As they say, “hindsight is 20/20”. Dame Dash, former manager of Jay Z and partner at Roc-a-Fella Records, recently expressed regret for his past actions towards women in an interview with Hip Hop Motivation, via a video posted to YouTube. Referring to a scene in which he pours champagne all over a model in Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin’, the entrepreneur stated,
If my son ever did that I would be appalled. I wouldn’t want nobody to do that to my daughter or nobody that I care about,” he said. “Sorry to all the girls that I poured champagne [on].”
“You do something when you’re 20 and you’re still paying for it when you’re 40. I was a completely different person than I was when I was 20…At 20 you don’t see that, you think 40 is never coming,”
As Monie Love pointed out earlier this week, the time period, the late 90’s, when the music video came out, marked a major turning point for the treatment of women in Hip-hop. Soon after, we saw a sharp decline in the number prominent female rappers and “Big Pimpin’, which was very mainstream track, played a major part in the commodifying of hyper-masculine and misogynistic performance in mainstream Hip-op music.
While it’s admirable to admit your mistakes, the fact that it took 15 years and 50 million dollars to arrive at these conclusions, is an epic case of “too little, too late”. Here’s to hoping that Dame Dash will use his new found clarity to impart some wisdom on the upcoming generation of music-makers and moguls. I won’t be holding my breath or placing any wagers on that one, however.
