Bitches Ain't Shit


"Bitches Ain't Shit" is an American rap song, never issued as a single, but a huge underground hit, that closes record producer and rapper Dr. Dre's debut solo album, The Chronic, released in December 1992 as Death Row Records' first album. In late 1993, discussing a set of public protests over this song, rap journalist Dream Hampton incidentally called it, artistically, the best song on the year's best rap album. Billboard notes, however, "the misogyny is ugly and thick, even for a rap record." It evokes a set of four male running mates who rap sagas and lessons altogether teaching that "bitches," being women, are ripe for sexual indulgence, and sometimes offer easy money, but, being traitorous, are just "hos and tricks." Soon notorious, this song helped establish the persona of its guest rapper Snoop Dogg.
Largely debuting via this album, Snoop also raps the hook, which reduces "bitches" to performing fellatio, and which fellow guest rapper Daz's verse heralds as "the anthem." Dre's verse, the song's first, overlooks literal women to disparage his former N.W.A bandmate Eazy-E as a "bitch," who allegedly cheated Dre of money, and to incidentally call N.W.A's manager Jerry Heller, allegedly complicit, "a white bitch." Snoop's own verse portrays a former girlfriend, unfaithful but perhaps fictitious, "a bitch named Mandy May." And guest rapper Kurupt's verse, like Daz's, demotes women to mere indulgences. In closing, R&B singer Jewell, the only female, boasts indifference as "a bitch that's real." Yet until the album's 2001 reissue, this song was a hidden track—initially unexpected. Hitting especially hard, anyway, it helped drive album sales.
Despite many offended, even females often loved the song, compelling in "the beat" and the lyrical "flow." Meanwhile, Dre's musical sound, borrowing from funk music's subgenre P-funk, shaped a new rap subgenre, gangsta funk, G-funk, having a smooth musicality, whereby The Chronic singles, lyrically milder, broke gangsta rap onto popular radio. But in 1993, launching a national battle against gangsta rap, activist C. Delores Tucker largely targeted this song, album, and record label. In 1994, at the ensuing Congressional hearings, Tucker called gangsta rap, especially Snoop's, "pornographic smut." Yet its foothold proved secure. Dre and Snoop thus refashioned the rap gangsta from an angry menace to society, à la N.W.A, into an urban socialite, threatening violence only to guard his own lifestyle of leisure and indulgence. Becoming iconic, the "Bitches Ain't Shit" model reshaped both rap and R&B, which, merging, became popular music, influencing America's popular culture.
Social critics alleging adverse cultural effects by gangsta rap have recurrently indicted this song. Reportedly, it had motivated Sarah Jones's performance poem "Your Revolution," a feminist reaction to hip hop's growing focus on women's sexuality. Still, when listening, a woman may instead identify even with the male vocalists and, singing along, feel herself aggrieved by "bitches." And amid numerous, borrowing artists, some interpolate the hook to start, "Niggas ain't shit," disparaging men generically. Further, in early 2005, rock artist Ben Folds released a trimmed cover version—only Dre's and Snoop's lyrics, including the vulgar hook—a rendition ironically sentimental, "a gorgeous piano ballad." In April 2005, it placed #71 on the main popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100. Surviving his 2008 attempt to retire it, it was a humorous fixture of his live sets into about 2017. Then he stopped performing it. In 2020, apologizing for ever playing it, he sought its removal from music streaming.

