At some point you have to put the crotch-shots away and woman-up. This is where we find Ms. Kimberley Jones, aka, rapper Lil Kim in our year of the Lord, two-thousand-and-nine.
She's been to jail. She's been vilified. She's done all sorts of ungodly things. She's been under the knife repeatedly to change her look from a cute, but regular, black chick, to a blown-up, boobie black Barbie. She's been raunchy. She's been nasty. Now she's singing for Nelson Mandela's birthday bash with Cyndi Lauper.
Singer Teyana Taylor delivers the cake, looking a delightful hot mess in a purple Minnesota Twins hat and pink plaid at Rihanna'sGood Girl Gone Bad viewing party June 17th.
Famous people, mostly dressed badly, standing in front of cameras and getting their pictures taken. It's a hard job, but they were all just sober enough to do it. Here are my favorites from the past week.
RIHANNA GOOD GIRL GONE BAD VIEWING PARTY
I have mixed feelings for Rihanna. I'm probably not in the demographic for her music, but I have to admit, she looks pretty adorable here trying to be all dark and sexy with the heavy eyeliner like a high schooler trying to age-it-up to get liquor at a club she's too young to get into. Rocking Halle Berry's hair of almost 15 years ago. Awww! Try not to throw up from downing all those shots of Cuervo Black!
LeToya Luckett, still alive.
I thought this was an accident when I first saw it on WireImage. Like someone teleported a photo from 1992 into Rihanna's shindig. But, no, this is a group called The Retro Kids. And I'm lovin' the kente cloth vest, bi-colored high top fades and tortoiseshell glasses making them look like some weird mash-up of Kid n' Play, Kwame, "Don't Be Cruel" era Bobby Brown and Troop.
Nice. I'm feelin' it. I won't wear those clothes again (no Cross Colors?), but I'm feelin' it.
Also, kind of frightened that at 30 the music of my youth is "retro." I prefer "out of style."
But speaking of "Don't Be Cruel" era Bobby Brown ...
This isn't him.
ASCAP RHYTHM & SOUL AWARDS
No. It's old, formerly (currently?) cracked out, Whitney-less Bobby Brown. The self-proclaimed "King of Stage" took the stage, along with the rest of New Edition, at the ASCAP Rhythm and Soul Awards June 23.
"Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky and Mike, if I love a girl who cares who you like!" (Ralph and Johnnie too, yeah ... word tha mutha!)
And if that passage made no sense to you, my word, I am so depressed now. And why is Ralph Tresvant bald? I loved Ralph when I was in junior high (not more than I loved Tevin Campbell because I loved no one more than Tevin at the time.) But I still listen to Ralph's solo album to this day. I can't listen to his whiny rap on the track "Rated R" without laughing (who can?), but "Do What I Gotta Do" still holds up well.
Other people found to be still alive at the ASCAP Rhythm and Soul Awards ...
MC Lyte (So many kinds of wrong. One part Roman, one part WTF.)
Tichina Arnold (I'm a little weirded out by her side-boobage.)
And alleged Pussycat DollMelody Thorton and her hideous peek-a-boo toe high heeled boots.
CELEBRITIES OUT AND ABOUT
The lanky NBA Finals champ (finally) Kevin Garnett in Manhattan, NY.
Cellphone assassin/professional clothes wearer Naomi Campbell doing something good (as she is wont to do). This time she was lending her criminal star shine to the Africa Rising Festival June 25. Naomi is all about the motherland. Although I am concerned about this wig she has on.
She makes too much money to be wearing something that looks like what I can purchase at a King's Beauty Supply on West Florissant. (That's North St. Louis County for the non-St. Louisans. The Koreans have the fake hair, beauty product market on lock.)
Rosario Dawson looking very, very pretty in white on June 22. The bag is an Eco bag she designed for some save the earth thingy for Absolute Vodka. Oh, Rosario. I don't believe there was much "designing" going on with this bag, but you look almost dainty and ethereal for a crazy, crazy woman.
I'm assuming this jacket is for warmth as Rihanna leaves Madison Square Garden June 18 after show with Ne-Yo because it's totally ruining what looks like a pretty cute cocktail dress. It's a little "jazz hands" and Solid Gold, but it's cute on her.
