I admit it! I’ve done some things that hip-hop heads would consider “suspect” (i.e. gay). Yes I have!—from being a ballet dancer (something that Tupac and I have in common) and a “Magic Mike” stripper (something that Blood gang member & rapper The Game and I have in common) who wore a G-string wedged up between my butt-cheeks—to repping for gay rappers—to wearing Prince-like poet shirts with lace & frills. Some guys can do this and remain fully heterosexual. (Shout-out to Prince! R.I.P.) That would be me! As Star (of Shot97.com) would say, “I’m a man of a certain age!”—so I really give less than two-s#### about a n#### waving the “suspect” flag in my direction. F**k your idea of manhood & masculinity!
Grown men commenting on other men’s appearances seems to be all the rage these days, and so, Young Thug has given all you male hip-hop fashionistas something to talk about. On the cover of his new mixtape there he is—dressed in a floor-length dress looking fabulously trans! LOL. I’m just so tickled at where hip-hop has taken its fashion sensibilities! There are no boundaries! The days of Timberlands, baggy jeans and over-sized T-shirts have become as extinct as the dinosaur. Hip-hop don’ gone from the dress/kilt-wearing stylings of Diddy, Kanye West, Kid Kudi, Andre 3000, Snoop Dogg and ASAP Rocky to Young Thug’s all-out women’s dress wearing!
At my age, I just find this s### hilarious! A “thug” wearing a dress? If this isn’t the ultimate oxymoronic symbol. I bet Uncle Rico Lord Jamar is just itching to get on Vlad’s couch and have a conniption fit over what Young Thug is doing to hip-hop.
I’ve said it before! Lighten up! The days of the uber-hardcore rapper are gone for now, so all of you Lord Jamar’s might as well take several seats and ride this sh*t out. It’s quite pathetic hearing you old-heads try and steer this young person’s culture. Y’all are like an old washed-up boxer sitting on the front porch telling the young’uns war stories—lying to the kiddies about what hip-hop is—upset that the white kid (Eminem) has mastered his toy (rap) and the gay kid (Young M.A.) is beginning to stand up for himself/herself and speak his/her truth. Indeed! You old-head Negroes are hip-hop’s version of Napoleon Dynamite’s “Uncle Rico”—who so desperately wishes that Kip’s “Time Machine” could take him back to 1990 just to get one more chance at being quarterback in the State Championship game. (See what having children will do? Keep ya current on cult classic movies!)
I know why you are appalled at Young Thug’s dress. Young Thug’s dress pulls at your heterosexual heartstrings, kinda like how Prince did to an earlier generation of music heads. Some of you swore that Prince was gay, yet, since his death not nann no gay man has come out of the closet to verify the veracity of your mind’s claims. Prince was a woman f**king machine linked to some of the finest women on the planet! Indeed, I know why your panties are all bunched up!
Young Thug wearing a dress runs contrary to all that you have been programmed & brainwashed to believe about manhood & masculinity. Thug and Jaden Smith’s dress wearing is the emasculation of manhood as we know it, but don’t mistake this with the feminization of the male species, which, according to pseudo sexual theorists of the Lord Jamar ilk, leads to homosexuality. Nope! Nunna dat!
I fully expect that you black folk Negropeans are aghast (filled with horror & shock) at Young Thug’s dress. As a Negropean, you are no more enlightened than your white counterparts when it comes to black culture and history. Black people are looking at Young Thug’s dress through the lens of this white, European, ethnocentric paradigm and symbol of manhood. A man must wear pants to be fully man. This is what we think. Young Thug is no man for wearing a dress. This is our simplicity.
But we have a collective conscious conundrum (a confusing & difficult problem); that is the fact that pants are a relatively new invention in the annals of men’s fashion, dating back only a few hundred years, created by white people.. According to these Internets “Pants” comes from:
A 3rd century Christian doctor who was condemned to death by the Romans for aiding the poor. The Church canonized him, giving him the name “Saint Pantaleone”—Pan is Greek for “all” and leo is the Latin word for “lion.” In ca. 800 CE, in comic drama according to Robert Hendrickson in his book Facts on File: An Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, the fool in a comic production was called Panteleon (“all lion”). In time this changed to Pantaloon. The actor was dressed in breeches that were tight below the knee but which bloused out in a full puffy fashion from the waist to the knee. In the 18th century the costume became one worn by many men. The famous portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud found in the Louvre shows Louis XIV in a regal pose, showing off his legs in a “Pantaloon” costume. The term was shortened to “pants” in the 1840s. (www.dl.ket.org/latin3/vocab/etym/history/pants.htm)
Pants, britches or trousers are European! Young Thug is African. Pants are a European invention—and a late one at that, yet we diss Young Thug for loosening the fashionista shackles which white people gave us. Pants were unknown to the African, the Egyptian, the Hebrew, the Moor, etc. These people wore dresses, tunics, caftans (for lack of better words). Even the white Greeks & Romans wore something resembling a dress as did the Scottish with their kilts. Again, when you do a survey of the whole of men throughout history—the dress was acceptable, preferable and worn. Like monogamy, the screwing marrying of one wife for a man’s entire life, which has been a 500 year old experiment gone horribly awry, pants are a new thingy on the evolutionary scale of masculinity. We’re just on some b####### and Young Thug is “man enough” to expose it.
The beautiful dress-wearing West African men of the Wodaabe Tribe.
Even Adam & Eve wore dresses made of leaves to hide their shame (according to the myth).
For you religionists that would use the Bible where it says, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God” (Deut. 22:5)—this was a prohibition against a religious practice, not an admonishment on how to dress! There were no pants circa 3,000 B.C.E. so they could not have been talking about clothing. In fact, they were talking about a religious practice where women would carve themselves wooden dcks penises (or d#####) and use these strap-on ccks phalluses in the temple, f###### practitioners of the Goddess & Sodomites faiths. Sex, as ritual, had been used since Time Immemorial as a show of honor and worship to the Deities. As for men dressing like women back then—again, that was the Israelite’s answer to Hebrew men who indulged in sword-fighting & c###-jousting (homosexuality) in the name of Sodomite gods, and not any admonishment by God on how to dress. (Like really, what does the God of Creation care about how we dress? Give the Big Guy more credit, wouldja?)
How can you call yourself a “conscious” black person—a Kemetic thinker, a Hebrew Israelite, a Moor, yet have a problem with Young Thug wearing a dress? This is your collective conscious conundrum! Even if Young Thug is on some dress-wearing gay s###, the conscious mind faces a conundrum. Condemn the dress, which the African, Egyptian, Hebrew and Moor all wore or big-up the pants that the European invented.
The dress was ok for the Egyptian, but Young Thug is destroying your white paradigm of manhood? Ok, right!
Dare I say that you “conscious” folk aren’t as conscious as you think? You still have some Negropean in you. Young Thug & I are just here to point it out.
Khalil Amani, C.O.O.N. (Consciously Optimistic, Overtly Nihilistic). Blogger, Writer, author of seven books. IG, Facebook, Twitter @khalilamani. AllHipHop.com, DJ Kay Slay’s Straight Stuntin Magazine, Originators Magazine.