Record production

In 1986, Ice-T's song "6 in the Mornin'," stealing from electro rap and "funk hop" some attention in the Los Angeles area's rap scene, was gangsta rap's inaugural anthem, reaching gold sales. Forming in early 1987, the group N.W.A turned gangsta rap grim. Despite scarce radio play outside the County of Los Angeles, and despite two, early departures over money—Arabian Prince in 1988 and lead rapper Ice Cube in late 1989—N.W.A took gangsta rap to platinum sales, but dissolved in early 1991 once record producer Dr. Dre left. Freed from N.W.A's brash lane, Dre had creative control, industry cachet, and soon, at low cost thereby, studio access. He wanted to only produce, then, but his ghostwriter The D.O.C. convinced him to still rap, too.
Assisted by Daz and by Warren G, Dre reused classics of soul and funk music, especially its subgenre P-funk, to shape a new sound, casting a new aura: gangsta funk, G-funk. In late 1993, Death Row Records' second album—the Snoop Doggy Dogg debut solo album Doggystyle—secured gangsta rap as mainstream, popular music. Yet first, in late 1992, there was the Dr. Dre debut solo album, The Chronic. Set to the Los Angeles area's scenery and scenarios in Dre's directed music videos, its sounds and themes achieved gangsta rap's breakthrough via grooving bass lines and bassy thumps under catchy, melodic hooks and Snoop's relaxed, melodic raps. Its lead single, "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang," pervaded popular radio, and "Let Me Ride" won a 1994 Grammy.
"Bitches Ain't Shit," on the other hand, although "equally well built with G-funk musicality and danceability," was among the more "gruff" and "sinister" of The Chronic tracks. Album recording, across nine months in 1992, began in Calabasas, California, in Dre's house—which, midway, burned down—and finished in the City of Los Angeles section Hollywood at the studio Galaxy Sound, owned by SOLAR Records' Dick Griffey. Its audio console was advanced, but its neighborhood was decayed, and in April beset by the LA riots. This song was, in the end, as its guest rapper Kurupt prides, "one of the most hard-hitting songs on The Chronic." With the album's 2001 reissue, it joined the track list, after all. Back in December 1992, although present, playable as track #16, it was a hidden track.

Synthesis

In the album's 1992 issue, its final listed track is "The Roach," subtitled "The Chronic Outro," plus a long silence. Abruptly cracking it to start the truly final but unlisted track, Snoop intones, a capella, "Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks"—the hook's first line—trailed by a breakbeat from the band Trouble Funk's 1982 hit "Let's Get Small." Then opening, to loop once per bar, is a synthesized rhythm section—kick drums' bassy thumps, aflutter, syncopating offbeat, and snare drums' lively taps, steady, syncopating backbeat, atop a bass guitar's grooving bass line, a riff that is the replayed start of Funkadelic's 1976 song "Adolescent Funk"—while both snare drum attacks per bar, on common time's two and four counts, meet a chord on synthesized keys. Simultaneously, an eerie, highpitched whine or ring, created on a Moog synthesizer—a keyboard that can synthesize bass, too—manifests while Snoop, restarting from its first line, raps the full hook, sexually explicit. Snoop then repeats it while a sample emerges—to recur often in the song—from New York City rapper MC Shan's 1986 hit "The Bridge."
A rock musician, Colin Wolfe had befriended Dre working long hours under Dre at Ruthless Records, which had first invited the bass guitarist to tour with its R&B singer Michel'le. In 2014, Wolfe recalled, "One day, I was alone in the control room and Dre and Daz were up in the back room, trying to mess around on the keyboard for the 'Bitches Ain’t Shit' bass line. So I stepped in the doorway and I could hear what they were trying to do. I said, 'Man, look out, y’all trying to do this.' I straight did it, recorded it, and then I was like, 'Yo, I got another part,' and did the high Moog part right after that." By 1987, to emulate Bernie Worrell's otherworldly Parliament–Funkadelic or P-Funk sounds, Dre had had Wolfe buy a Moog synthesizer. Via the funk group Ohio Players' 1972 single "Funky Worm," such a "high Moog part" is called the "funky worm." With N.W.A, Dre released only two songs deploying it—Ice Cube, in 1987, rapping "Dope Man," and Dre with MC Ren, in 1991, rapping "Alwayz into Somethin' "—a signature sound, rather, of The Chronic. Also engineered masterfully, "Dre's sonics," recalls Jimmy Iovine of the album's distributor Interscope Records, "just sounded better than anything else on my speakers."

