Life’s a bitch if you’re a bitch who can’t handle a real bitch without bitching. The bitch of it is that you can bitch out the world all you want, but that won’t make it your bitch. Bitch, please. You’re lucky to ride bitch in its bitchin’ Camaro, bitch.

Similar to “fuck” in its satisfying mouthfeel and kaleidoscopic swirl of self-contradiction, and with greater potential to offend, “bitch” occupies a special spot in the lexicon. It’s a versatile word, but it’s never going to not be gendered, and almost every usage carries implications regarding misaligned power dynamics in interpersonal relationships. 

Toying with gendered assumptions has always been one of popular music’s most potent stocks in trade. And in mentor-mentee situations or creatively destructive catfights between rivalrous peers, screwing with power dynamics can be the express lane to a breakdown or a breakthrough. 

“Bitch” makes frequent appearances in the ‘70s AOR canon, but few made as good use of its gender-bending juice as David Bowie with “Queen Bitch,” his snarling, propulsive ode to his key inspiration and core frenemy Lou Reed.

Bowie was a huge fan of the Velvet Underground and used his greater celebrity to bring ears to Reed’s music, producing his landmark 1971 solo LP Transformer and setting “Queen Bitch” firmly within the Lou Reed cinematic universe.

The song is written from the POV of a character who rejects a potential male lover, then lashes out in envy while watching him from an 11th-floor window as he’s seduced by drag queens on the streets of New York. It’s a conflicted sort of bitchiness: lacertating, cool, and eager to get back on top of a relationship.

In a version recorded live on John Peel’s BBC program, Bowie does his best Reed impression, marking the song’s conceptual origins. But on the scorching Hunky Dory version, he makes it his own. 

His vocal establishes the formula for glam, with the wounded swagger of an unapologetic weirdo too sexy for your boxes. It’s a direct precursor to his Ziggy Stardust era, and “Queen Bitch” featuring the band that became the Spiders from Mars. It still sounds fresh today, both bitchy and bitchin’.

More than two decades later, another artist, less known for gender-bending permissiveness, used the same titie to run a similar experiment. 

As the story goes, Biggie discovered a beat off the transom and wanted to use it on his monster debut LP Ready to Die. His producer Puff Daddy, who thought he should do more pop-oriented material like the singles “Juicy” and “Big Poppa,” shot it down. Big then decided to upcycle it as a statement of purpose for his protege and kindred spirit in hardcore hip-hop instincts, a 5’4” rapper and member of his Junior M.A.F.I.A. clique called Lil’ Kim. 

There exists a demo of Big performing the lyrics he has in mind for Kim’s version, rapping “got buffons eating my pussy while I watch cartoons” in his deep, thudding, unmistakable flow. It’s a fascinating exercise in artistic license.

The song became “Queen Bitch,” and it’s a testament to the strength, turbulence, and shared love of grimy battle-raps that Kim and Biggie shared (and Puffy consipcuously misunderstood). Short, swaggering, and aggro, it’s similar to Big’s merciless album cuts “Gimmie the Loot” or “Machine Gun Funk” in its staccato braggadocio, theatrical menace, and allegiance to the cipher over the radio.

In terms of both hip-hop’s sonic evolution and Lil’ Kim’s career, it’s a time capsule, distilling the moment and forecasting bigger things to come.

Bowie’s “Queen Bitch,” also a tribute to a fellow artist and celebration of a difficult, rivlarous relationship. handily wins the bitch-off by virtue of its timelessness, enduring as a cornerstone anthem of glam rock. 

Lil’ Kim’s still sounds great, too, representing the RZA-fied side of the mid-’90s hip-hop explosion triggered by the decline of LA gangsta rap and the soul-bearing majesty of Ready to Die. Kim owns the rhymes so hard she runs out of breath, and it’s one of the most resoulte and personal tracks on her 1996 porn-rap opus Hard Core. But it was squarely a product of Big’s mentorship. Kim went on to write more apt rhymes herself and do other work that was more hers, both within and without her main bitch and their bitch of a partnership.

Both songs are worthy treatments of the competition and aggression that cloud even the most fruitful of human connections. Relationship power dynamics are ever-fluid, and today’s bitch can become tomorrow’s bitch, so ultimately it’s a bitches-to-bitches comparison.

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