Sticky and Sloppy: is this all women can be?

“I’m ashamed to say how much I like Sticky,” one of my closest friends said to me after

his first listen of Tyler, The Creator’s new album Chromokopia. The album, released on October 28, 2024, is stacked with noteworthy features including Daniel Caesar, Childish Gambino, Lil Wayne, and countless other significant names in contemporary hip-hop. “Sticky,” the eighth track on the album, features Glorilla, Sexyy Red, Solange, and Lil Wayne, and it reflects the influence of those features. The song, featuring mostly female features, contrasts from Tyler, The Creator’s more predictable style and leans more towards Glorilla and Sexyy Red’s inspirations. It still undoubtedly fits into the album, but it makes the listener pause and really pay more attention to the album and its content. It’s by no means a “bad song” (although this is a subjective statement), and it showcases the talents and styles of the different artists, cohesive and surprising. But not shameful. Why would it be shameful to like a good song? Because it features and leans into women in hip-hop.

The hip-hop industry has always been male-dominated. It’s become a medium for discussing serious social issues as a product of black culture in America. Its controversial nature is what gives it this power, but it still exists in the paradigm of the patriarchy. To be “vulgar” or sexual for a man is to show power, but a woman is seen as trashy and obnoxious. This isn’t anything new for the music industry, but for a genre that defies all other constructs, the barriers to women in the hip-hop industry present more frustration.

Consider, for instance, rap beef. In January of 2024, Megan Thee Stallion released a new track “Hiss” with a lyric directed at Nicki Minaj. Nicki took to Twitter with live reactions to the song and was quick to release, “Big Foot,” merely weeks after the initial diss. The “beef” died down fairly quickly after Megan posted just a picture of herself laughing, presumably at Nicki’s rebuttal. While the conflict had been brewing for a few years between promised features and perceived disloyalty, its eventual eruption was short-lived with little to no coverage, especially not in the mainstream.

Comparatively, the infamous feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar in early 2024 lasted far longer. Starting in February 2024 with Drake and J. Cole’s release of “First Person Shooter,” in which J. Cole refers to himself, Drake, and Kendrick as “the big three,” the conflict resulted in months of diss tracks and countless other artists. It made mainstream headlines as the “Rap Civil War,” and even had people like my sixty-year-old father, a Lutheran pastor, asking me what I knew about it.

While these are clearly different contexts and players, it’s still worth acknowledging that there is a clear difference in the way that women are processed in the music industry machine. To continue the feud and continue firing back would have meant the decline of both Megan Thee Stallion and Nicki Minaj’s careers. The longer Drake and Kendrick stretched out the beef, the more notoriety they got. To back down from the challenge, for a “real man,” would not be a humble back out, but it would be a detriment to his pride and honor.

Regardless, to hear a prominent male hip-hop artist feature so many female artists on such a highly-anticipated album made me realize how few there were on some of my other favorite albums. Women continually strive to be taken seriously, matching the same energy as the men in the genre, discussing sex, violence, drugs, money, and all the same topics as male artists with the same passion and aggression. The only difference is a female voice and a female perspective, automatically guaranteeing that a large portion of hip-hop listeners won’t listen. “I just don’t like how womens’ voices sound in songs,” someone in my study hall told me in high school. He would disregard any female artist, never even giving them a chance.

It was junior year of high school, and he asked me about one of the many stickers on my laptop. “It’s The Regrettes, they’re my favorite band,” I told him, seeing the blue and red “How do you love?” his finger pointed at. Over time, he would drop more misogynistic breadcrumbs for me to pick up, like when he was upset he went to a women’s basketball game for our high school because he forgot to check who was playing. It was because of him that I began to notice the subtle misogyny even more obvious around me. At first, he seemed to care about the same issues I did, and we had similar values when we would talk, but I could smell a subtle hatred for women obvious in every sly joke he told, and I became more sensitive to it generally because I realized how blind I had been to it until that point. It’s so easy to ignore prejudice when it’s under the veil of a friend’s joke or the lyrics of a particularly catchy song.

The apparent truth that even the best female hip-hop artist of all time is still female first, never truly in the same league, haunts me because it’s not just true in hip-hop. A part of the feminine experience is accepting that womanhood defines the initial impression people have. In some ways, this is a comforting thought because femininity is itself a comfort and a form of solidarity. The issue, however, is that this comfort and community is weaponized as a showing of weakness. In this sense, it’s clear that it’s not the fault of those expressing their femininity but rather those condemning and underestimating femininity for the negative and weak social assumption. As a social construct, gender is only something that can be externally changed, so to see Tyler, The Creator showcase female artists in hip-hop with such positive reception shows encouraging progress.