Vocals

Dre's verse was written by The D.O.C., his usual ghostwriter, who had moved with Dre from Ruthless Records to help form Death Row Records. Helping them shape its first album, this song's four guest vocalists—among the album's others—still unsigned, recorded while frequenting the studio like a social club. Snoop's circle brought his younger cousin Daz and also Kurupt—soon a rap duo, Tha Dogg Pound—while R&B singer Jewell, already present, was pioneering women's singing on rap songs. Yet most prominent is Snoop. Dre plucked him, age 20, from Long Beach trio 213, formed in 1990 of Snoop with his cousin Nate Dogg, singer, and Warren G, producer and rapper, stepbrother of Dre.
In April 1992, unheard since N.W.A's 1991 album and breakup, Dr. Dre reemerged. His debut solo single, title track to the Laurence Fishburn film Deep Cover, also debuted Dre's guest but instantly star rapper, Snoop. Despite the ensuing buzz about him, Snoop's debut solo album started recording after release of Dre's, which, heavily featuring Snoop, is nearly his album, too. Early on, collaborating to write the "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" lyrics, The D.O.C. focused, beyond Dre's verses, on imparting to Snoop, already gifted, an extra lyricism, "the formula." Snoop brought from Long Beach an intoxicated, brighter lens on gangsterism, and the elders coached him, sealing the aura that this team would mint.
The producer Dre links the vocals of the four "Bitches Ain't Shit" male rappers closely, barely skipping a beat between them, effecting teamwork: Snoop's hook twice, Dre's verse, Daz's verse, Snoop's hook once, Kurupt's verse, Snoop's verse, and, while some male repeatedly whispers, "Bitches ain't shit," Snoop's hook twice. Then the rapper Dre, silent since the first verse, returns to starkly deadpan, with reverberation effect, "Bitches ain't shit," just before Jewell starts the last verse. An increasingly echoic refrain, Dre's deadpanned Bitches ain't shit recurs to head every fifth bar across Jewell's verse, an R&B/rap outro. Jewell's closing few words abruptly go a cappella and, echoing, fade out while Dre's refrain returns once more and, fading out, echoes.

Lyrical content

First verse : Promptly after Snoop opens with the hook, Dre narrates a personal tale of a specific "bitch"—a man who allegedly shorted Dre's money—until, closing the "real conversation," Dre calls a "pass to Daz."
Second verse : Off and rapping before Dre silences, Daz exploits "hos" and grows camaraderie, "chilling with your homies and shit, and have my niggas kick the anthem like this," Snoop's immediate hook recital.
Third verse : A beat later, Kurupt tersely adds to the hook and then, like Daz, refers generically—"bitches" or "hos" or "tricks"—ultimately closing with a brag, "turning them trick-ass hos the fuck out, now."
Fourth verse : Seizing the next beat, Snoop narrates just the second tale of a specific "bitch"—this one a woman, unfaithful—and caps it with his third and final round of trumpeting the anthemic hook.
Fifth verse : Dre returns to intermittently deadpan, "Bitches ain't shit," while Jewell—a woman, singing soulfully, then rapping vociferously—stamps her endorsement, if mostly I don't give a fuck!.

Dr. Dre's verse

Based on an early rap feud, Dre's verse never directly comments on women. Rather, complementing brief skits and the single "Fuck wit Dre Day," it is the album's final smear of Eazy-E. Dre's former N.W.A groupmate, Eazy had founded the group and owned its label, Ruthless Records. Never identifying Eazy by his stage name, Dre's lyrics identify him first by his legal name, Eric Wright, but otherwise call him "bitch" and "she." These jabs are occasioned by Dre's glossing their friendship, rap partnership, fallout over money, and then Wright's lawsuit against him, allegedly resulting since, Dre raps, "bitch can't hang with the street." Tracing the turning point to Wright, more specifically, "hanging with a white bitch"—unnamed in the song's lyrics—Dre thus alludes to veteran music manager Jerry Heller, counting N.W.A among his clients. Wright and Heller—manager of Dre's first group, too, the World Class Wreckin' Cru—had cofounded Ruthless.

