Good Or Shit: Ladeez Night

Remember the days when Lil Kim was getting around (Biggie's bedroom and) the hip hop scene brandishing (bits of herself that no one other than Biggy really cared for and) her tarted up style of gangster rap? Beefing with everyone from Faith Evans (fair enough, she was Biggy's wife) to Foxy Brown? That was the period I grew up in, when Kim wanted to know how many licks it took to get to the centre of the?...

Centre of what, you may ask - Iggy Azalea would say 'pussy', Azealia Banks would say 'cunt'. Jeez those two have a lot in common beyond variations of the same name which, I hear, they have beef about. Surprise, surprise. What is with beef and hip hop? There is actually an entire Wikipedia entry on “Hip Hop Rivalry”. You never heard Woody Guthrie saying “Bob Dylan? That dude bit my style. If I see that guy in the street he's gonna lose his strumming fingers.”

Anyway, asides aside, what do I.Az and Az.B have in common? – Vaginas. Yes they both have them, we know, because they've rapped about them and it has made them very famous. And sure, there is some fun to be had in the commercial crunk-ish, dance-hall-ish sound to these tracks. I've seen plenty of women genuinely enjoying themselves, shaking their bits on a dancefloor while saying “I guess that cunt's getting eaten”. Must be women's lib right? The lads have been rapping about 'getting brain' for decades and now women want you to 'get a mouth full of pussy, aka Listerine'.

But if you're in the club (haha sorry, I just had to say it) and the DJ is playing late '90s/early 2000s rap and R&B, what is more likely to fill a dancefloor? Lil Kim's How Many Licks or Faith Evans' All Night Long? You know the answer. If you're already crooning a bad rendition of All Night Long and guiltlessly enjoying yourself, you need to steer away from commercial vaginas and look into underground lesbians.

The Internet is made up of Odd Future's Syd Tha Kyd and Matt Martians. You wouldn't pick it, and if you're into semantics you'd say it isn't hip hop (hip hop is a culture dude, lots of stuff falls under its jurisdiction) you'd say it's soul/R&B. And it is, albeit new and innovative. Syd herself claims nothing else sounds like it, and given her role as Odd Future's producer and engineer, you would expect her creations to be too big for a box, I'll give her that. But you can still hear the '90s/'00s R&B influence - it's just modernised. And thank the gods because the last ten years of R&B have been abysmal. This is quality music made at the hands of a woman who looks like a little boy and says 'swag' too much.

Also dressing like little boys and rapping to a more innovative sound is THEESatisfaction. This is like rap and soul in a loving embrace but without the swag, which is awesome because swag is really boring.

So what do these two acts have in common other than vaginas? – Innovation, substance, talent, and funnily enough lesbianism. They don't feel the need to lick ice creams and appear the vixen, or bounce up and down in Mickey Mouse jumpers while they rap the c-word over standardised styles of proven-to-be-successful-sounds. In ten years' time people will still play their tracks with pleasure, without cringing, without holding a hand over their face while they say, "Oh god, can't believe I used to love this song."