I was in college when I first became blessed to know the artist known as Jean Grae. Call me a late bloomer but at least I found her. A hip-hop friend of mine, a beast of a lyricist named Nonymous, turned me on to her around 2001. He insisted I check her out; in the infancy cradle of the internet I stumbled upon a few of her tracks, but only one caught my attention – How To Break Up With Your Girlfriend, which was featured on the Laid in Full Chapter 2 compilation by M-Boogie.
Jean Grae is a different type of hip-hop beast, on the real.
To understand How To Break Up With Your Girlfriend is a true hip-hop classic born and bred in the rebellious sense, you have to understand how much Jean Grae is misunderstood. Once upon a time, in the late 1990s and early 2000s era of hip-hop, female rappers were no longer just MCs with the gift of vocabulary. Instead, they were devolved into the sexually objectified thanks to the hypersexualized imagery of Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown’s debut solo albums. Sex was the only thing the label and most labelmates were willing to sell when it came to female lyricists much to the listeners chagrin; out of executive decisions for the worse female rappers had to have an image that matched their whorish sexual personas.
Jean Grae, like most of the female foremothers of hip-hop, wasn’t feeling that and resisted having to sell her body over her words. While I absolutely love her defiance on that her career suffered greatly as her critics dismissed all her contributions to the hip-hop medium as nothing more than a bitch fit rant of a manless hag spouting brooding anger rants steeped in man hating among other things. I am here to tell you nothing could have been further than the truth. How To Break Up With Your Girlfriend is an operatic ballad in parts while doubling as a masterclass of interpersonal relationships of couples that spoke to the realism of dating life of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In other words, Jean Grae spoke her peace and let the chips fall where they may. If you took offense she struck a nerve and obviously something she said had a little truth in it.
For the uninitiated, How To Break Up With Your Girlfriend is a twenty five bar masterpiece that gives a bit of tough love therapeutic dating advice. Contrary to what her contemporaries insinuated in her lyrics, Jean Grae did not give a scathing commentary of men within the song, she merely called them out on their piss poor behaviors in long term relationships and offered them a plethora of options for fixing the problems or leaving the woman behind and moving on with their life. Don’t get it twisted, Jean Grae doesn’t bite her tongue picking and choosing who she is directing her words of wisdom to, nor does she bit her tongue calling out men for their lack of time, effort, and patience with their significant other from the start.
The first verse starts off singling out the couples that have been together two or more years, sending the one night standers and the expecting parents out of the room before the grown folks conversation starts. From that point onward the ominous warning light flicks on and Jean Grae runs down the facts of life to couples that have lost the spark in their relationship, including but not limited to, defining roles to determine the state of the relationship. If none of that winds up working, verse two breaks it down in a satirical comic fashion what desperate last resorts can be taken to scare the chick away, since Jean Grae keeps letting us know the chick has got to go by any means necessary (and she really does give a few means to do it).
For true hip-hop aficionados How To Break Up With Your Girlfriend is a grossly overlooked gem in the cypher of hip-hop classics, falsely slandered as a male bashing song in certain prejudiced circles and largely forgotten in time to everyone outside of die hard Jean Grae fans and hip-hop purists. It was an is a sad state of affairs that the song generated little attention outside of the underground and was intentionally overlooked for commercial radio play because Jean Grae didn’t have enough hoe tales to throw into it for their listening sensibilities or play the sexism game the industry tried to force her into. Above all, Jean Grae is not an angry Black chick popping off about bad relationships because she is bitter. She is a storytelling MC, the same as her male counterparts.
This is why only Jean Grae is the perfect lyricist to tell you the right way on how to break up with your girlfriend.