Guest verses

Daz & Kurupt

Although both touting hedonism, Daz, operating systematically, alike a gigolo, stalks profit and eyes leisure, whereas Kurupt, derisively mistrustful, chases sheer thrills. Here, women resemble a faceless breed of indulgent but disloyal nymphomaniacs, who if shown men's affection would repay it by becoming the men's adversities as traitors and perhaps as parasites.
Daz, before heralding Snoop's hook recital as "the anthem," advises best practices to grow relaxation time with "your homies." In Daz's protocol, "you pick a ho who got the cash flow," and "run up in them hos and grab the cash and get your dash on." Once the hook soon closes, "Then I hops in my coupé to make a quick run," Kurupt adds, "To the sto'—to get me a 4-O."
Kurupt, out to buy a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor, gets paged by Snoop. "That must mean," Kurupt knows, "more hos." His outing to Snoop's hometown Long Beach—"just so I can meet a freak to lick me from my head to my feet," Kurupt beams—swiftly attracts, he prides, "bitches on my nuts like clothes." But, in his circle, "we don't love them hos": "a ho's a trick"; "a trick's a bitch."

Snoop Dogg

Snoop skims a saga of finding himself as "a nigga on sprung," "up in them guts like every single day," and "in love like a motherfucker," walking into his debacle with her, "a bitch named Mandy May." Early on, despite "the homies" advising him that she was "no good," he had "figured that niggas wouldn't trip with mine," his being, after all, "the maniac in black, Mr. Snoop Eastwood." But, "on a hot, sunny day," his "nigga D.O.C." and "homie Dr. Dre," retrieving him from a jail stint, pose, "Snoop, we got news."
Now wise to her "tricking" during his "county blues," Snoop, who "ain't been out a second," already must inflict some "chin checkin.' " So he pulls up to "my girl's house," he says, and will "kick in the door," but first goes, "Dre, pass the Glock." At the doorstep, drawn to "look on the floor," Snoop finds, "It's my little cousin Daz, and he's fucking my ho"—a discovery that prompts Snoop to "uncock" it. He admits, but affirms, "I'm heartbroke, but I'm still loc," and, at long last, swears Mandy May off: "Man, fuck a bitch."

Jewell

Whereas "bitches can't deal," Jewell, "a bitch that's real," belts, "I don't give a fuck—about a bitch," and will "let her know that she can't fade this." Headily, Jewell boasts selfdetermination, getting paid on "the Row," the chime And I don't fuck a fuck!, a carnal skill "like a washing machine," and an oral appetite, if for "just the juicy ones," closing in some explicit detail.

Public reception

The hidden jam

"Bitches Ain't Shit," in predating the cultural effects of Snoop's debut solo album Doggystyle, met a society that, despite misogynistic rap lyrics by Too Short and by 2 Live Crew since the 1980s, still expected popular songs, rather, to romanticize women. Although too hardcore to be a single from The Chronic, this song was among its "unheralded favorites," sparking talk of "the beat"—that is, the instrumental section—and of the rappers' lyrical "flow," especially Snoop's. Interviewed, asked about it, one young black woman, echoing many women, commented, "I shouldn't like it, but I love the song 'cause it's the jam." In October 1993, rap journalist Dream Hampton, remarking aside the controversy over it, called it, in the rap genre, "the best song on the best album of a pretty slow year."
Since the November 1992 release of "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang," the album's singles, lyrically milder, pervading popular radio, shifted the rap genre's spotlight, for the first time, from the East Coast to the West Coast. The Chronic, suddenly, "recast hip hop in the mold of LA rap." Although in August 1993, months before Doggystyle's November release, Snoop was charged with involvement in a homicide, Death Row Records' CEO Suge Knight bailed him out. Snoop kept amassing popular appeal and emerged as one of America's biggest superstars. Meanwhile, presaging Snoop's injection of misogyny into pop music's culture, "Bitches Ain't Shit" became "notorious." Altogether, this hidden track, a huge underground hit, explains its guest rapper Kurupt, "was one of the things that helped sell The Chronic the most."

