. But they may bear no other relation to the "Bitches Ain't Shit" cover, posted on YouTube when most were in elementary school [Upload oloFLyel3Is, "Bitches Ain't Shit", CirculationDesk @ YouTube, 13 Nov 2008]. Ben Folds produced an album released five months later, April 2009, compiling various collegiate a capella groups covering his songs [Dave Karger, "Ben Folds' wacky new a capella record", EW.com, Entertainment Weekly, 15 Apr 2009]. (The album lacks a "Bitches Ain't Shit" [Andrew Leahey, "Ben Folds: University A Capella!", AllMusic.com, visited 31 Dec 2021].) Then in December 2009, he was among the judges on NBC's new TV show of amateur a capella contestants, The Sing-Off [Kyle Anderson, "Ben Folds kicks off NBC'S 'The Sing-Off' ", MTV.com, MTV News, 15 Dec 2009 & " 'The Sing-Off' proves Ben Folds needs his own television show", 7 Dec 2010]. In December 2013, amid the show's fourth and last season, Folds wrote a "long-ass" post on Facebook to promote a capella programs among youth [Ben Folds, "My long-ass post about Sing Off and a capella music" @BenFolds, Facebook.com, 11 Dec 2013]. (In December 2014, there was a fifth "cycle" as a two-hour special without Folds [Ashley Lee, " 'The Sing-Off' replaces Ben Folds with Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump", Billboard.com, 26 Nov 2014], who was busy in Australia with " 'a tour of symphonic proportions,' where he'll be backed by different orchestras and will perform his own piano concerto" [Marisa LaScala, "We're going to miss Ben Folds on 'The Sing-Off' ", Bustle.com, 17 Dec 2014].) Feminist sociologist Michael Kimmel showed the video Kate Stone Lombardi, The Mama's Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger (New York: Avery Publishing/Penguin Group, 2012), quotes Michael Kimmel suggesting a usefulness of the college women's video: "What moms can say to their sons is, 'Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric? That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [p 230 Lombardi, likewise, hints that "guys" will perceive their own "moms" in the collegiate young women's clubhouse appearance, genteel manner, and "angelic voices" as an altogether unthinkable target of lewd misogyny [pp 229–230]. For reference, here is the Lombardi book's full treatment of the song: "The Barnard College a cappella group posted their rendition of hip-hop superstar Dr. Dre's song 'Bitches Ain't Shit' on YouTube. Dressed in pink, the young women's angelic voices rise in harmony, gently singing the lyrics 'Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks. Lick on these nuts and suck the dick.' Those are actually some of the milder lyrics, and the incongruity of hearing the incredibly misogynistic words coming sweetly out of these college students' mouths makes its point. 'What moms can say to their sons is, "Hey, have you ever actually listened to this lyric?" ' Michael Kimmel says. 'That's people like me they're talking about.' Moms can keep guys connected at the concrete level as opposed to the abstract.' " [pp 229–230] Thus, besides Lombardi's syntax that strictly, but trivially, states that the women's voices are dressed in pink, she may overlook that the choir covers only the Ben Folds version, whose most harshly misogynous lyrics she quotes when suggesting that the choir also sings the Dr. Dre song's more harshly misogynous lyrics. At such recurrent mixup, Folds elsewhere clarifies, "That song is like a six-minute-long misogynistic rant that never stops, and I took most of that stuff out" [Chris Steffen, "Ben Folds on repeating mistakes, conjuring characters, and repeating mistakes", AllMusic.com, Netaktion LLC, 23 Aug 2019]. Lombardi is also, in any case, "a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and for seven years wrote a popular regional column that focused on family issues. Her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reader's Digest, Parenting magazine, and other national publications, and she is the winner of six Clarion Awards for journalism from women in communications. She lives in New York with her husband and is the mother of two adult children, a son and a daughter [Contributor webpage, "Kate Stone Lombardi", Ideas.Time.com, Time USA, LLC, visited 16 Dec 2021]. to his colleague Lisa Wade in 2010. At feminist Jezebel.com, she aired the "appropriation," an "example of resistance" by "race, class, and gender contradictions"Feminism is now in its fourth wave, which targets allegely systemic white male supremacy, and seeks "comprehensive justice" by "deconstructing" perceived "systems of power" while emphasizing "racial justice as well as examinations of class, disability, and other issues" [Margie Delao, "A brief look at the four waves of feminism", TheHumanist.com, American Humanist Association, 4 Mar 2021]. Despite some disputing that feminism ever declined and resurged, the fourth wave is distinguished by its internet basis, massive popularity, and being "inherently intersectional" [Constance Grady, "The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained", Vox.com, Vox Media, LLC, 20 Jul 2018]. Feminist discourse, planning, and even activism, like #MeToo tweets, are mainly online, while the Women's March was "conceived and propagated online" [Ibid.]