By you're a bandwagon-leaning individual, I gather you've already hit the eject button on Jermaine Dupri following his questionable tirade against women in rap. Sure, there's an objective to be made embedded in his message, but JD is missing a key component or a "sign of the times" for lack of a better word. Countless women (who rap) and allies came forward in denouncing Dupri for his line of thinking, including a charged-up Ari Lennox who delivered her biting response in the form of an unrehearsed freestyle.
Due to Jermaine Dupri's willingness to remain a "publicly traded entity" and not go the ways of a has-been, have-not performer, Dupri thought it might be prudent to sponsor an all-woman initiative through his imprint, tentatively labelled the So So Def Female Cypher - coming to a ____ real soon.
"After all the calls, DMs, angry tweets and other messages saying ‘I am a major gatekeeper in the hip hop world, why don’t I invest in a female who is out here hustling and making a name for herself?’ I decided to create the #SoSoDefFemalecypher,” he wrote on Instagram with a campaign poster to match. “details coming soon."
Jermaine Dupri's success as an entrepreneur and producer is inarguable. So So Def may have never reached the heights of its regional counterparts like Cash Money or No Limit Records, it did, however, endure the test of time without undergoing much in the way of a dramatic overhaul to the roster. For what it's worth, the "female cypher" is the last thing the leading women of hip-hop would have asked of Jermaine Dupri. Sometimes it's better to hold the L, and reposition oneself towards enlightenment.