Or, for that matter, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”?
I’m not aware of anyone contesting his rights, or suggesting he be jailed for his lyrics.
I’m just wondering: if he’s insisting people are misinterpreting the lyric, then what is the correct interpretation, i.e. what did Rick Ross mean?
Maybe he meant that “Rick Ross” is just a character invented by William Roberts Jr.?
That’s what I’m objecting to. Granted that I’ve never used it, I’ve been the designated trip-sitter for people who have, and they were alert, sometimes more so than normal, and very sensitive, sometimes to the point of needing to be moved to a quiet, dark place to wait out the trip. I’ve never heard of molly or Ecstasy incapacitating someone, significantly lowering their inhibitions, or causing blackout of memories. Basically, I don’t think it would be a very good date-rape drug.
I’m not excusing its use on unsuspecting people, of course; dosing an unknown person is flagrantly immoral and (I assume) illegal.
Yeah, I think the dummy meant to say ‘roofie’. “Molly” is the rap lyric du jour for a bunch of the younger, cornier rappers these days, and in his eagerness to use it, he fucked the usage up.
I agree that molly, a slang term for MDMA, could never be accurately described as “a common date rape drug.”
I will also agree that regardless of the efficacy of molly as a date rape drug, Rick Ross certainly seems to be implying that he is attempting to use it as a date rape drug in his lyrics.
Obviously that’s how it’s being interpreted, but it is so completely implausible that it’s reasonable to doubt that that’s what was intended, given that the nearly every other invocation of “…and you don’t even know it!” in the song is read as “And it was so awesome!”
It’s not plausible for someone to unknowingly ingest enough crystalline MDMA slipped into a drink to suffer an overdose. MDMA is a very bitter, unpleasant-tasting substance, and there is a long way between a typical dose and an overdose. Typically, an overdose of MDMA involves blood concentrations ~40X the usual recreational dose, from taking many capsules and re-upping over the course of the night.
A “Molly Mickey” doesn’t make sense. While it’s possible to get to a pretty libidinous place under the influence of MDMA, it’s not plausible for someone to* trick* you into getting there, First and foremost, it’s a very powerful stimulant - while you can definitely feel “This feels awesome, I’m having the best time of my life,” under the influence, you’re not going to get there if someone surreptitiously doses you, you are going to be “WTF, somebody fecking *drugged *me, I am getting the feck out of here, NOW.”
As a thought experminent, what does “We turn up in the club, you don’t even know it / Got a hundred bottles comin’, you don’t even know it” mean? Does it mean that he and his party are such discreet and unobtrusive gentlemen that their presence in the club isn’t noticeable? Probably not, right? It’s a non-literal superlative, and can be transliterated from the vulgar to the pretentious as “It passes understanding.”
Does it seem* possible* that a similar intent was was meant for the other lines?
No argument that buddy managed to get his foot in his mouth, but imagine for a minute that you’re intimately familiar with the effects of various recreational substances. (Waitaminute, isn’t “Machine Elf” a Terence McKenna reference? Fttt.) Anyway, nobody’s who’s actually taken MDMA is going to think “I’ll just slip some in her drink, and she won’t notice, and* then* I’m totally going to have sex with her without her consent or recollection,” right? Because it’s completely ludicrous. It makes sense to me to extend the benefit of the doubt to him about whether or not he intended those two lines to be interpreted literally, because of a) numerous other instances in the lyrics establishing figurative use and b) the absurdity of the literal interpretation.
That’s seriously one of the best public apologies, if not the best public apology, that I’ve ever seen.
If the song’s narrator did not intend to take advantage of his date’s impaired state, why would he need to put a drug in her champagne before “enjoying” her? Talk about completely implausible.
I think it’s more likely that Rick Ross is confused about drug slang or the effects of MDMA than that he meant “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it” to be understood as a description of a woman voluntarily taking “molly” and then having totally consensual sex with the narrator.
Hint: Sex on MDMA is really, really fun.
Let’s consider another rap lyric, from Juicy J: “Pop Molly in her ass / watch her get freaky.” This refers to the practice of “butt bumping,” or sticking an MDMA cap in the less-intuitive end. (The benefit being that more of the drug ends up in your blood stream that way, because when it’s taken orally some is naturally destroyed by gastric acid.)
Do you assume that Juicy J is talking about somehow slipping it in there when she isn’t looking, or does this describe a consensual action? Rhetorical question; of course there is consent there. So, does it make sense to assume there’s no knowledge or consent in the Rocko lyric because “ass” has been replaced with “champagne,”? People take powder-form MDMA in solution in beverages at *least *as commonly they put it in their butts, and the chances of someone slipping it in your drink without you noticing are just about on par with it ending up in your arse with you unaware.
