Pep Love
Sat Nov 17
Roseland
In the 1991 movie Boyz N the Hood, one of the female leads asks the question (paraphrased from memory): “Why, when you refer to women, you always gotta call us hooch, or bitch, or ho?” Ice Cube’s character barely looks up from his game of dominoes to respond, “Cause that’s what you are.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I am a bitch and a ho.
But Pep Love doesn’t think so. The MC, who’s been a part of the Hieroglyphics crew (Del Tha Funky Homosapien, Souls of Mischief, Casual) for ten years, finally released his first solo record, Ascension, last July. It’s a tightly mixed album and Pep’s skills are sophisticated; his rhyming is sharp, steady, and emotionally expressive. And his new single, “T.A.M.I.,” is about a girlfriend. He doesn’t refer to her as a bitch or a ho (and never says the line, “It don’t matter who I’m hittin’,” like his less enlightened comrade, Casual). He calls her a “ghetto diamond, free from confinement/ sparks in my mind lit flames in my heart.” Sure, nearly every song in the universe has been written about love, but how often do MCs refer to ladies as ladies, much less without looking at them as holes to fill, if you know what I mean.
He also says, “Dear T.A.M.I., my heart bleeds for you/words on a page, my calm and my rage/ beauty that’s undescribed/we coincide in one vibe.”
Pep Love’s been touted by a lot of people as the most underrepresented MC on the West Coast, and it’s because his lyrics are real, positive, and insightful, and his style is unique in its rhythm and warmth. His lyrics in “T.A.M.I.” reflect the respect he has for life, in general–from when he spat, “this Hieroglyphic high priest speaks from my third eye” on Hieroglyphics’ 1998 Third Eye Vision record, to Ascension’s “Living is Beautiful.” In that song, he decrees, “I’m feeling Master P because there’s no limit/ to the shit that you can do when you put your soul in it,” to a backdrop of sweet, thick beats.
Pep Love has no shields or reservations about putting his message out there, be it metaphysical, or the aforementioned rare love song. His courage is appreciated.