Public opposition

The runup

All in 1990, many rap records gained the Parental Advisory label, Newsweek smeared rappers as, in one reading, "ignorant black men who scream obscene threats," and a Florida judge, triggering ban laws, ruled a rap album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, obscene, US history's first in music. But, hearing the lewd party music in court, jurors laughed, and acquitted the group, 2 Live Crew. Recorded amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots, rather, The Chronic largely reflects this climate—anger, angst, and mayhem, present in Dre's life, too—between the visions of leisurely life for a West Coast rap "G." For the December 1992 album, Interscope Records, led by its parent and distribution channel Time Warner, had Dre's label, Death Row, remove "Mr. Officer." Its hook wishes a policeman's death. In October 1992, rapper Tupac, Interscope, and Warner were sued for the April 11 fatal shooting of a Texas Highway Patrol officer.
Although killing an undercover cop themes Dre's debut solo single "Deep Cover," already out since April 4 via Dick Griffey's SOLAR Records, a soul label in Los Angeles—through Epic Records distribution under its owner Sony Music—national outrage arose in June instead at a March release from a side project of L.A.'s original gangsta rapper, Ice-T. Heavy metal, a track on his rock band Body Count's eponymous album, "Cop Killer" was condemned by US Vice President Dan Quayle, President George H. W. Bush, the NRA, and a Texas police union, which urged a Time Warner boycott. By August, about 1 000 stores withdrew the album. In January 1993, Warner Brothers Records, owned by Time Warner and owning Sire Records, which had cancelled Ice-T's new rap album, announced freeing all Body Count artists from their contracts. Yet after The Chronic, despite an associated, beating death in June 1993, opposition regrouped around misogyny.

Harlem rallies

On Sunday, May 9, 1993, in his Mother's Day sermon, senior pastor Calvin Butts—leading the Abyssinian Baptist Church, in New York City's Harlem section—vowing a symbolic act, solicited offending music samples. Butts thus became the first black public figure to decry gangsta rap. On Saturday, June 5, supported by a few hundred outside of Abyssinian—historically the city's largest and preeminent black church—Reverend Butts, as vowed, mounted a steamroller. But dozens of counterprotesters, decrying censorship, blocked its path. One shouted, "You're steamrolling our dreams," and "who we are." Another alleged, "He's attacking us black rappers," not "the white power structure." Skipping ahead to the preplanned finale, then, Butts and followers, taking the boxes of CDs and tapes unexpectedly unscathed, boarded a bus to Midtown Manhattan.
On the sidewalk at 550 Madison Avenue, they laid, and some trampled, the boxes of gangsta rap. There, at Sony Music headquarters, "representative of an industry which," Butts felt, "laughs at black people all the way to the bank,” he blared, over bullhorn, "Recognize that this poison kills!" But that summer, amid Harlem's wide tolerance, young males would casually wear T-shirts emblazoned with the hook Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks. Eventually, some two dozen women organized and protested. On three days, by bullhorn, they demanded that street vendors on Harlem's main thoroughfare, 125th Street, stop selling the shirts. Such apparently sold on streets of the Los Angeles area, too, into at least 1995. By then, Reverend Butts—who, romanticizing "the black community," had called gangsta rap "antithetical to what our culture represents"—had faded from the battle.

