As a white girl, retired rapper, and proud owner of a black light Biggie poster, I was hesitant to see Sundance darling Patti Cake$, which follows an aspiring white rapper trying to make it big. I assumed the film would either make me feel ashamed for abandoning my former passion, or — worse — for my murky relationship with cultural appropriation. But on a recent lazy Saturday, I finally bit the bullet. Did I feel read by the film? Absolutely. But I was also deeply moved, both by its portraiture of the highs and lows of creative expression, and by its poignant demonstration of something I’ve had on my mind for a while: How rap can be used as a feminist tool.
A female hip-hop enthusiast is a strange space to occupy. In one of my favorite rap songs, Biggie details robbing a woman and then ejaculating in her eyeball. I’ve often grappled with my passion for a genre historically known for glorifying objectification of and violence towards women. My preference for female rappers like Lil Kim, who often flip the script–“I treat ya’ll n*ggas like ya’ll treat us, no doubt / Ay yo, yo, yo, come here so I can bust in ya mouth” — was a temporary fix. But then an Esquire interview with Ilana Glazer helped assuage my feminist guilt. Regarding her former status as a Nicki Minaj super-fan, she said:
I listened to her mixtapes over and over, I knew all her f*cking raps. Because it felt good to, like, bark cocky sh*t. It stuck in my brain. You know when you smile, your brain feels you smiling and starts emitting happiness, you know, serotonin? Kind of that. I feel like I spit her sh*t that was pumping in my ears for so long that I was able to feel that confident.
While Nicki’s raps are undoubtedly more feminist than Kanye’s and Biggie’s, I think the sentiment can be equally applied to all hip-hop regardless of content. It feels good to bark cocky sh*t. And this is an experience women are generally denied. Our agency is forever chipped away at, and we’re constantly being told we’re mistaken, wrong or otherwise ignored entirely. Patti Cake$, on the other hand, takes Ilana’s quote to its logical conclusion.
Geremy Jasper’s debut film appropriately begins with a dream sequence: Patti’s hero O-Z (imagine a gaudier A$AP Ferg) introduces “Killa P” as his newest protégé before a screaming, green-lit crowd. Just as a glammed-up Patti begins spitting, the ring of her flip phone snatches her from her glittering fantasy: Her grandmother’s medical bills are past due, the caller threatens legal action. Killa P has disappeared, leaving only Patti Dombroswki. The 23-year-old wanders through her filthy New Jersey home, sans makeup and gold jewelry, sporting an unflattering alien T-shirt and mesh shorts, curly mane disheveled as her surroundings.
Her mother is asleep with an unknown man in the other room; her grandmother chain smokes in front of the TV. As she leaves the house, Patti puts O-Z on her headphones; his rhymes propel her into another green-hued fantasy (Jasper veers into magical realism by physically lifting Patti into a hazy green sky). A car honk again snatches us from Patti’s dreamland: “Yo Dumbo, get out the street,” the man says before driving off. Patti stands inert in response.
Throughout the film, conflict builds between the two Patti’s. There’s Patricia Dombrowski aka “Dumbo”– the shrinking woman who spends almost every night holding her mother’s hair back while she vomits in the bathroom where Patti bartends. Then there’s Killa P, aka Patti Cake$, aka White Trish, aka Marilyn Mansion, aka Jane Dough, a woman bossy and confident in ways Patti could never imagine, exuding body positivity and unadulterated swagger. Early in the film, after weaving through her mother’s empty bottles and grandmother’s cigarette ashes on the way to the bathroom — stark reminders of her bleak reality — Killa P emerges before the bathroom mirror: “You’re gorgeous, ya boss b*tch,” she says before spitting her toothpaste into the moldy sink.
Patti’s bathroom mirror rap instantly recalls Insecure’s Issa Rae, who shares Patti’s taste for rapping to her own reflection when things get dreary. Both women also use rap to escape themselves. I never rapped in the mirror, but I similarly vampired hip-hop’s swagger to transform from timid and unsure to bossy and in charge. When I rapped, I was no longer Anna Dorn, the girl who spent all her waking hours in the library and cried when she got a less than perfect grade, but Vagablonde, an irreverent socialite who was kicked out of boarding school for lighting fireworks off the roof. Likewise, Issa uses rap to escape her daytime dispassionate nonprofit persona to become an assertive diva. But there is a major, unignorable difference among us: Issa is black; Patti and I are white.
A.O. Scott wrote for The New York Times that “the story of a white suburban redhead chasing hip-hop glory may set off alarms about cultural appropriation, but the film mostly disarms them.” At one point, Patti is thrilled to realize she’s been hired to cater a party for O-Z, whom she nervously gives her mixtape only be to called a “culture vulture” in response. There are lots of people who will tend to agree with O-Z, concluding that Patti Cake$ is just another example of white occupation of black bodies, a long and painful history to which films like Get Out speak powerfully and the Kardashians showcase on the daily. But I think there is also something less nefarious happening.
Consequence of Sound described Patti’s love of hip-hop as “wholly unironic,” her draw to the genre less about attempting to “assimilate blackness, so much as her identification with the grander themes of hustling and adversity.” Likewise, filmmaker Jasper — white himself — said: “Rappers take the crappy circumstances of their lives and make them mythological. Places like Queensbridge or Compton or Lodi, New Jersey, become bold and colorful and interesting, instead of drab and mundane.”
But I’d argue there is an even stronger gender element. I believe many women are drawn to rap music because we — like black Americans — have been repeatedly disenfranchised. From explicit deprivation of basic rights, such as healthcare, to more invisible but equally harmful microaggressions, women are repeatedly given the message that society deems us lesser than. The world continually refuses to appreciate our value.
In among the film’s most powerful scenes, Patti enters a rap battle with her crush — a guido whose corny Macklemore-esque bars somehow manage to draw a crowd. When Patti embarrasses him with her virtuosity, throwing his white male mediocrity in his face, he responds with rhymes detailing sexual violence and fat-shaming. She serves it back to him double-time, a freestyle so fierce her crush is left with no verbal recourse, and he responds by headbutting her in the face.
Women regardless of race can find power in rap’s ability to give voice to the Other. Like Ilana said, spitting rhymes helps women imagine what it would be like to be powerful and paid attention to. As CoS wrote, when Killa P “starts to fit bars together, or finds the right tone for a track,” she “physically manifest[s] a woman coming far enough out of her shell.” As Patti, Issa, and Ilana all highlight, the experience of rapping can fill women with a sense confidence we can then transfer to other parts of our lives.
The film doesn’t show Patti achieve the superstardom she imagines in the first scene. (My rap career didn’t take off either.) It’s unclear whether Patti will keep rapping, and that doesn’t seem to be the point. The story is rather about Patti shedding Dumbo and finding her voice. By the end, we see woman learning to assert herself and ask for what she wants. Just as my brief foray in the rap game gave me the confidence to believe that I might be more than a timid bookworm, Patti realizes that she can inhabit Killa P even when she isn’t on stage. At its core, Patti Cake$ shows us that in persistently and enthusiastically playing a boss, we might just start to become one.
Patti Cake$ will be available on home entertainment systems on 11/7 — look out for it then if you missed it in theaters.