Meh. I think the chances of someone in his demographic being so completely unaware of the subjective effect of MDMA approaches zero. If those were the only two lines in the lyrics, I would tend to agree that the author being completely confused about the substance was the most likely explanation - but in the context of a litany of non-literal "you don’t even know it"s, at some point you have to consider that those lines might be intended to be read the same way as the others.
This puts the poor bastard in the position of trying to address the blue-nosed Maude Flanders of America armed only with the defense of “What? Why would you even think that? If you were a debauched, Schedule I drug-abusing hedonist like me and my target audience, you would realize that that makes no sense at all.” The only out is “Yes, those lines* can* be read that way. My bad, I am so sorry.”
The lyrics are a bunch of lame, classless brags, and include two other references to seasoning costly beverages with mind-altering substances in ways that most people would consider an offensive waste of a quality product: “Sip Dom Perri’, little high glow, no no we don’t do Moet” and “This is a thousand dollar cup of lean and you don’t even know it.” So, the narrator is putting E and (blechh) DXM in his *own * high-price champagne. Is he doing it because he’s planning to rape himself? No?
And if the woman were interested in that sort of fun, the man wouldn’t need to drug her drink for her.
Are you joking? A woman is a hell of a lot more likely to notice someone pressing a capsule into her anus than someone dropping a capsule into her glass. I mean, we’ve all been warned to be careful with our drinks, but a woman’s beverage glass is not part of her body, nor is it normally kept inside her clothing. There is also not, to my knowledge, an established history of men inserting drugs into unsuspecting women’s rectums in order to incapacitate and rape them while drugging a woman’s drink for this purpose is hardly unheard of.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, and even if it were true that Rick Ross must know all about the effects of MDMA then I find it very easy to believe that a 37 year old isn’t up on current drug slang. He may not have known that “molly” referred to MDMA. I don’t listen to rap music, but Nzinga, Seated does and she said “molly” is mentioned in a lot of current songs and that she considers it likely that Ross used the term in an attempt to sound hip without being certain what it meant.
What you are missing is that the benefit of MDMA for sex is just plain not there if both parties aren’t aware. The best sex of my life has been when both parties were on E, followed closely by sex where one party was on E and the other party was cool with it. If I thought for a second that you could get some of that benefit by slipping it to someone unaware, you bet your butt that I would struggle against the temptation to dose my non-partaking wife when she wasn’t looking*, or to surreptitiously dose myself. But anyone who has even passing familiarity with this substance is going to be crystal clear that either of these scenarios would translate into NO NOOKIE TONIGHT. Nobody is going to slip someone MDMA of increasing their chances of getting laid. Maybe talk someone into it, but if you’ve ever done it yourself you know that you simply cannot coerce someone into being in that state.
No, in both cases the probability of the person being aware that something untoward was being foisted on them and b) therefore very alert and defensive is simply 100%. MDMA has the exactly the same chance of catching you unaware in your drink as in your anus because it is BITTER AS FUCK. If you knock that back it’s because you damn well knew what you were imbibing, contrasted with colourless, flavourless agents such as rohypnol or GHB. Even if it were something that might be ingested without noticing, you’d damn well notice that you were drugged, and in such a way that any libido you had going into the date was instantly vaporized. Your heart would be racing, and you would be very concerned about getting medical attention or the aid of a cop.
A random 37-year-old, maybe - but it’s completely ridiculous to suggest that this specific thirty-seven-year-old doesn’t know what “molly” refers to.
*Relax, I would struggle successfully, just like I struggle against the impulse to quit my straight job and go back to working on warehouse parties.
What you are missing is that a rapist is unlikely to be concerned with whether his victim enjoys being drugged and raped.
But MDMA is a “psychedelic stimulant”, hardly the kind of drug you’d use to incapacitate someone. It is basically an amphetamine with some psychedelic emotional aspects, it is altering your perception but not to a point you’re passed out.
It just doesn’t make much sense, it would be like spiking a drink with cocaine to rape the victim.
You’re including your conclusion in your terms, though. The only way you can read it this way is if you ignore the context of the rest of the lyrics and the assumed knowledge of the target audience.
I agree that the words are very poorly chosen, but the only way that you can read “rape” from it is if you simultaneously literalize “she don’t even know it,” (ignoring the idiomatic reading that is used repeatedly elsewhere in the same piece,) and imagine that “molly” either refers to some completely different substance or has properties which are entirely unlike its real-world properties.
