'Bitch', the success of Meredith Brooks that reappropriated an insult in a pop key long before 'Zorra'

Songwriter Shelly Peiken was not having a good time in the mid-nineties.

Although she had been writing songs for ten years for artists like Tommy Page, Samantha Fox or Céline Dion, she had never had a hit single that was played on the radio.

Disenchanted with the industry, and with serious problems paying the bills, she considered throwing in the towel and going back to work as a waitress.

But just before giving up, she channeled all her frustration into

Bitch

, the song that in 1997 she put on the map for fellow American Meredith Brooks.

"I was coming home after a session, in the middle of premenstrual syndrome and very low emotionally, and I said to myself: 'What am I doing?'

My poor boyfriend, who I was living with at the time and am now married to, was going to have to deal with all of that when he arrived.

He loves me just the way I am and I thought, 'he even loves me when I can be a bitch.'

My thought, in that spirit, was: 'I hate the world today.'

That was the first line.

Meredith, an artist I had recently been introduced to, immediately came to mind.

"She had a lot of courage and knew she could relate to this idea," Peiken told The Tennessean

newspaper in 2018

, where she also revealed that the first time they spoke on the phone she already proposed the controversial title:

bitch

, in Spanish, can be translated as bitch. or slut

So happy to see #bitch the lead single from my 1997 album 'Blurring The Edges' trending again!

Just in time for the album's #25thanniversary 🎸 Thank you for all the love!❤️ #90snostalgia #90sfashion #meredithbrooks #blurringtheedges pic.twitter.com/DN9AOeHqBk

— MeredithBrooks (@MeredithBrooks) October 6, 2022

They both thought about the possibility that no radio would dare to play it, but they still decided to write it in four hands “because that's how we felt.”

Brooks had nothing to lose.

The two female bands of which he had been a part, Sapphire (active from 1976 to 1982) and The Graces (between 1987 and 1991), together with the singer Gia Ciambotti and the former The Go-Go's Charlotte Caffey, never stood out.

And his first self-titled solo album, released in 1986, had been ignored by critics and the public.

As Peiken confessed some time later, her string of failures made her the perfect candidate to play her.

Her future in music hung by a thread and, like her, her discontent with her industry had only worsened over the years.

Sheryl Crow and Meredith Brooks at the 1998 BMI Pop Awards.Brenda Chase (Getty Images)

“Meredith had a development deal with Interscope Records.

She was writing and performing songs, and they kept dismissing them.

I think she had one more left and if they rejected her she had to leave.

We wrote it together from start to finish.

She picked up an acoustic guitar and, honestly, it was like playing ping-pong.

This is how it should be: someone says one line and it makes you think of another.

When we finished, we were excited, but I never like to get my hopes up because this business is full of disappointments.

She recorded a demo, took it to Interscope, and they rejected it!

Her manager immediately got into the car and headed to Capitol Records.

That same day she was signed.”

Published on March 25, 1997 as the first preview of Brooks' second full-length album,

Blurring the Edges

,

Bitch

spent four weeks that summer at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, the American singles chart.

If it hadn't been for Puff Daddy's

I'll Be Missing You

, I probably would have reached the top.

Now, something happened that neither of them contemplated: the radio stations and MTV did not censor a single word.

Not even the title.

As just happened with

Zorra

de Nebulossa, the majority of the audience understood the message they were trying to convey right away.

“Women are complex.

We are not two-dimensional, and the men who deserve to be by our side know this and appreciate it.

In fact, they celebrate it.

“Bitch

was a recognition of that complexity,” Peiken stated in an interview in 2020.

In reality, the reappropriation of said insult in a display of strength, sorority and empowerment was not new in 1997. Given the aggressive tenor that the term bitch acquired in the eighties by hip hop, in general, and gangsta rap, In particular, a new wave of female artists frontally rejected its negative connotations in the first half of the 1990s.

Rappers like Queen Latifah (UNITY, 1993), Salt-N-Pepa (Big Shot, 1993) and Lil Kim (Queen Bitch, 1996) embraced the word as a war cry against the language of misogyny.

Seen in perspective, they were the pioneers.

However, that does not detract from the merits of Peiken and Brooks:

Bitch

was one of the first properly pop songs, and performed by a white woman, which contributed to giving a positive spin to the word.

Happy Valentine's Day❤️from your favorite #Bitch 😘 #ValentinesDay #Blurringtheedges pic.twitter.com/MRKXDeTh4O

— MeredithBrooks (@MeredithBrooks) February 14, 2024

More than the title or its chorus itself, what they feared in the Capitol Records offices weeks before the release was a minor matter.

“When I first heard her, I thought, 'She sounds great and she's very catchy.'

This is a resounding success.'

But then I felt some anxiety because I imagined she would be compared to Alanis Morissette because they share some similar traits.

First, she is a woman.

And second, she has lyrics that force you to pay attention,” Perry Watts-Russell, the executive who signed Brooks, stated in the Los Angeles Times.

This caught her by surprise: “I was so worried that people would criticize me because of Chrissie Hynde's influence… and then this.

"It's like someone played a joke on me."

Brooks shipped nearly three million copies of

Blurring the Edges

and received two Grammy nominations for

Bitch

.

She released three more albums (the last,

If I Could Be…

, was a compendium of children's songs that she recorded in 2007 after giving birth to her first child), but she never equaled the triumph of her star song. .

Today she is considered a one hit wonder.

Or what is the same, a one-hit artist.

For Peiken's part, things went much better.

After earning her long-awaited first number one hit in 1999 as co-writer of Christina Aguilera's What a Girls Wants, her career took off.

Among others, she has worked with names such as Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and Cher.

However, as she wrote in her 2018 memoir,

Confessions of a Serial Songwriter

, “

Bitch

really saved my life.”