It's OK to want big booty hoes

Lily Allen’s new song “Hard Out Here For a Bitch” bemoans many cultural products, but the critique is not respectful or successful. Its parody of certain institutions serves only to glorify Allen under the light of a holier-than-thou halo, but in a much more unlikeable way than the alluring cheek of her break-up song “Smile.”

Her song echoes the recent trend heard in Lorde’s “Royals” and Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”: white artists ridiculing the rap game’s perception of the lux life.

The video begins with her preparing to reluctantly undergo liposuction, an allusion to her blog breakdown a few years ago during which she addressed how the media’s scrutiny of her weight caused her to grapple with self-loathing.

I’m not reviling her cliché message of how she shouldn’t be told to drop pounds, but her chiding of the hip-hop scene’s sort of lyrical staleness, specifically its mention of “cars and chains.”

She says she “won’t be bragging” about hers.

I’d like to point out that hip-hop’s symbols of urbanity and the appropriation of certain clothing items for empowerment are nothing to be scorned.

Doing so only demonstrates a poor understanding of hip-hop’s history.

She’s mocking testaments to the black cultural revolution of success, staples of which include Timberlands, which were originally a fisherman’s muck boot. They’re now sold in different colors because black members of the hip-hop community repurposed them.

The same goes for New York Giants hats, throwback jerseys, etc.

Allen is clearly criticizing those “black” aspects of rap culture, using black booty dancers as props around her, but condemning the way they dance.

As she stands fully clothed at the center of their gyrating asses, champagne being poured over their derrieres, she sings, “Don’t need to shake my ass for you/‘Cause I’ve got a brain.”

She’s claiming a feminist anti-consumerist stance on these issues, reasoning that “there’s a glass ceiling to break.”

But she’s exchanging only one arrogance for another.

While she’s lamenting the male gaze and being told what the outline of her form should be, she’s questioning the taste of hip-hop artists.

While she rejects their form of success, she’s ignoring the fact that hip-hop is self-made and rose to tremendous power, overcoming racial barriers, and that is a phenomenon.

Hers is but a different lens of condescension.

It’s still attaching a stigma to a person’s choice to look a certain way.

­— ashhendr@indiana.edu