A big topic that I hear come up a lot is, is hip-hop degrading women? Well, I think hip-hop is exploiting. I wouldn’t say degrading, because the woman species cannot be degraded. We’re such a great resilient species, we are, after all, the mother of all civilization. There’s no way anything or anyone can degrade us. I think that women are exploited. I think jewelry is exploited. I think commercialism is exploited. I think money is exploited. I think all these things are quite thrown in our faces to make us feel and think that those are the things that are most important. I would say for a person that only knows two or three things, those are the only things that they gon’ talk about or sing about. If we only see two or three images, those are the images that we think are acceptable and we’re all trying to get paid in the game. We’re gonna try to mold our craft to…and our songs and our images to look like what’s acceptable, so we could fit in, so we can be a part of this American dream of music in this industry. I think those ideas are so exploited. I think we are so mislead. I think we’re so confused about what’s good and what’s not because we’ve been programmed to think that a certain thing is good. As artists grow into themselves, and this is my opinion, they begin to see other things. And when you give them more choices, you give them more opinions and as you grow, it changes your perspective or your point of view. There was a time when that wouldn’t bother me at all–to see a booty shaking. That wouldn’t bother me, cause that’s what I was into. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s another side to that too. I would not want my daughter to think that’s the way that you have to be to be successful. That’s a very tribal thing. When I say tribal thing I mean, all across the world, tribe-based societies, the body is beautiful, the gyration and the dance, we’re born sexual beings, we’re spiritual beings and we pay homage to that, but if that’s the only thing we see, I call that exploitation and not degradation. You heard it from Badu. It’s my opinion.

–ERYKAH BADU