i'm in love with a gangsta

When I heard the radio version of Tallahassee Pain’s – what unfortunate initials – song “I’m in Love With a Stripper”, called “I’m in Love With a Dancer”, I had a ‘scuse-me-while-I-kiss-this-guy moment. My mind substituted “dancer” with “gangster”, and I believed it.

At first I was like, is this a tribute to gun-toting, doo-rag wearing, weed-smoking brothers with metal-coated teeth? And I thought about it for a while (through the first verse), and started listening properly right at the chorus. With lyrics like, “she’s poppin' she’s rollin' she’s rollin'”, and "she can pop it she can lock it", I became convinced that in fact T-Pain was performing an ode to female gangsters.

And I loved it. I was over the moon. I thought this was a milestone in terms of the recognition of women who weren’t over-pretty and utterly useless bimbos that seemed to figure in every rapper’s life. I had this mental image of a female gangster (gangstette?), sort of Queen Latifah in Set It Off but straight, coming home after a long day of drive-bys, drug deals, and general gangstering to an r’n’b crooning man who had cooked her dinner.

Before I go any further, I’d like to point out that this delusion lasted until the second time I heard the song a couple of hours later, and I was under the influence of nothing. Unless you consider one Advil two days earlier as mind-altering.

It wasn’t long before I realised that the song was actually a misogynistic recitation of what one particular working girl could do with her attributes. Needless to say, I was very very disappointed.

But I still believe that paying tribute to female gangsters is a way more interesting subject than singing about strippers. Just my opinion.