Jermaine Dupri draws a feeble hand in response to the “stripper rapper” backlash.
By you’re a bandwagon-leaning individual, I gather you’ve already hit the eject button on Jermaine Dupri following his questionable tirade against women in rap. Sure, there’s an objective to be made embedded in his message, but JD is missing a key component or a “sign the times” for lack a better word. Countless women (who rap) and allies came forward in denouncing Dupri for his line thinking, including a charged-up Ari Lennox who delivered her biting response in the form an unrehearsed freestyle.
Due to Jermaine Dupri’s willingness to remain a “publicly traded entity” and not go the ways a has-been, have-not performer, Dupri thought it might be prudent to sponsor an all-woman initiative through his imprint, tentatively labelled the So So Def Female Cypher – coming to a ____ real soon.
“After all the calls, DMs, angry tweets and other messages saying ‘I am a major gatekeeper in the hip hop world, why don’t I invest in a female who is out here hustling and making a name for herself?’ I decided to create the #SoSoDefFemalecypher,” he wrote on Instagram with a campaign poster to match. “details coming soon.”
Jermaine Dupri’s success as an entrepreneur and producer is inarguable. So So Def may have never reached the heights its regional counterparts like Cash Money or No Limit Records, it did, however, endure the test time without undergoing much in the way a dramatic overhaul to the roster. For what it’s worth, the “female cypher” is the last thing the leading women hip-hop would have asked Jermaine Dupri. Sometimes it’s better to hold the L, and reposition oneself towards enlightenment.