Ne-Yo. I realize this is because I'm not hip like I used to be, but I tend to get Ne-Yo confused with Mario, Trey Songz, Ray J and Omarion. Technically, I know who Ray J is. Before he used to be just Brandy's little brother. Now he's that gross guy with the porn tape. But vocally there's a lot of crossover going on and it doesn't help that they're all basically weaker versions of Usher Raymond and I hate Usher Raymond.
ISLAND DEF JAM TAG RECORDS LAUNCH PARTY
"If me and Janet got married I'd be Jermaine Jackson. Heh, heh ... wait. That didn't sound right."
Look away! Look away!
Whew. That was a close one. I almost looked JD in the eye ... wait, OHMYGOD WHAT IS THAT???!
Hot Dollar. That has to be a joke right? Hot Dollar sounds like a pimp Eddie Griffin once played in an Ice Cube production.
Evan Ross. As a fan of boys who sometimes look like girls ... you look great, Son-of-Diana ... Brother-of-Tracee. Even if you do have on over-sized aviator shades and the way you're grabbing your belt is evocative of Michael Jackson's crotch grabbing era of the 1990s. Never did one man grab his crotch so much in order to pantomime sexual prowess. What's sad is I feel like that had a lot to do with Motown marketing him as a sex symbol at ten. I'm sure that didn't screw him up at all.
Now go eat something, Evan. You're wasting away.
The pale half of Kid n' Play, Chris Reid.
Jurnee Smollett. I love you, but I'm not supposed to see your bra. Try some double-stick tape next time. Also, not feeling your outfit, but you've transitioned pretty well from child actress to ... whatever you're going for here. You're a good actress, though. You've always had the chops. Just don't get all tricked out with fake boobs and start making "Me sooo sexy" faces all the time like your "Eve's Bayou" co-star Meagan Good. I love her too and she is almost too sexy, leading me to opine, less can be more.
STEVE RIFKIND AND SRC'S POST-BET AWARDS PARTY IN HONOR OF STEVEN HILL
Ashanti's 1920s hair and Nelly
Big Boi and actor Ryan Philippe (never noticed those flame tats on Ryan's arm before. Were those there pre- or post-divorce from Reese?) And it's still disturbing how he still looks like he could be Justin Timberlake's brother. He also looks like he could kick Justin's ass, but that's why Ryan's sexier than Mr. SexyBack. Don't talk about it, be about it, Justin!
I don't know who's scarier here. Lil' Kim with her blonde wing, fake lashes and general bleached out look; Diddy looking puffy with his slight paunch, cap curiously backwards; or Lil' Wayne ... no words there.
I'll be safe and say it's a tie between the two "lil's."
A few years back I started making Andy Warhol homages to Lil Kim. Not because I liked Lil Kim or her music. Not because she was some epitome of manufactured beauty. But because of what she'd become, because of what Christopher Wallace, Notorious B.I.G., created her to be, the one thing she had to sell and sold greatly.
Lil Kim is a commodity like so many other things in the post-Shiny Suit Era of the Hip Hop Industry. A time when female MCs were really damaged girls on the come up willing to become glammed up, exalted strippers spitting rhymes they did not write. Flaunting game that was coached and coaxed. Male producers boosting them like hot cars. Flipping them like refurbished homes. They were ample, eager, hungry enough to get down on all fours and become profane provocateurs who could provide money based on "Pussy Power."
Pussy Power is not feminism. It is not womanism. It is about your worth being reduced to your private parts. Your parts being the only thing you can sell. Tits. Ass. Vagina. Marginal face with exemplary chassis. Girls getting bodied for talents they never possessed, but paraded about as the supreme because they fulfill male fantasy. This is not the same as an attractive woman with brains who uses her charm and guile and beauty to advance like an axiomatic Goddess. A success story who glides amongst us and gains the longing stares of men and women alike. This is the aspirational woman. The dream.
The likes of Lil Kim, Trina, Remy Ma and Foxy Brown fresh from prison are not.
It's amazing that any woman, girl, child could look at this coterie of cunts and find their dreams. That they could learn their sad origin tales of sexual abuse and abandonment leading them to paths of decadence and destruction and want to cosign to a testosterone fueled world where a credit card in the crack of an ass crudely demonstrates the vulgar truths.
