It’s been a while since we’ve seen an extended Kanye West Twitter rant (months at least) so we’re glad to report that the #no #filter DONDA Pres and current Kim Kardashian paramour has ended that drought with a lengthy rumination on whether using the word “bitch” (lyrically or otherwise) is an appropriate way to address 51% of the human population. The word, traditional hip hop shorthand for “woman”, has littered Kanye’s lyrics since his 2004 debut album The College Dropout (see “School Spirit” – If I could go through all that and still be breathing//Bitch bend over, I’m here for a reason) but new criticism of how he has used the term, recently in the sugary ode to how awesome Kim Kardashian is, “Perfect Bitch”, has the emotionally sensitive guy who is just thinking out aloud here questioning whether it is cool to call someone “bitch” in the year 2012, even if it’s in an ironic way.
“Is it acceptable for a man to call a woman a bitch even if it’s endearing?” he asked, comparing bitch’s transformation from a pejorative term to an endearing one (no idea when that happened) to the way that hip hop culture embraced the word “nigga” in the late 1980’s. The crucial semantic difference being that almost all of the rappers who use the term “bitch” have penises (FACT) and use it to either objectify or degrade women instead of empower them.
But wait, what about if we qualify it?
“Is it ok to use bitch as long as we put BAD in front of it? Like you a BAD BITCH,” he later tweeted (see Kanye’s use in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy single “So Appalled”: “House keeping, I mean goddamn one time//Let it be a bad bitch sweeping” or Nicki Minaj (an actual woman!!!) in reference to fellow woman MIA, on “Monster”, from the same album: “Pull up in the monster automobile, gangsta//With a bad bitch that came from Sri Lanka”.
He went on to admit that swear words should never become a crutch (something Jerry Seinfeld has touched on from a comedian’s point of view) and that he occasionally omits naughty words from his work because “Stevie Wonder never had to use the word bitch to get his point across”.
Read the entire diatribe below…
THIS HAS BEEN ANOTHER EDITION OF KANYE WEST THINKS OUT LOUD ON TWITTER.
Photo by Pascal Le Segretain via Getty Images Entertainment.
