1990s & 2000s: Erykah Badu & Lil' Kim
Erykah Badu's iconic song "Tyrone," is a black feminist anthem if I ever did hear one. A song that's all about calling out domestsic inequality - much like Aretha Franklin's "Respect" - Badu plays no games as she calls out her lover for his disrespectful ways. She croons, "every time we go somewhere/ I gotta reach down in my purse / to pay your way and your homeboys and sometimes your cousins too." Badu's lover takes advantage of her generosity, and to this, she says no more. At the end of the phone, she tells her lover it's over, telling him to call Tyrone, but he can't use her phone. This reclaims Badu's power and is great example for women to expect nothing but equality when it comes to relationships.
In Lil' Kim's song "Suck My Dick," she flips the script when it comes to archaic ideas concerning the shaming of women for having sexual relationships and the praising of men for doing the same thing. She also calls out the ways in which women treat women, by reversing the roles and describing a situation in which she expresses "imagine if I was a dude and hittin' cats from the back / with no strings attached, yeah [bleep] picture that / I treat y'all [bleep] like y'all treat us." The whole song deconstructs the different ways in which men disrespect women, such as manipulating their feelings for sex, recording their sexual relations without consent, and overall treating women as less than human. By flipping the script however, and speaking as if she were the one treating the men how they treat women, Lil' Kim shines a bright light on the double standards and toxic masculinity that exist within patriarchal constructions.