Pussy Power is a distortion; A liberation fantasy of pulsating pornography where women become fuck dolls, a bang, throwaway thing. They are the jump off draped in cheap chinchilla and bedazzled cubic zirconia while their impresarios prance about barking, "Skeet, skeet, skeet."
Pussy Power is fleeting. Just like how every stripper and porn star has an expiration date, so do these crass exhibitionists/hedonists. In their male written, fantasy lyrics they call their perversions the downest of down, the hardest of hard while engaging in celebratory acts of sexual anarchy. These behaviors binding them to the sexist rules of glittering genitalia and mesmerizing mammary glands. Talentless hulls their worth is in their mechanics, a return to the slave auction of old.
"Fifteen hundred dollars," cried the auctioneer and the maiden was struck for that sum. This was a Southern auction at which the bones, muscles, sinews, blood and nerves of a young lady of sixteen were sold for five hundred dollars; her moral character for two hundred; her improved intellect for one hundred; her Christianity for three hundred ; and her chastity and virtue for four hundred dollars more.
-- "Clotel or The President's Daughter," by William Wells Brown
Unlike the young, innocent Clotel of Brown's novel, these Pussy Power proprietors are twisted in their own game, knowing this is what it takes to push record label weight. To get the MAC makeup ads, the VIBE covers and the Apple Bottom Jeans. This is what they want by any means. Damn dignity 'til it's dead if wealth you can bed. Can you tongue kiss Cartier or fuck a $3000 pure white Prada coat? Can the finest of leather and gold and luxury goods give you that Everlasting Gobstopper of orgasms?
Some are too young to know they are selling themselves when it happens. Some know exactly what they're doing. And some become pathetic caricatures of gapped mouthed blow-up dolls being fondled by a tipsy Motown diva live on television, without thinking. It was so primal, she had to reach out and touch it to see if such ignorance was real, if shame had been murdered in a back alley by Col. Mustard with the candlestick. Or was it because it was out there as an advertisement. The exposed breast and the pastie were product meant to be sampled and enjoyed like 250-count Wamsutta sheets and teddy bears from the Build-A-Bear Workshop. Maybe Diana Ross just wanted to check out the merchandise.
Pussy Power tells a young girl a blow job is the emancipation proclamation. That an STD is an occupational hazard. That "I'm not a whore because whores work street corners, turn tricks, get smacked by pimps and fucked by johns." They don't rock a stage next to 50 Cent where even he has no respect as you bounce beside. Where he treats you like fading stock. Like you're Enron.
Crash, bitch. Crash.
The American woman at her best in hi-tone commercial imagery is represent as either openly, joyously brazen and whorish, begging to take it in any orifice, or unconsciously wanton and bursting with fresh, childish, as-yet-undiscovered virginal whorishnesss, such as the fifteen-year-old girl in the Calvin Klein ads who looks like she just got punched in the face.
-- "A Massive Swelling," by Cintra Wilson
I, obviously, am filled with a disgust for this pornography masquerading as empowerment. I can still remember hip hop filled with female MCs who were not created as male playthings but were organic beings of intellect and talent. The respected pioneers and purveyors gynocentric ryhmes like MC Lyte, Queen Latifa, Monie Love, Salt N' Pepa, Bahamadia, Left Eye and Lauryn Hill. I remembered songs to party to and songs that made me think. From drugs to feminism to AIDS to emotional loss, love and abandonment. These were women with talents. These were not modern Hottentot Venuses, perfecting freshly fucked faces while drenched wet down Korean weaves.
In our anything for a dollar world, people will say we're all grown. If Foxy Brown wants to act a fool, if she wants to pose naked because that is all she has if Jay doesn't write the lyrics, so be it. This a business and sex has sold since there were men willing to pay for it.
But I worry about the image it sends to girls who still absorb this Pussy Power propaganda. It tells girls, especially black girls who don't know the history of our sexualization, that only the superficial matters. Sex and consumerism are the only true American faiths. These girls do not know the history of how our parts were dissected, embalmed and preserved, then displayed as recently as 1974 in France. How we were measured and partitioned. How there was a balkanization of our sexual beings that is still remains to this day.
