Girls in the Hood

So much of Megan Thee Stallion’s music is about retaking power from men, and she refuses to placate the fragile male ego. She has an alter ego (Tina Snow) that centers a woman as a pimp, and she is constantly asserting her sexual authority. She raps as if primacy is her prerogative—so it makes sense that she’d eventually rework Eazy-E’s “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” a testosterone-pumping problematic classic that is active in misogynoir. In the original song, there’s a lyric about grabbing a woman by her “nappy-ass weave” and slapping her “like a pimp.” “Girls in the Hood” rectifies this imbalance. It feels like Megan is leading a revolt of the women mistreated in rap songs. “I’m a rich nigga magnet/Pretty with a fatty/Thirty-inch weave with the long eyelashes,” she exclaims before interpolating the original’s most famous bit toward her own ends: “You could check the throwback pics, I been that bitch.” With her performance on “Girls in the Hood,” she challenges rap’s patriarchal canon.