Social media has been in a frenzy over the last few days over the newest lyrical offering from Rick Ross. In a verse on the song “You Don’t Even Know,” Ross raps about drugging a woman, and then raping her while she is incoherent. The offending line:
“Put Molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it
I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.”
Justifiably outraged, bloggers and cultural commentators are taking Rick Ross to task for explicitly boasting about sexual assault. The lyric has proven to be alarming to male and female hip-hop fans alike.
To men, rapping about rape crosses a clear line into unacceptable behavior. Media personality Jeff Johnson penned an open letter soon after hearing the Rick Ross lyric, calling for brothers to hold each other more accountable for supporting music that boasts about sexually assaulting women.
And for women (especially for female sexual assault survivors), hearing an acclaimed rapper boast about rape reminds us just how unsafe we are, not only in the world of hip-hop, but the world at large.
This is nothing new, unfortunately
But this is far from the first time that misogynistic lyrics have made it into the hip-hop sphere. There’s almost a fatigue after decades of imploring rappers to stop referring to women as “b*tches,” “hoes,” and “tricks,” and using them as expendable props in videos and other imagery.
Even when the lyrics move into arguably violent territory — the ever-popular phrase “beat the p*ssy up” comes to mind — little is made of it. And despite that line showing up in no less than a dozen rap songs, it wasn’t until Lil Wayne compared the assault of a woman’s vagina to the beating of civil right’s martyr Emmett Till that music listeners called foul.
So why now? Why does this Rick Ross lyric cause such an outrage at this time?
One reason is the glaring explicitness of Ross’ rhyme. “I took her home and I enjoyed that, she didn’t even know it,” is aggressive, specific and direct, and there’s no way to argue that he’s not describing rape. Most other hip-hop songs describing sexual contact, while still often misogynistic, at least leave room for a listener to believe that women are consenting parties. But in this case, listening to a man gleefully rhyme about drugging someone and having sex with her while she’s unconscious feels like an alarmingly pointed threat.
In the shadow of Steubenville
The song also comes as the nation has highly-charged conversations about sexual assault and consent, prompted by the rape case in Steubenville, Ohio (in which two high school football players were convicted of sexually assaulting an intoxicated 16-year-old girl), and last year’s high-profile rape case in New Delhi, India (where a 23-year-old female medical student died after being gang-raped, beaten and impaled with a tire iron on a bus).
A number of female media personalities — such as Goldie Taylor, Zerlina Maxwell and Melissa Harris Perry — have been using their platforms to speak out against sexual violence and to open up about their own ordeals as rape victims, and countless commentary and opinion pieces on sexual assault — both by women and men — have been published by a myriad of news outlets.
Events in the news have opened up the dialogue about sexual violence among friends, lovers and families, and rape survivors have taken to social media and blogs to speak out about their personal stories. And increased discourse and awareness lead to increased sensitivity.
Still, some hip-hop fans wonder: “What about murder? What about drugs and gangs? What about all the other immoral and criminal activities that artists have rapped about for years?” In the case of Rick Ross (and numerous other rappers), tales of drug-dealing and manslaughter are a form of theater, play-acting for sake of the art-form.
Rape, however, doesn’t lend itself to a “street life” fantasy. It’s all too real, crippling and traumatic.
As one friend put it, “Rappers might talk about murder, but few people actually know a victim of homicide. Almost everyone knows someone who’s been raped.” Out of any group of four or five women, it’s likely at least one of them has been sexually assaulted. And there’s no way to glorify that in song.
Rick Ross is not alone
There’s a virtually unanimous agreement that Rick Ross’ rape lyric crossed a line of decency, and that’s encouraging. Petitions have already been started to pull the song out of any possible radio rotation. Still, the work doesn’t stop there. While Rick Ross’ verse may be among the most egregious depictions of rape in hip-hop, there’s much more to be concerned about.
For example, a few weeks ago, Chris Brown took the microphone at a Hollywood club and instructed men to declare ownership over their girlfriend’s bodies. He then launched into song, singing the lyrics:
“Don’t make me had to tell you again, that that’s my p***y, baby
It is mine, baby, babe, mine…
Don’t make me had to tell you again, that that’s my p***y, baby
It’s mine girl, It’s mine girl, It’s mine…
So you better not give it away.”
The bizarre song doesn’t explicitly instruct rape, but it equally contributes to the notion that a woman’s body is not her own, and that a man, by sheer virtue of being a man, can do what he wishes with it. This line of thinking is much more pervasive in our culture than the idea of drugging a woman and taking her home, and easily contributes to the fact that more than half of rape victims are assaulted by a partner, boyfriend or husband.
A history of sexual violence
A myriad of other sexually-aggressive lyrics have been swept under the rug in the history of hip-hop. And maybe that’s why Rick Ross thought he’d be able to get away with one of the few lines that explicitly depicted sexual assault. It’s great that listeners have drawn the line at date rape, but we all need to remain critical long after this latest outrage, and continue to call out artists who perpetuate rape culture, whether through a descriptive lyric or a seemingly-playful metaphor.
Whether slipping her a “molly” or “beating the p*ssy up,” anything that advocates sexual violence contributes to hip-hop’s reputation as a hostile environment for women and girls. And we can’t afford that when life so often imitates art.
Veronica Miller can be found on Twitter at @veronicamarche.