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Tuesday, February 14, 2006
BITCHES AIN'T SHIT
Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg, Dat Nigga Daz, Kurupt, & Jewell
The Chronic
Death Row : 1992
[Buy It]
BITCHES AIN'T SHIT
Ben Folds
Available on iTunes
Last summer, I encountered the Ben Folds song "Bitches Ain't Shit" while up in Vermont visiting friends, who put the song on the stereo as part of an attempt to soothe their crying baby. (I suspect that the song was never, in either of its incarnations, intended as a lullaby, which has no doubt fueled my fascination with it.) "Bitches Ain't Shit" was originally recorded by Dr. Dre with Snoop Dogg, Dat Nigga Daz, Kurupt and Jewell as a catchy if otherwise standard piece of woman-slandering braggadocio. The appeal of Ben Folds's version is a little trickier to pin down.
When I first heard the song, I was struck by the contrast between Folds's earnest voice and the lyrics he was singing. If comedy is largely about the inversion of expectation, then it's intrinsically funny to hear a white boy from Tennessee sing, "Long as my motherfuckin' pockets was fat/I didn't give a fuck where the bitch was at." The contrast between the tough lyrics and Folds's sweet melody and opening-bars-of-"Scenes-from-an-Italian-Restaurant"-style piano (apologies for the reference; I'm from New Jersey) are also good for a quick laugh. But if Ben Folds's song was all about such comic dissonance - if it was a mere joke at the expense of Compton, Nashville, or both - it would be a one-trick pony, like Steve Martin's only-relevant-in-1978 "King Tut." (Sorry again.)
The fact is, for all the song's humor, there's something touching about it, too. Not a whole lot about the original could warm your heart, but it isn't just Folds's voice that changes the tenor of the piece; his artful tweaking of the lyrics transforms "Bitches Ain't Shit" into something with real emotional resonance. Dr. Dre, for example, repeats the chorus -
Bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks
Lick on these nuts and suck the dick
Gets the fuck out after you're done
And I hops in my ride to make a quick run
- five times; and as with the gross-out jokes in The Aristocrats, after a time your ear grows numb to the vulgarity. In Folds's song, the chorus comes back only once after its original iteration, and then with a full host of backup singers. The lyrics retain their shock value, and instead of merely repeating them, the backup singers lay on the irony with a trowel.
Folds also excises two rambling verses and retains those with discernible storyline. In the central one, the song's subject - "the maniac in black, Mr. Snoop Eastwood" - recounts a relationship with "a bitch named Mandy May" which he understands as purely sexual ("The pussy was the bomb, had a nigga unsprung / I was in love like a motherfucker lickin' the pro tongue"). When he gets out of jail to find Mandy having sex with his cousin Daz, however, the severity of his reaction suggests not so much violated honor as a broken heart. (He grabs his Glock, drives to her house, kicks down the door, and "uncock"s his "shit" - a loaded choice of words if ever I heard one.) The rancor in Folds's tone as he recounts this incident reverberates throughout the song; if the subject has Mandy May in mind when he denigrates her entire sex, I'm saying, you don't have to agree with him to understand his synecdoche.
But perhaps Folds's most interesting decision in reworking "Bitches Ain't Shit" is to repeat the first verse following the original chorus:
I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright
We used to roll around and fuck the hos at night
Tighter than a motherfuckin' gansta beat
And we was ballin' on the motherfuckin' Compton streets
In part, this verse is interesting because it raises the question of why Wright (a.k.a. Eazy E) should be a bitch, since in the context of the song the term usually refers to a woman. (At one point the subject vilifies a former girlfriend and her new white boyfriend by saying, "She was hangin' with a white bitch, doin' the shit she do / Suckin' on his dick just to get a buck or two;" displacing the "bitch" from the woman to the man shows his disdain for both.) Eazy E's feud with Dr. Dre was well known, but by the time of E's death from AIDS in 1995, they had made peace with each other.
In Fold's retelling, the song begins to sound like an elegy: I suspect that Wright is a bitch for dying, and that the subject is haunted by his memory. Why else would the verse recur, sung with such feeling, in Folds's song?
. . . . . . . . . .
Emily Barton is the author of Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron. In her childhood, she spent many an uplifting afternoon with her father listening to Alan Lomax's recordings of chain gang songs. Her favorite word is "Schadenfreude."Labels: emily barton, writer's week
posted by Alex
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