National battle

In September 1993, C. Delores Tucker, chair and 1984 founder of the National Political Congress of Black Women, a lobbying group in Washington DC, reentered the public eye to take up the battle against gangsta rap. Swiftly becoming the battle's national leader, she expanded it against offensive rock lyrics, too, but especially targeted "Bitches Ain't Shit," The Chronic, and Death Row Records. Of a background in civil rights activism and state political office, the Democrat demanded congressional hearings. Illinois representative Cardiss Collins, already chair of Congress' standing committee on commerce and consumer protection, convened them in February 1994. There, with Republican conservative, onetime US education secretary, William Bennett in alliance, Tucker called gangsta rap, especially Snoop's, "pornographic smut." No government action ensued.
But in May 1995, the Tucker and Bennett attacks on Time Warner had aired a television commercial in four major cities, and gained a prime ally, Senate majority leader Bob Dole, Republican presidential candidate. Time Warner, although calling them political opportunists, divested from Death Row's distributor, Interscope Records. Its 1991 cofounder, Jimmy Iovine, was promptly dined, then, by four of the five other major record companies, the then Big Six's rivals to Warner Music. Assessing Interscope's options, Iovine reacted, "I'm just glad to have our company back." Interscope chose MCA, which was being renamed Universal. Death Row, likewise unfazed, steamrolled ahead. In the late 1990s, as G-funk's era closed, The Chronic grew into a pop classic. And yet "Bitches Ain't Shit" would refuel recurring rebuke and debate about this word for women, and about such depictions of them.

Female listeners

's lyrics, smearing types of women since 1985, or even 1983, were comparatively vague. In 1993, "Bitches Ain't Shit" was arresting since it apparently "scorned all women," and "presented misogyny with an explanation." Meanings of bitch and ho need the rappers' and listeners' specific context, maybe playful or even loving, but, explicitly defining terms, this song scorns any trust or love for them. A contemporary listener fond but at times uneasy, artist Saul Williams recalls, "Some people, women in particular, would be instantly offended, while others excused the lyrics because of Snoop's intoxicating flow. It became common to hear people say, almost apologetically, 'Oh, I just like the beat.' "
As ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt notes, "examples of women defending their love of the beats, but not the rhymes," "leaves them looking like their participation is all about the body, not the lyrics." A woman, Gaunt appraises, "For females, the appeal of being able to move to the latest jam, and falling in love with the beats that drive one's body, is a learned desire," descending to a sexist stereotype: "men work the intellect, and women work the body." But rapper Jadakiss, a man, called women "the main ones" who "want to hear" this "entertainment" of Snoop rapping "that 'Bitches Ain't Shit' shit." In any case, at least some girls who ignored unknown, passerby boys' greetings were harassed, then, by chants from the hook.
The Chronic already out a couple of years, one Sarah Jones, from Brooklyn, attended a party hosted by a New York rap mogul. "I was standing there," in Tavern on the Green, she recalls, "like some video ho, singing along to 'bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks.' And I thought, 'Something has gone awry. This is not me, you know, I disagree!' " On this epiphany, Jones explains, as a fan of hip hop, she rebuked its new changes. Her resulting poem, "Your Revolution"—in part, your revolution will not happen between these thighs—was a performance poem, set to music in 2000. Fining a radio station for playing it, the FCC labeled it indecent, but reversed its ruling after Jones became the first artist ever to sue the FCC.
On the other hand, more recently, theatrical researcher Amy Cook, analyzing dynamics of role casting, listens repeatedly, appraises her own cognition, and—despite others' likelihood to cast her as "one of the various 'bitches' "—soon finds, "Even I, a white female, feel impelled to join him, to sing along about how 'bitches ain't shit.' " Nor is this mindless. Instead, "singing along, I take on the position of the powerful, the angry, the sad, the person aggrieved by 'bitches.' " Further, amid the female/male distinction's social primacy, at such a "miscasting, or counter casting," Cook explains, "the spectators must consider the nature of their expectations." And so Cook finds, in sum, "a cultural power in the counter casting."

