This is getting ridiculous. No, really. I have the strength of a lioness, but these “critics” will wring every bit of patience out of me. Honestly, how hard is it to get off my Twitter feed and actually listen to the album that I worked so hard to put out? I’m sorry, but there is no such thing as “too conceited for a woman.” In fact, I take umbrage at the word conceited. I am merely telling the truth. I am the goddess of rap, and everyone that disagrees is eventually going to eat their words. When they’re reading about me in history class in thirty years, seeing me plastered all over their textbooks as the woman pioneer of my genre, they’ll know they should have believed me. This entire thing is making me so mad I’m going to have to tweet my feelings out. “Good vibes only but u all know I invented this game and that’s the truth” I consider my tweet for a minute and decide it isn’t enough. They have to know how I really feel so I finish my twelve-tweet rant, and sit back in satisfaction, only to immediately register a sense of deep regret. I know what’s going to happen. People from all over the world are going to come together to send me brutal-sounding physical threats for thinking “too much of myself.” But I can’t stop. This is who I am, and who I’ve always been. Even so, sometimes it bothers me. It’s never nice receiving death threats, obviously, but what really drives me up the wall is when they start to say I slept my way to the top of the industry, or, even worse, that I am only famous because of my husband. I cannot think of a single correlation between my husband’s brief stint in the vile pornographic film “Robocock” and my career as a musical artist. It makes me want to tear my hair out. Throughout my career, I’ve been warned repeatedly about writing about the men in my life. Everyone from my husband to my production team has warned me that there’s bound to be a backlash if I sing about men I’ve slept with. Taylor Swift, they tell me, made that exact mistake, and now, all these years later, she is still faced with hordes of haters who assert that she only writes soppy songs about her string of ex-boyfriends. Oh well. I knew I was onto something when my subconscious prompted me to interrupt her Grammy win. It was my musical consciousness warning the world of all the horrors that she would eventually bring into this world. So, like every other woman in this industry, I listened to my producers. It’s a tough industry for me. The male production assistant at the studio (whose only real job is to bring us coffee) only stopped groping my butt every day after one day I slid a knife into my back pockets and then watched his face turn ashen as he felt something pierce his filthy fingers. When I told my sist-ah Nicki about this over lunch, she asked me why I didn’t tell someone. But who was going to believe me? Why would the coffee guy have any reason to do that anyway, they would ask, and I wouldn’t know how to answer. Because, really, why would he? So anyway, I stopped writing songs about men and sang about my great love for myself instead. It felt right. It is true I occasionally have to face everyone saying that I am too confident to be a woman, but I can deal with that. My art keeps me afloat. But people still disregard my art. A recent review of my latest fashion line says that my line is too “basic.” I don’t know what they expect, really. I’m just designing clothes I would want to wear, and sharing this divine insight with the public. Take it or leave it. I’ve just released my newest album, with tracks that I believe will revolutionize how the world views rap. I dream of the day my producer lets me release an album without music videos accompanying them, like a real rapper. My music should do all the talking. The day after my album was released, I scoured all the articles I could find about it, looking for someone to appreciate my music. However, all I found were a bazillion articles about the costumes in my music videos. My body, my hair, my eyes, my clothes, my legs - every inch of my physical being was analyzed over and over, and yet it was only after a couple of days that articles talking about my music began to appear. And even those wouldn't lay off my “vulgar” dance moves. I’m tired. Maybe I should do a reverse Caitlyn and become a man. God knows it’d be a much simpler life. This article was written by Shreya Shreerman. Please send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Arshaun Darabnia