. So it is often dated to 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were well in place, and fourth wave was well recognized by 2013 [Ibid.] That year, Kira Cochrane glossed the first wave's apex in the 1910s via voting rights, the second wave's "liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and '80s", and "the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker", daughter of the 1983 novel The Color Purple 's author Alice Walker, and by others in the early 1990s, "with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers' " ["The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women", TheGuardian.com, 10 Dec 2013]. Cochrane found it "feels like something new again", a "reactive movement" of "startling" popularity, enabled by new technology [Ibid.] Yet, more realistically, by the 1980, the second wave had splintered, as radical feminism, including its offshoot cultural feminism, along with socialist feminism, which is radical plus Marxist and largely is black feminism, opposed liberal feminism, the mainstream of mostly white women of middle class who endorsed liberalist values of individualism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution. Near 1990, poststructural feminism reexplained gender not as causing but instead as caused by culture as structured by language, and femaleness was displaced from the center of feminism, which then developed radical queer and critical race theories [Sam Warner, "Structuralism, feminist approaches to", in Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe & Wai Ching Angela Wong, eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, 2016)]. In March 2020, Dream Hampton helpeded commemorate Bell Hooks, author of the 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which asserted "conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society" [Dream Hampton, bell hooks "100 Women of the Year: 1984", Time.com, 5 Mar 2020]. Hampton closed, "Today, as we push back against those who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis that requires we take on class and race and gender, could not be more important." [Ibid.] to "mock the original"—"Dr. Dre's"—and "expose it as grossly misogynistic." In December, near Barnard, Folds covered Kesha's new song "Sleazy." Kesha's debut single "Tik Tok" reached #1 on the main popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100, for the week closing January 2, 2010, and held #1 for nine weeks [Billboard Staff, "Kesha's relationship with Dr. Luke: A timeline", Billboard.com, 10 Mar 2016]. Her single "Sleazy" was issued in late October 2010. Ben Folds, living in Australia, returned to America to tour on his collaborative album Lonely Avenue, whose lyrics were written by English novelist Nick Hornby, a tour of 14 shows from November 5 in Chicago to December 14 in New York City at the "fabled Beacon Theater" [Gabrielle Sierra, "Ben Folds confirms NYC show; releases new record with Nick Hornby", BroadwayWorld.com, 21 Oct 2010]. Six months later, Folds issued a music video shot "behind the scenes" of his studio recording of "Sleazy" ["Ben Folds—Sleazy (Ke$ha cover)", benfoldsTV @ YouTube, 2 May 2011]. Nearly three weeks later on Australian program Like a Version, he performed the cover live [Sound recording, "Like a Version: Ben Folds", ABC.net.au, Triple J, 20 May 2011, performed with Chad Chapin, Sam Smith, Andrew Higley & Ryan Lerman]. There, he prefaced, "I think, really, what it is, because someone dresses a certain way—and may appear sleazy to some people—this is, in fact, their culture, and should be respected. And so, you've got this sort of upper-middle-class douchebag, comes in, and thinks that he can just take advantage of Kesha because of her style. And she's reminding him that she in fact does get sleazy, just not with him." Five years later in Los Angeles, Folds played keys for Kesha covering a Bob Dylan song while preparing to perform it at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards, but her record label withdrew her permission [Jessica Goodman, "Kesha covers Bob Dylan's 'It Ain't Me Babe' with Ben Folds", EW.com, Entertainment Weekly, 19 May 2016]. In June 2019, she issued, with a disdainful visual, a song of demographic opposition, "Rich, White, Straight Men" ["Kesha—Rich, White, Straight Men (audio)", kesha @ YouTube, 8 Jun 2019]. (Perhaps see Halle Kiefer, "Kesha's new song asks: What if 'Rich, White, Straight, Men' didn't rule the world anymore?", Vulture.com, 3 Jun 2019.) A Village Voice writer endorsed "wincing," called ironic covers "a problem right now, generally," and said he "perhaps mercifully" omitted the Dre cover, "way more problematic."

