American rapper Snoop Dogg is married with three children. Hell, he even has a television show called Fatherhood, in which he does normal dad stuff like coach his son’s football team, the Rowland Heights Raiders, and walk the dogs.
But there he was in concert at Sydney’s Acer Arena last Friday, winking like a sly fox and asking if there were “any sexy ladies in the house”.
A black guy in a souped-up jeep once hollered at me while I was out walking in a miniskirt. Does that count? But it was International Miniskirt Day, so I assume he was only getting into the spirit of things.
“Yo!” he yelled out the window. “Nice skirt. I like the faded denim look.”
I gave him a thumbs-up as he sped off.
Other than that, I have never really been a usual pickup target, something that has never bothered me.
In fact, I always wind up feeling sorry, not for myself, but for those poor women who somehow end up trapped in those dancing cages in nightclubs, surrounded by blokes who only know the pegging-clothes-on-a-line move.
“One minute he told me he had lost his phone number and needed to borrow mine,” a bewildered woman will later recount.
“The next I was swinging from a strobe light.”
So, no, it’s never bothered me. But when Snoop asked that question, I started to panic. Was I a sexy lady? And if I were, would it be, well, in poor taste to nominate myself? And if I did nominate myself, how does a sexy lady act?
Should I leap over the barricades and onto the stage and do a Beyoncé-inspired shimmy and shake before the security guards carry me off?
Just before Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube had been on stage and had performed his classic hit Today Was A Good Day, and as usual when he comes to the part about picking up a girl he’s been trying to get with since the twelfth grade and, um, what he does with her, it made me blush.
The truth is my dilemma is that I love hip hop, but rap music videos are full of booty-shaking women not wearing much at all.
Sexist or sexy? Or should I not even care, since the music is so great?
Not so long ago, I met American rappers Kool Keith, Tim Dog and Marc Live when they were in town for their Project X tour, so I decided to ask the boys about it.
We were in the foyer of Canberra’s Crowne Plaza. Kool Keith had fallen asleep so unfortunately he couldn’t contribute his opinion, but Marc Live and Tim Dog were still awake.
“So," I ventured nervously. “Is what’s in the music videos true? On any given day do you have a whole bunch of women lying around?”
The boys listened carefully, like I was actually asking a serious question.
“I wouldn’t say lying around,” Tim said. “But it can get very crazy.”
Marc added, “I think the beauty of it nowadays is that we’re like the Traveling Wilburys, we could tour forever and with being able to travel the world, you do live that hip hop lifestyle.
“There are groupies and women that wait for you to come into town and we get large sums of money sometimes. Where a guy would have to work all year to make $40,000 we might make that in one month. I don’t really take it for granted, but you did the work, so you deserve to do certain things.”
Those things definitely including having lots of beautiful women around.
Tim explained it to me this way.
“It’s every young black man’s dream to have a bunch of women, so when you get money, you accentuate what you was dreaming about when you was a kid,” he said.
“You know, I don’t condemn. I don’t think it should be every video. I don’t think it should get to a point where it’s like the operation now. But I think if that’s what you’re about, you should be allowed to do that.”
Then he smiled.
“And I prefer to look at women in bikinis than men in thongs.”
Marc said they consider themselves progressive rappers.
“We always was antiestablishment, so like I never dreamed of having women in my videos with my group. It was like, women,” he said, making a face.
Marc said for the music video for their song Iconic, from their first Project X album Iconic, out this month, they did have “women in bikinis and cars”.
Marc said he likes to go on the Internet when they go on the road to check out what the fans are writing on their blogs.
“The fans really…I mean I don’t know if I should say this, but they really believe that we’re making fun of [that lifestyle] and they’re not buying it. They’re like, ‘Oh, no man, they’re being sarcastic.’
“Because they know us to be so progressive, like we’re always like, f--- the establishment, f--- the industry. And then kids are seeing this video and they’re scratching their heads and trying to find what they think is an underground, hidden meaning behind the women and the Bentleys.”
He paused.
“There isn’t. But you know, we just feel like we deserve to do stuff that we enjoy. We enjoy women, we enjoy cars, we enjoy nice things. We don’t always have to be rapping in mud or, you know, in a back alley and be so crazy. We can put on a nice outfit and do things that we enjoy so I think there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Meanwhile back to the Snoop Dogg concert.
“Are there any sexy ladies in the house?” Snoop yells out.
All around me, women scream. I figure it’s all about supporting these rappers who have come so far. And how can you take Snoop the family man seriously as a player?
So I do it. I leap over the barricades and onto the stage. It’s a shame the security guard doesn’t quite see it that way as he carries me off.