If the narrator was a date-rapist, he would use a substance that had some chance of making it easier to take advantage of someone, rather than amping them up and inducing panic in a way that would be completely counterproductive to a rapist’s intent - assuming they managed to gulp it down without noticing that it tasted a mouthful of alum.
GHB is not flavorless, it is VERY salty in flavor. Like grams of salt, the only way I could even imagine someone not noticing the flavor would be in something like a bloody mary.
*Yes I’ve taken it, not used it to rape anyone.
Hmmm… ty, also taken GHB once, many years ago, but straight from a dropper. I didn’t recall the flavour.
For sure it’s not as noticeable as crystalline MDMA, though - which is pretty harsh if it’s not in a gel cap.
It’s actually listed as a date rape drug on the Wikipedia article on the subject, which is evidence that at least some people think of it that way even if it would not be the most effective drug to use for that purpose. A quick search on Google books comes up with a couple books saying that it’s a myth that MDMA is a date rape drug, which suggests that this belief is fairly widespread even if it isn’t correct.
We’re talking about the lyrics to a song, not a news report. Things can happen in a song that are unlikely or even impossible in real life, either because the lyricist is being fanciful or because the lyricist has mistaken beliefs about the real world.
So were you. Sure, if the narrator got the woman’s permission before giving her MDMA because he wanted them both to have an enjoyable, consensual sexual experience than that’s not rape, but the lines in question don’t say that this is what happened. Even ignoring the “ain’t know it” bit, he says he put a drug in her drink, took her home, and enjoyed himself. There’s not one word to indicate that the woman agreed to or enjoyed any of this or that the narrator cared whether she did or not. And when a man is described as putting a drug in a woman’s drink before he takes her home and enjoys himself, I don’t think it’s reasonable to just assume that this all happened with the woman’s consent.
You don’t have to ignore it. The shift in meaning from idiomatic to literal could be deliberate wordplay.
A listener could very easily be unaware that molly=MDMA or believe that MDMA is an effective date rape drug. Prior to this thread I didn’t know that “molly” was the same drug known as ecstasy/X/E when I was a teenager, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m not convinced that Rick Ross, who’s several years older than I am, knew himself.
Regardless of his intentions, it’s very easy to interpret “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it” as “I drugged her drink without her knowledge, then I took her home and enjoyed myself without her knowledge.” The listener does not need to strain or twist Ross’s words to get to that interpretation, it’s the literal meaning of those lines. If he wanted this to be understood as meaning “I offered her a recreational drug and she willingly accepted, then I took her home and we had consensual, mutually enjoyable sex” then he did a terrible job of actually putting that thought into words.
I see no reason to assume Rick Ross knows anything about what, specifically, “molly” means. If he did, why would he sing about putting it in a drink? That’s not how anyone takes MDMA. He probably just heard it in some other artist’s song and assumed it meant the same thing as “mickey”: a soporific, incapacitating drug.
Nonsense, it’s a pretty common way to take MDMA if you have a line on uncapped, crystalline MDMA and you want to be kind to your sinuses. You don’t have to go outside the genre to find other, non-rapey pop-culture references to it, either. You have Scrilla, Cup Full: “I’m about to roll this shit; Everytime I drop a molly in my cup I keep tellin’ to hurry.”
Really, it makes sense to you that a Hip Hop artist on the scene for a couple of decades is choosing to include lyrics about drugs while somehow being naive enough to be vague about what they actually are?
Yes, and that brief section carefully delineates how they are defining the term: “Practically any drug (either surreptitiously or openly given) could be considered a date-rape drug if used to facilitate rape.” You still have to explain how it could facilitate rape, though. Anybody who thinks for a second that surreptitiously dosing someone with MDMA would increase their chances of having sex with them has a profound misunderstanding of the subjective effect of the drug.
I agree 100% with that, and think that’s why he initially apologized only for the poor choice of words. As for there being no words in there that explicitly acknowledge the woman’s consent, that is characteristic of bulshit braggadocious rap. Yes, the woman is completely objectified and only serves as a prop for the narrator’s dumb-ass bragging. Yes, that is repulsive enough on its own. But that’s the genre, through-and-through.
I see him as a Larry David-level schlemiel who put himself in a corner with a spotlight on him, in a completely untenable and difficult-to-defend position - in no small part because of some unpleasant personality defects and inability to empathize – but genuinely, “Wait, what?! Why would you even think that?”