In 2012, the "violence and aggression" entry in Encyclopedia of Gender in Media linked rocker Ben Folds to rapper Eminem as music's vent of "white boy pain"—an "ideology" that "feminist backlash theory" alleges as heterosexual white men's falsely feeling victimized and thus attacking women, queers, and nonwhites for progress since 1960 —while Slate.com editor L. V. Anderson, to reexplain Folds's popularity, cited "musical prowess," leftward "politics," and "identity" in "the trials and tribulations" of straight, white males of middle class. No longer fond, she claimed his breakthrough hit, "Brick" —whose 1997 album was reissued in 2005 —"feels exploitative and seems to dehumanize Folds' former girlfriend."

L. V. Anderson, adding "empathy" for herself lacking "perspective" in 1998, says that at 15, herself unblighted but "unhappy" and a straight white of middle class, she—who maybe "wasn't Folds' exact target audience"—wanted insight on "the opposite sex." His songs, allegedly, "don't hold up to scrutiny." They, "condescending" or "appropriating other people's struggles," commit "mansplaining" and "unsolicited advice," while 2005 track "Late," for a dead friend, is "troubling," "astonishingly presumptuous." His "entirely unserious songs," like "Song for the Dumped," are "unsuccessful," as maybe Folds—or many a fan—"really believes that paying for dates entitles a man to a woman's sex and affection," she fears.

"Even more disquieting" to editor Anderson is "Rockin' the Suburbs"—Folds, in it, "mocking his own lack of urban credibility," "before dismissing concerns about racism by asserting that slavery 'wasn't my idea' "—which, she feels, "reads as the musical manifestation of an enormous chip on his shoulder. Similarly offensive is Folds' slow, acoustic cover of Dr. Dre's 'Bitches Ain't Shit,' which was part of an ugly mini-trend in alternative pop." "Like 'Rockin' the Suburbs,' this bit of quasi-minstrelsy ostensibly pokes fun at Folds' whiteness, but comes across as sneeringly chauvinistic." From 2015 to 2020, others accused his Dr. Dre cover of "toxic masculinity," Arielle Bernstein, "Girl swagger and blood lust: Rihanna, Taylor Swift and repackaging toxic masculinity for a female audience", Salon.com, LLC, 12 Jul 2015. Bernstein argues that female consumers and female artists have adopted "toxic masculinity" through chronic exposure to such media. "The sexualized violence in 'BBHMM' "—that is, R&B singer Rihanna's music video to her 2015 single "Bitch Better Have My Money"—"is particularly troubling" [Ibid.]. "One of the joyful things about watching 'BBHMM' is seeing a female auteur flex her muscles, building on the themes of successful artists who came before her and owning her power. The painful thing is knowing that this fantasy of power is so easily stripped away. In writing this article I watched 'BBHMM' over and over again; at first the scenes of violence were hard to sit through, but eventually I became inured to it. The shocking things became less shocking; the ordinary things more ordinary. I felt this same way listening to Eminem rap years ago in my teens and early 20s. I felt this way driving around with my college boyfriend, me in the passenger seat, listening to a version of 'Bitches Ain't Shit' by Ben Folds. 'I don't like this,' I said. 'It's ironic. It's funny,' my then boyfriend told me gently: 'It doesn't mean anything.' But it did. And it does. I've sat through so many songs about bitches and whores, and so many shows where cut-up female bodies are just part of the landscape. 'It's not about you,' a girl at a party tells me, when a sexist song begins to play. But it is. It is and it is and it is." [Ibid.] Berstein, perhaps evoking New York gangsta rapper Biggie Smalls's published persona, the Notorious B.I.G., uses the nickname "NotoriousREL" and "teaches writing" at a Washington DC university ["Arielle Bernstein", Salon.com, visited 30 Dec 2021], which calls her a "cultural critic who focuses on film, TV, art, culture, and how social media and digital communications shape human expression, interaction, intimacy, and empathy" [Arts & Sciences, "Arielle Bernstein: Sr professorial lecturer: Literature", American.edu, visited 30 Dec 2021]. "cultural appropriation," and being "deeply problematic."

