Mid 90’s Tennesse; the birthing ground of hard-gangster and occult-themed hip-hop. In the hoods of Memphis, from Westwood to Frazier and back again to Orange Mound, the 808 sounds of now ‘Southern’ hip-hop legends, such as Three 6 Mafia etc, are bumpin’ in the back of every Box Chevy with the 28” DUB rims. Gang-related warfare haunts the streets and, hand-in-hand, with the high levels of drug abuse and sex-trafficking it was ‘not the place to be for a weak ass nigga’.
So where does the story of a love-led, male transvestite MC fall into the mix?.. Short answer; it just doesn’t, but that’s what I believe makes the story of Lady Bee so interesting.
I first came across Lady Bee through M-Town era influenced rapper/producer Lil Ugly Mane, who sampled the intro vocal from Bee’s song ‘Mask to My Face’ in his song of a similar title (possibly an homage to Bee) ‘Mask On My Fucking Face’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcHNGCGq8J0
Led by my undying desire to know everything there is to know about Ugly I decided to follow up on Lady Bee and came across this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktzwHPCVjnU
A fairly standard M-Town era piece (70’s/80’s soul samples, double-time vocals and simulated 808 drum track) save for one stand-out feature; the silently discordant helium-pitch vocal.
I remember thinking to myself upon first listen ‘Is that a pitch-up I’m hearing?’. Perplexed, I put in a search on Lady Bee in YouTube and found something really interesting; a series of videos collectively making up Lady Bee’s only tape – a 1994 release entitle ‘Strictly for That Nigga’. The interesting thing about said videos, however, is the name they were under; not just ‘Lady Bee’ this time but ‘Lady Bee A.K.A Kingpin Skinny Pimp’ (notoriously harder-than-hard M-Town era rapper).
Naturally, I was confused. ‘Skinny? Artist behind ‘Nobody Crosses Me’ and ‘Midnight Hoes’ is Lady Bee?’ I hadn’t considered the possibility of a male vocalist playing with pitch to sound like a woman being behind Lady Bee as there was no short supply of female MC’s on scene at the time and, given the cultural context, it would have been completely left-field.
I put in a browser search on ‘Lady Bee Kingpin Skinny Pimp’ but came across nothing, save for a few mp3 download sites and links to various YouTube uploads. I had been scrolling for a while before, finally, I came across something palpable; a thread on some since abandoned M-Town underground forum debating whether or not Skinny was in fact the MC behind Lady Bee or not. After scrolling through the seemingly endless “gay ass nigga” and “hope this shit aint true, used to be a fan” comments I finally came across an answer in the form of a dedicated Memphis underground fanatic’s collective research on the topic which claimed that Skinny was the MC behind Lady Bee, but it wasn’t as easy as this being his expression of latent transvestism, as I had suspected.
The story, as it was told, begins back in Skinny’s hustling days when he formed a close relationship with one of his girls – a fellow small-time MC that went by the name of Lady Bee. It will remain unknown whether the pair were romantically involved or not but Skinny always took great care of Bee.
Around the time Skinny dropped his first tape ‘Pimps and Robbers’, the pair went to work in the studio for Bee’s breakthrough tape, the aforementioned ‘Strictly For That Nigga’ but at the time Bee had been struggling with addiction and after recording only one track – ‘1 In The Chamber’, Bee caved into a drug dependency and never re-emerged again.
Whether Skinny was romantically involved with Bee or not we will never know, but evidently he loved her a great deal as, incredibly bravely with regards to the then hood consensus, he took on the responsibility of finishing the tape for her by pitching up his vocals so as to sound like Lady Bee; to keep her in pocket while she found her way back on her path. Tragically she died of needle-transmitted AIDS a year later.
Take it as you want; the story may well be an entire fabrication past the point that it is definitely Skinny rapping on the tracks
(see proof here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnG_A5uCt44)
but maybe it is in fact the true story of tender love, loyalty in the midst of a culture of poverty, violence and drug addiction in a mid-90’s Southern-American hood.
Either way, no matter how marring it may be to Skinny’s ‘gangster’ persona, it’s important to note that he may well have been the first artist to break the mould on transvestism and, when you dig a little deeper, latent homosexual content in hip-hop music; a hugely commendable achievement and, truth of the story behind said achievement pertaining, a beautifully raw and poignant insight into the life and times of two struggling hood apparitions…
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