If Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg can still take to the stage to rock the mic, surely Lil' Kim should be allowed to strut her stuff and spit her flow, writes Charing Ball in a blog entry at Madame Noire. The fact that she gets clowned, aside from her offstage antics, is symbolic of sexism that runs rampant in our society and the music industry, she concludes.
So a snippet of Lil' Kim's new song dropped yesterday and well, let's just move on …
Between the Drake-esque flows and the auto tuning, an interesting and heated discussion not around the song but Lil' Kim herself emerged with some friends of mine, who questioned if Lil' Kim was just too old to make a comeback.
And by old, I'm not talking about played out, to which I would agree to a certain extent. At some point, any rapper over the age of 30 still trying to play the role of a 21-year old girl, chasing after trends and dressing like he/she just stepped out of a high school, needs to probably go sit down somewhere. However, my male and female friends, believed that Lil' Kim, who is around 36 years of age, is just too damn old period to rock the mic. "No one wants to listen to some old lady rap. It's just not cute," said one friend.
Wow. I find this idea of being too old to rap interesting considering that Jay-Z is not [too] far off from qualifying for an AARP membership himself and still continues to churn out music and play to sell-out audiences. I brought this point up to my friends but they weren’t hearing it. One of them remarked: "Listen, I know you don't like to hear this but the lifespan of a female rapper is much shorter. No one wants to listen to a female rapper spittin' about how sexy they are when they are 40. Deal wit it. Jay-Z is like a box of cereal with a long shelf life that you can eat at anytime and it still taste good, Lil' Kim is like the gallon of milk. You got to hurry up and drink it or it goes bad.
Read Charing Ball's entire blog entry at Madame Noire.