Cultural integration

Snoop effect

Dre's carefully crafted "G"—the sociable street gangsta ever at leisure, doing violence only on threats to his comforts and privileges—spawned untold copycatting. "Bitches Ain't Shit" lays bare the basic values of the aura, refined in Snoop's breakthrough, early rap brand: intoxicated on alcohol and marijuana, mellow and debonair, but, while loyal to the homies, gunhappy and misogynistic. Amid the rap genre's snowballing corporate consolidation then underway, Snoop's persona spawned rap's massive commercialization, like his endorsements of St. Ides malt liquor and Tanqueray gin, in the 1990s. Traditional R&B rapidly lost favor.
In 1999, rap magazine Ego Trip identified "16 Memorable Misogynist Rap Music Moments." They date back to 1985: the pioneer, Too Short, still at #3, "The Bitch Sucks Dick." Topping that, the #2 moment, is "Bitches Ain't Shit." This trails only Snoop with, the next year, more male camaraderie and teamwork, now featuring Warren G, Nate Dogg, and, again, Kurupt: the Doggystyle track "Ain't No Fun." Also never a single, yet another huge underground hit, it seemingly fulfilled overnight what Snoop's first, "Bitches Ain't Shit," had presaged: the end of soul and pop music's insistence on idealizing women.

Female reply

A year into the new century, ahead of Beyoncé's iconic status solo, music journalist Lola Ogunnaike, in Vibe magazine, profiled the lead singer's R&B group, Destiny's Child. "Chockful of sophisticated, ball-busting, and often comical hits that berated brothers," its 1999 or second album, The Writing's on the Wall, "earned the group reputations for being everything from gold-digging male bashers—a charge the girls heatedly deny—to new-millennium feminists out to challenge the bitches-ain't-shit posturing that plagued much of late-'90s R&B and hip hop." But, months earlier, on her own second album, rapper Lil' Kim instead rehashed the posturing.
Sharing what, "if I was a dude, I'd tell y'all," Lil Kim's song "Suck My Dick"—a directive shared by the "Bitches Ain't Shit" hook—asserts that "niggas," or men generically, "ain't shit." Closing, she inverts on men the year 1993's influential hook. Also in 2000, rapper Trina's debut album Da Baddest Bitch, several years late, directly retorts The Chronic's hidden track by rehashing its hook into the very hook of her own song named, just as plainly, "Niggas Ain't Shit." Still, it was Lil' Kim, the selfproclaimed "Queen Bitch," who led but the latest iteration of American women's reappropriating the word bitch, now also to antidote a bitches ain't shit residue.

Pop revised

As the 21st century settled in, by absorbing the label bitch, women preempted its use against them, and reframed it to buoy their own ambitions. But since their 1996 debut albums, both Lil' Kim and her popular rap contemporary female, Foxy Brown—two rappers who would slur each other as various types of "bitch"—had leaned on profane boasts of vanity and lewdness, avarice and violence, more gangsta rap. Allegedly, such models of womanhood were "resurrecting Jezebel"—pernicious stereotypes of women, especially of black women—and so, in a roundabout, were supplementing "Bitches Ain't Shit." In 2002, certain singers, including Usher and Alicia Keyes, rather, were praised for revitalizing R&B's soul tradition, after a decade of the rap genre, with its "Bitches Ain't Shit" model, invading R&B.
But by 2005, in the rap genre itself, "Bitches Ain't Shit" had seemingly stood since "the beginning of time." And yet, in 2012, at The Chronic's 20th anniversary, Billboard magazine still found, at this track, "an elephant in the room here: the misogyny is ugly and thick, even for a rap record," as "women are treated like disposable sperm receptacles." The album was, by then, both a rap classic and a pop classic, anyway, roundly celebrated at its 25th anniversary. "A misogynistic hip-hop masterpiece and relic of the past," writes one music journalist, while another calls it "rap's world-building masterpiece." In 2020, the Library of Congress enshrined it in the National Recording Registry. By then, music artists of over 40 songs had borrowed from "Bitches Ain't Shit." In the process, it had become, additionally, "a gorgeous piano ballad"—the 2005 cover version by rock artist Ben Folds—which entered the main popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100.

