Shystie – “Woman’s World”
Alex Macpherson writes:
She was meant to be the female Dizzee, the girl who would feminise grime enough for the charts and the broadsheets alike while still holding down the scene’s realness. Instead she released an album which was acclaimed by precisely no one except me and bought by even less, and the super-scary teenage MC Lady Fury did a diss track so harsh that Shystie hasn’t been heard of since in any capacity whatsoever. Shystie could be just as harsh, too, and she was at her best when she indulged her inner Lil Kim rather than aiming for the Ms Dynamite socially conscious model. On ‘Woman’s World’, she aims her rapid-fire flow squarely at MEN – not some men, or scrub men, but ALL MEN – and pumps them full of verbal bullets. Shystie is imagining a world, possibly a utopia, in which gender roles are reversed; she starts off joking about naked studs on Page Three and ends up fantasising about keeping men “in kennels like dogs”. After climaxing with some particularly outré what-the-fuck-did-she-just-say musings on body hair she delivers the sucker punch with relish: “Yeah we crossed the line / But men do that shit all the time!” Come back Shystie!