wiz khalifa
Rapper Wiz Khalifa has built success on lyrics that often describe women as “bitches” and “hos”. So does he really respect them as he says? Card-carrying feminist Elizabeth Day finds out
The rapper shares his views on misogyny, politics and his infamous beef with Kanye.
“If I call a woman a bitch, it’s not [towards] all women,” he says, leaning forward to make his point more clearly. “It doesn’t mean that you’re a bitch.”
“Thank you,” I say. How kind. To backtrack: we’re halfway through the interview and it’s going pretty well. We’ve covered the necessary ground: he’s talked about his sixth studio album, Khalifa, his tendency to self-critique (“I’m just really, really picky”) and the fact that he wrote his first rap at the age of eight (“It was about just being cool”). He was only 20 minutes late for our interview, which in the world of hip-hop stars is admirably punctual.
At 29, Us-born Khalifa – real name Cameron Jibril Thomaz – has already released a string of hit songs, such as “Black And Yellow”, “We Dem Boyz” and “See You Again” (used on the Furious 7 soundtrack). He’s taken part in high-profile collaborations, recorded with artists such as Snoop Dogg and Miley Cyrus, has been nominated for 10 Grammy Awards and won three American Billboard Awards. He was also married to self-proclaimed feminist, model and actress Amber Rose, with whom he has a three-year-old son, Sebastian.
In person, he is polite, engaged and smart. So how can he square all that with the retrograde and misogynistic content of some of his lyrics? Why is it okay to repeatedly refer to women as “bitches” and “hos”, and why, in the song “Hustlin’”, does he rap about a “bad bitch, she sucks me while I’m rollin’ up... Throw a stack at that bitch ass / And make her pay her rent with it”?
“It’s a double-edged sword,” he says, impressively unperturbed by the question. “I love women. I look up to women. Women are smart. They’re the smartest creatures on earth. They need to be empowered and respected. But some of the women we see in our [hip-hop] community – a lot of the ones we talk about, who we don’t have respect for – are the ones who come out in the music. That’s why you hear those words.” He breaks off to take a drag from a huge joint as casually as other interviewees might sip on a cup of coffee. “At the end of the day, where we could be a little bit more sensitive, I feel as hip-hop artists we just take the realer route and we talk about more of what we see.”
So he’s talking about specific women who act in a certain way to promote their own interests? “Yeah. It means that I probably met some bitches in my life who did some things. There are women in the industry who use what they know to get ahead. We use our words, they use their bodies – it’s an understanding. I would never call my mum a bitch, my little sister a bitch… I would never disrespect a woman just because she’s a woman, you know?”
But it’s a bigger issue than just one artist. Referring to any woman in such derogatory terms plays into promoting a culture where it’s acceptable to view the female gender in a negative way. The young boys who buy Khalifa’s records probably don’t get the subtlety of his distinction. He’s by no means the worst offender; his mentor Snoop Dogg and other artists, such as Rick Ross and Lil Wayne, are guilty of far more aggressive sexism in their lyrics.
Hip-hop has a long and ignoble history of misogyny. Its vernacular was minted in a society plagued by racism, poverty and illiteracy, where economic and social frustrations were daily realities for young black men who were more likely to go to prison than university. The first hip-hop artists were angry at everyone, including women. For some, like Khalifa, the occasional sexist lyric is a nod to hip-hop’s traditions. Still, it is absolutely not okay. Anything that a man in a position of power does to objectify women or treat them as lesser beings is sexism.
As the film director Ava Du Vernay put it: “To be a woman who loves hip-hop at times is to be in love with your abuser.” And yet, I do love hip-hop. It’s tricky because I have no defence for the fact that I know all the words to Ice Cube’s “No Vaseline” and do a mean Skee-lo at karaoke. Ultimately, I love the music, the beat and the passion behind some of the world’s greatest rap tracks. I like listening to hip-hop, but I realise it makes me a hypocrite. But I don’t let hip-hop’s perception of women define me. And I take heart from the fact that things are changing (slower than I’d like, admittedly, but at least going in the right direction). There are female rappers such as Queen Latifah and Missy Elliott redressing the balance, while artists including Snoop Dogg have softened their lyrics in recent years. In 2011, Kendrick Lamar rapped about women not needing to wear makeup.
Does Khalifa think hip-hop music would be less popular if the language changed? “Yeah. Just thinking of me as a kid: I thought jokes were funnier with cuss words. People just like their music more raw.” Khalifa is good at rawness. He speaks like he raps – with unfiltered honesty. He says he always felt destined for greatness, partly because of his name, which is inspired by his Muslim ancestry. “My uncle’s name was Knowledge Colossal,” he explains. Knowledge Colossal? That’s the best name I’ve ever heard. Khalifa laughs. “I know! I wanted one to match so he called me Wisdom. And I needed a last name, too; ‘Khalifa’ is Arabic and it means ‘successor’. It’s somebody who spreads the word.”
Khalifa was an army kid with both parents in the military. After his parents divorced, when Khalifa was three, he moved to different bases every couple of years – Germany, the UK, Japan. Can he speak Japanese? “Uh, yeah,” and then he says something that sounds like, “Domo arigato gozaimasu.” (A Google search translated this into English as, “Thank you very much.” See? So polite.) But always being the new kid at school made him “nervous”, so music was his refuge.
Wiz Khalifa is sitting on a purple velvet armchair in a house in the Hollywood Hills explaining that he doesn’t think I’m a bitch…