Hoez With Attitude were most probably the first ever female MC’s to officially pull a high-heel suppository LP on CD/cassette with their cult 1990 debut Livin’ In A Hoe House. Situated & or/affiliated in LA but with the central Rapper (Baby Girl) hailing from Chicago they spilt a viscous amalgam of hyper bitchiness, raunchy libidinous, side-splittingly improbable gangster fantasy & bordello/harlot trick exploitation bolstered by a bunch of competent producers & beat-smiths that you will probably never have heard of before.
The beats are often tacky but also proficient in design & other sectors. In fact, this hybrid of cheap/quality contrast creates an adorable quirkiness & “cult” advantage along with Baby Girl who at this stage of her career (she improved massively as a rapper on forthcoming albums) was somewhat challenged in her MC credentials, & yet I find her constant bitchiness & snide sneering hugely delightful. BG’s catty, arrogant, ceaselessly disdainful bitchiness & over-emphasised razor-tongue becomes almost comic in a pantomime villainess prosthetic contempt of exaggerated chide & pre-eminent elite bitch grandeur. It’s really quite a joy! BG definitely has the most sobriety when compared with the more abrasive Choice (Texas) & the berserk bitches in BWP (New York). The two other female members of HWA barely contribute, providing only skits & chorus components. Lyrically the quality content is mostly quite minimal, with occasional excellency, but once you stop taking the album seriously & start to revel in it’s tawdry glory it’s outrageous charms start to gratify. I’d almost say this is a kitsch-classic with areas of undeniable quality & reckon the mass majority of early 90’s Vagrant’s will be besotted with the vintage samples/song construct & the adorable 808 drum-prog. Members of NWA are constantly assaulted (with the significant exclusion of Ice Cube who is never mentioned) with near religious tenacity, appearing in the rifle scope on about seven songs. Baby-Girls disses are sometimes pathetic, but her self-assured insipid arrogance carries it off (imperfectly), it’s hilarious. Unconvincing gangster fantasy, lurid & louche sexploitation & faux prostitution enterprise & entrepreneurship. On 1-900 BITCHES Baby-Girl depicts getting a married man infatuated with her premium phone sex service, mercilessly goading him to insolvency & destitution with obsessive phone-sex. It’s utterly hilarious! Eat This is another rug-munching anthem with some brilliant & hysterical lines, whilst Gangstrology is one of my personal favourites & one of the rarer stints of ridiculously artificial Gangsta Rap (machine gun totting high-class prostitutes). another peak on the album is Trick Is A Trick, a truly classic tune with superb production & BG’s haughty high-capping beyond belief, even describing shooting a punter in the back after boning & the victim attempting to abscond without paying. It’s totally hilarious, totally brilliant & totally ridiculous! The final track perhaps surges the entire formula to it’s cardinal apotheosis with Little Dick, with nowhere near the class & verbal aptitude of Choice’s magnificent Mr Big Stuff, this track verging on inane (if not sinking directly into it’s boggy mass) still comes off as hugely enjoyable mirth conducing nonsense with insufficiently sized lovers getting ripped to shit. I can’t see how this album can’t be deemed a classic? almost all it’s faults become boons in some mad inadvertent metamorphosis. Even the cover has to be seen to be believed (including BG’s hair-style & shoulder-pads), with the girls hooking out-side of a Beverly Hills mansion complete with computer generated pink-pastel skyline.
HWA would return in 1994 for the EP Az Much Ass Az You Want with massively enhanced lyrical abilities & the rest of the girls rapping as frequent as BG. Baby Girl also returned in 1996 with a solo album Holla At Me with vastly escalated skills & some really killer cuts!
As far as I am aware, HWA are the first female MC’s to deliver a full length album in overtly explicit hard-core Rap (Choice also smashed it to shit with The Big Payback in the same year), & Livin’ In A Hoe House is an enchanting piece of smut-encrusted, expletive riddled gaudy matriarchal mayhem. Let’s not forget who did it first mothafuckers!!!
Rekd: 1990
Label: Drive-By-Records