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GOOD DAD: Dad with Daughters Pens Letter to Rap Music, He’s Had It With The Sleaze!

Clash DailyApril 27, 2014

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Mike Heenan has two daughters, his oldest daughter is only 3, but he decided to write a break-up letter to rap music.

Dear Rap Music,

I’ve been known to “throw my hands in the air and wave ’em like I just don’t care.” I used to hit up your shows and you could often “find me in the club, bottle full of bub,” where, if your beat thumped enough and your hook looped just right, I could be enticed to “jump motherf*cker, jump motherf*cker jump.” And while I’ve never really been “down with O.P.P.,” I do “like big butts and I cannot lie…” And man, those days were the days.

But now that I have two daughters, two centers of the Universe, these are not those days.

I am breaking up with you, Rap Music, and it’s not you, it’s me. And it’s also, kind of, you.

It’s your rampant misogyny, homie. It is an epidemic. Your unapologetic sexism is a scourge on an otherwise exceptional cultural phenomenon. A movement I used to wear proudly on the sleeve of my Turbo/Ozone parachute suit while spinning on my back on the cardboard refrigerator boxes my mom brought home for the neighborhood kids to krush grooves and bust a move on. But the game has changed. Since falling headspins-over-heelkicks for the love of my life, that life is no longer about “getting my freak on.” And since becoming a SAHD of daughters, cash no longer “rules everything around me.” Frozen does. Dora does.

My oldest daughter is only 3, but she is a rosebud. Every day she grows closer to womanhood and every day I am made aware of another biological anomaly or aspect of gender-nature. Just last month, at the playground by our house, a little boy approached and in some brief but instantaneous fit of glee, my daughter turned to me, face a-bloom, and said,

“Dada, he’s noiiiiiiice!”

Probably a benign assertion, but thought-provoking none the less. And I’ve gotta worry about this little boy in his Dada’s car, radio cranked up to the tune of “I I I I could BEEP you all the tiiii-i-i-iime.” Sure, it all comes down to individual parental responsibility, but that’s what I’m doing here, taking responsibility for my music choices. I will NOT have my daughters subconsciously, or euphoniously, convinced that “b*tches ain’t sh*t but hoes and tricks.”