It is healthy and normal for young girls to explore their sexuality within the confides of their teenage world. It should not be influenced or encouraged by entertainers who are dressed like an army of Eliot Spitzer's seven diamond whores. These women are dressed to sell. Not for love. Not for respect. They are reconstructed cattle, plastic show ponies. A little tit for tat. A little ass for cash. But this should not be paragon.
We shouldn't have this.
The market has spoken and the industry wants these haggard-faced rough riders. We must hold tight to their daughters, love them and educate them early. We cannot wait for the world to teach them these venereal, heart break-laced horrors. We can not stand idly by as real sexuality is forgotten and becomes a victim to Pussy Power and machismo driven mythology about women crafted as a utility tool of stimulation. Sex, in its true form, should be a beautiful, healthy expression of joy, love, recreation, self-discovery and procreation. It should not be a commodity. It should not be taught as a product. It should be explained honestly, every question answered for your sons and daughters. Don't allow them to learn true love from BET. Don't allow them to wander into the wilderness without your wisdom and protection.
And for those who fear teaching their children about sex will turn them to promiscuous fiends, let me be a witness. My mother started to teach me about sex, gradually, from the third grade through the eight grade. She explained to me the changes happening in my body and why. She explained the feelings. She explained what was happening to my male classmates. She explained the slang and corrected the misinformation. She taught me the proper terms and the consequences, but she did not preach. She did not demand that I stay a virgin. But strangely none of The Snob Girls got pregnant in high school or college. All The Snob Girls are determined to have a ring on their finger before a baby pops out.
This doesn't mean that I remained chaste forever. But I didn't do it when I was young and dumb either, drunken with some SOB telling me that the cream from his "magic stick" is good for my complexion.
Education is the only way to combat the Pussy Power era. Teach your daughters self respect. Teach your sons to respect women. Teach true feminism and womanism. Teach true self-worth and love.
Because like cockroaches and taxes, Lil Kim isn't going anywhere.
If you fair snob readers have noticed, my Blogger profile photo features part of a panel of a cartoon strip.** And if you've wandered over to my BlackPlanet page then you already know that The Snob is a part-time broke artist who famously dropped out of art school.
I know this disappointed some of the others in my class as I was one of two blacks in the program and black people are supposed to be "edgy." I was supposed to create art about my Dickensian struggle out of the streets of St. Louis, dodging bullets to get to school and getting knifed up that one time on the bi-state bus to get to my job at the wing house. Watching my mother slap her veins so she could get doped up while my father was out impregnating other women who were not my smack-addled mother. Seeing my brother Pookie Bear get shot up by Kaydee and O-Dog in a drive-by while Radio Rahem did the pop-n-lock to "Fight the Power."
Black people are supposed to be broke and fucked up. How dare I be some county brownie from Hazelwood whose parents had the gall to get married long before I was born. How dare my life have comfort and stability. Why, I wasn't poor at all! The nerve. I was one of those Negroes. Those perfect English speaking, book reading, natty dressing, smooth talking, long-haired, educated charlatans who made them confront their bigoted world view that all black folks were a hot ghetto mess waiting on Michelle Pfieffer to come along and tell us we have beautiful, dangerous minds.
How dare I rob them of their Coolio moments!
Yeah, I'm bitter. So what.
Anyway, this was an excuse for me to share some of my not-very-snobby art. Primarily some tasteful, yet still slutty illustrations of Lil' Kim, one of my favorite subjects because she's so grotesque. Back in 2003 I decided to take a more subdued route with her. She was originally to be part of larger satirical piece on the commercialization of hip hop entitled "Clothes and Liquor" that I still have not finished. The "Electric Kim" is from a MAC cosmetics ad I combined with a Courvoisier that featured a pair of Gucci-like "Courvoisier" CV brand boots.
I might create a blog (someday) for my more risque cartoons and art, but ... hmmm ... I'll have to think about that one.
**The profile drawing is from a comic book I still haven't finished called "Inside Joke." It was created as a going away gift for my friend The M-Tizzle. The inside joke in that panel is about how I am fake sisters with The M-Tizzle and Lady Vance-A-Lot, who both happen to be red-headed and part Irish. People always assumed Tizzle and Vance-A-Lot were sisters (they're not) but no one would ever ask me if I were related to them (obviously). So I would often refer to myself as being black Irish. I don't think I actually have any Irish in me, but considering I'm a black American, God only knows.
Danielle Belton | 
