I remember when I first met Queen Latifah. It was in San Francisco at a huge benefit for AIDS awareness in the early ’90s. She was walking out of the green room and her bodyguard, a large imposing man, gave me a straight arm to get me out of the Queen’s way, and then she saw me, recognized me immediately and embraced me warmly. “Oh I have been wanting to meet you, gurrrl – you are funny! How you doin’? My name is Dana.” I was shaking and couldn’t even muster up the courage to say anything. I just stood there and gaped. She gave me a warm smile and went on stage. She was there with the cast of “Living Single” and showing much love to a worshipful crowd.
My ex-girlfriend, who I still believe is mad at me for breaking up with her, after fifteen or so years, my shit is that tight – for real tho’, was obsessed with the Queen, and made me a mixed tape with the single “U.N.I.T.Y.” and to this day, when I hear the bittersweet hook of that song, a war cry for all girls who want the respect that is due to them, that they had enough of the gender war, the male bonding that left them cold and alone in an already hostile world, I am brought to my knees in reverie. She truly is the Queen, not just in name, for her undeniable grace and power can only come from true royalty that only God can bestow, a Queen from the true Kingdom. There is no one that stands close to her in charisma, talent, beauty – who cares about the breast reduction and the weight loss, which could be construed by some as a self betrayal of her original spirit, the natural largesse of her being. She had some back problems, so get over it. I don’t have to take a feminist stance on judging what one might do with one’s own body, and when it comes to the Queen, nobody and nothing can knock her off her throne.
I got a big chest of drawers myself, and am not really a bra wearer, because I am a member of SAG and AFTRA, if you know what I’m sayin,’ and today in Victoria’s Secret – which I will never go into again by the way, and I only went because I was bored at the airport with a long ass layover. I was talking to my man on my cell, having a half-fight because of missing each other and no one wanting to admit it, and the saleswoman was holding up a support bra and pointing at it wildly, desperately trying to do something about the fact that my breasts were not as jacked up as she thought they should be, so she needed to give me some of that titty sign language like “The only way you gonna keep that man of yours is if you shove that shit up to your chin!!!” all frantic and crazed like she about to shout “UNDERWIRE!!!!!” in a crowded theatre. I did not need it from her and promptly exited the store while still on the phone. Bras don’t make me feel good. They hurt my back, and I could care less about where my breasts are as long they are still on my body. I am not going to go jogging anywhere, nor do I have a set of lingerie that matches because who has the time to wash that shit separately or put anything in a fishnet bag before you do – and I am sorry, I just do not care about gravity. Mind your own chest. For some reason, my lack of support for support, makes people really nervous. I think that there is something about bralessness that is too free, too overtly sexual, too bawdy, too loose – so that it makes people stare and stammer. It isn’t my intention at all to be any of these things, nor do I care if that is what people think that I am doing. Since I am not a dancer with a bony seat and no balcony, the boyish girls who can ‘get away’ with not wearing a bra because they are not guilty of fleshy ‘excess,’ and I am neither ashamed nor am I judgemental about the aforementioned ‘excess,’ considering it less excess and more an extravagance of nature, and something to be celebrated rather than hidden. My lawless braless ways are rather outlaw.
But I am here to talk about the Queen. Her reduction simply does not make her less of an icon in my eyes. The sequence in “Chicago” thrills me and forces me to play and replay it several times a day on my computer, the amber beaded dress fringes out into an ecstatic aura, casting her in a beautiful golden light. Ostrich feathers and jeweled headdresses were made for that shit, and Bessie Smith is reborn better and more badass beautiful than ever. She made that film truly brilliant and my guiltiest cinematic pleasure of the year, as I just cannot get enough of the Queen or that adorable shapeshifter, Renee Zellweger.
My favorite Queen Latifah performance has to be her gritty tour de force as hardcore gangsta bankrobber ladykiller in the exhilarating early ’90s noir “Set It Off.” The Queen goes down in a blaze of glory rivaled only by Al Pacino’s momentous bullet-ridden farewell in “Scarface.” I am not sure why “Set It Off” doesn’t have the same cult following within the hip hop community as the Brian DePalma epic of a Cuban immigrant with balls of steel and a strangely ethical manner of doing business as a high stakes drug dealer. First of all, the people in the movie are all in brown face. The performances are brilliant, but then again, everybody looks really orange. Even if there are a few real Latinos sprinkled in the mix, they fade into the background, chop and get chopped up with chainsaws in the first act, wear fly hats and tight hot angel white pants that look good when they are running and don’t get to have any lines. And the film is about race! I get the heroic thug that Tony Montana is, and have mad love for him, because he is a gangsta, through and through. He believes in himself, and he isn’t held back by his race (even though it is just self tanner but Pacino is a dope actor so he can do anything really), nor does he believe that his class is something that is going to be difficult to overcome. Like the Queen, he is the true King, anointed not by white society, but by his own bravery, intelligence, focus, pride, love, genius and some bizarre familial dysfunction that is both terrifically sad in the rejection of him by his mother and his creepy obsession with his sister. Rappers spend major bank on memorabilia from the film, and there are numerous mentions in legendary rap songs (Biggie says “Don’t get high on your own supply.”).
The true tragedy behind the Jacobean drama of “Scarface” is that no matter how much money Montana makes, no matter how palatial his estate is, Versace to the highest order, no matter how white and distant Michelle Pfeiffer is as a wife – he will never break the glass ceiling into the true elite society that he half-despises yet longs for, because he is not ‘legit.’ His money is dirty, a veiled allusion to his ‘race’ (ok – I won’t go there again, Pacino is the shit), and therefore his royalty is ignored by the playa-hatin’ wack royalty, represented by the blue haired socialites who cower at Montana’s meltdown at the fancy restaurant near the end of the film. The King ends up alone in his ridiculous bathtub, too large for anyone to fill without the water becoming too cold, and self destructs within cinematic seconds through his own drug paranoia, the realization that he has done himself in through a process of internalized denial of his own worth, a ticking time bomb set off by the race and class values of 80s America – that he would be the only one strong enough to bring himself down, and so he does, and even though seems as if he is the victim of numerous hitmen outside his bedroom door, it is really that he cashed himself in, because he couldn’t truly believe in his own credo – “The world is yours.”
My hope for the hip hop Kings and Queens of our age is that they really can believe that the world is theirs, that there is an unstoppable force within them that goes beyond the hype and the male posturing, that the coronation will not be televised, but that doesn’t mean anyone about to abdicate y’all.