Folds says "the part I chose to excerpt skews sad," lacking "most of" the "misogynistic rant" of Dre's song—which, beyond "serious stuff," has "Quentin Tarantino" and "comedy in it" —while his "white voice" sings at slower tempo atop "sad chords" and "heartfelt melody." Amy Cook, chair of theatre arts, in 2018 prefaced, "I analyze the performance of the same song by two different artists." White, female, Cook enjoyed introjecting them. Still, "the artsy white man at the piano," she "felt," had "masked a troubling experience." "Folds is trespassing into Dre's gangsta character in order to point out that the song is both sad and funny" via, she wrote, "the all-access pass granted him by his whiteness."

Meanwhile, a major radio station held a benefit show where, backstage, a planner forbade "Bitches Ain't Shit" from Folds, who then said "you should've told us that before we flew in to do it." She asked Folds to "do the right thing." Taking the stage, he cued his bassist, "Let's open with it." Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, the master of ceremony, "thought it was amazing," Folds recalls but reveals, "They all leave in droves." "So what was gained, you know?" "I don't play it anymore because things are so explosive in the United States." "I feel bad for anyone who isn't white, who would have to experience that." "It wasn't like that when it came out." Yet even in 2017, it had been joyously greeted at his own concert.

Retirement
On June 5, 2008, at the Wakarusa Festival, Ben Folds announced the last performance of "Bitches Ain't Shit" before its retirement. This began a string of appearances at festivals in which Folds claimed each performance would be his last. When interviewed on the matter, Folds claimed that it had genuinely been retired between each performance, but was now being included in his set lists once more.

Folds reportedly still had "Bitches Ain't Shit" in his live sets in 2015. He played it as recently as April 2017. Yet by 2019, Folds ceased to perform the song—which had "never got easier for me to sing," and "always felt so very wrong", although "that was also part of what made it interesting" —and while it was "regularly requested," had chosen to ignore these requests. Folds partly explains that one time, when playing the cover, "I saw a black couple pretty near me, and I'm like, 'How would I feel with the whole audience singing the N word?' Yes, 10 years ago it wasn't a big deal, but now it is a big deal, because they're being especially targeted." Folds altogether reasons, about the word niggas in 2019, "just because I'm an old man, and I can remember when you could say this, doesn't mean I need to make five people in the audience feel threatened, or terrible, or somehow less than. Anytime you're doing that, you're doing the wrong thing."

His memoir, released in July 2019, imparts, "Music should work to ease social tensions, not throw gasoline on the fire, even inadvertently." In August, he elaborated, "I had to stop playing it because—and I've had a lot of African Americans tell me this—they don't like to go out to big events with lots of white people." In a November interview, he speculated about "someone that wasn't white, in my audience, hearing a bunch of white people singing the N word—and in this climate?" Folds estimated, "they might feel like they need to run for the exit." And in 2020 on June 24, amid America's sociopolitical upheaval via the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement's nationally pressing allegations of ubiquitous racism violating blacks, Ben Folds on Facebook announced plan to ask the record label, as soon as possible, "to take the next step and remove the recording from any streaming platforms where it has been placed." The next day, he issued his a new song, "2020."