Ben Folds cover

In early 2005, American singer, songwriter, and musician Ben Folds, an alternative rock artist, who formerly fronted the band Ben Folds Five, had a new solo album out, Songs for Silverman. With the single "Landed" forthcoming from it, he needed a B side. Having wanted since college to put a melody to rap group Public Enemy's 1990 song "Can't Do Nuttin' for Ya, Man," he at last began work on it. But soon, he "found it too symmetrical for a good melody," effecting "too much of a Cat in the Hat vibe to sound serious with sad chords." Finding in his collection of classic rap, then, a song more divergent from English poetry's classic metre, iambic pentameter, he took only Dr. Dre's and Snoop Dogg's lyrics, including the hook, and, he says, "just added pretty chords and one of my best melodies."
Without the gloating and boasting in Daz's verse and in Kurupt's verse, and lacking Jewell's endorsement and boasting in her own verse, the cover version, where Dre's and Snoop's sagas of betrayal are the only verses, lets even the vulgar hook suggest hurt. Performing it live, "Ben Folds sitting at a piano," says an observer, "evokes an old-fashioned crooner or lounge act." When opening for pop rock artist John Mayer's nationwide tour atop the pop charts, though, "I was definitely causing problems," Folds admits. "But the biggest problem," he adds, "was one particular song, which was becoming a very successful single for me." Booing at his "Bitches Ain't Shit" rendition—whose own genre, rock, newly makes even the word nigga ostentatious—was spurring Folds to play it once or twice more, until the crowd quieted or, as he demanded, sang along.
Whereas many covers stand unto themselves, the irony of this cover, switching genres and largely races and subcultures, employs recognition of the Dre and Snoop original version, a dramatic contrast. As of 2020, although seen more on other Billboard charts, Folds has had but two songs, both in 2005, ever on the Billboard Hot 100. "Landed," an A side highly promoted by Sony Music, spending two weeks on it, peaked at #77 on February 26. Its B side, which "features" his then usually collaborating musicians Jared Reynolds and Lindsay Jamieson as "Mr. Reynolds" and "Lin-Z," a rendition ironically sentimental, "had spread by word of mouth and was now doubling my audiences," Folds explains. On the Hot 100 for one week, it held #71 on April 2. Its instrumentation mostly matches his familiar repertoire, but eventually summons a synthesizer at high pitch, evoking the original's eerie ring, the "funky worm."
At shows of Ben Folds headlining, "The cackles and singing from the audiences," writes a researcher appraising them, "suggest that they are hailed by the song, welcomed in, and engaged to be a part of it. And they like it." A rock critic calls the original version, originally a hidden track closing Dr. Dre's 1992 rap album, "a sumptuous slice of Olympic-level sexism that's almost as memorable as Ben Folds' emotional piano-ballad version." In October 2006, it was released again on Ben Folds's compilation album of covers, Supersunnyspeedgraphic, the LP. During 2008, feeling that "Bitches Ain't Shit" had made its rounds, Folds, retiring it, "was choked up," he later said. But, lest the next audience feel let down, he played it—planning to honor its retirement afterward—once more, "somehow even more moving for me," he would recall. Yet at the next show, abroad in Germany, lest this crowd feel cheated, then, he played the retired song again.
Folds thus accepted the song's unretirement. "So it's been an emotional roller coaster," he remarked in July 2008. For about another 10 years, his live sets retained the cover. Amid the "masterpiece" rap album's 25th anniversary year, some audiences heard tales instead about the venerated, ironic cover. "I've almost been beaten up a couple of times over this," Folds prefaces, "once by a kind of uptight hippie woman who said it was demeaning to women." He referred her to Dr. Dre, "the lyrics department," Folds recalls. In the ensuing live performance, emergence of the hook—the hook once notorious—could still move the crowd to shout, "So true!" But soon, citing ethical reasons, he ceased performing it. And in June 2020, amid America's sociopolitical upheaval via the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement's nationally pressing allegations of ubiquitous racism violating blacks, Ben Folds announced that he would ask the record label "to take the next step and remove the recording from any streaming platforms where it has been placed."