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Where are the lady rappers?

Jill

Nicki Minaj
This piece is so good.

Mini-controversies go down practically every minute on the rap internet, beef and battles inherent to the genre, so this one blew over within a matter of weeks. But it illustrated a deeper problem within the music industry. BET felt like it had to stretch for nominees because there is a constant dearth of space for female rappers. Since the heyday of strong, powerful, positive and feminist MCs piqued in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s — with Queen Latifah, Salt n Pepa, MC Lyte and YoYo at the helm — at any given time there have only been three or so female rappers topping the industry.

Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill remain the gold standards, and Lil Kim, Foxy Brown and Eve had their day. But before Nicki Minaj stomped and snarled her way into mass consciousness, arguably the last female rapper to gain as much industry respect and recognition as her male counterparts was Remy Ma — who’s been incarcerated since 2008 after shooting her best friend in a Manhattan parking lot.

“Since ‘97 it’s really just been Kim, Foxy and Missy, and then a rotating feature of crazy ladies,” says Judnick Mayard, rap and R&B columnist at Fader’s Suite903. “But they were never included or even paid attention to unless they could at least stand a bit on the level of those top three. If you’re a female rapper, you have to prove yourself on so many levels and be so many different things.”

And there are a ton of super-talented female rappers beyond Kim, Foxy and Missy (and Kreayshawn, jesus). Read the whole piece, because it is excellent, and Julianne is one of the best music journalists out there.

14 thoughts on Where are the lady rappers?

  1. I’m still more into the femcees of the 80′ and 90’s rather then those of today. When I listen to rap and hip-hop that is, which is very, very seldom.

    Well I guess I mean those who where more into a feminist and political way of thinking then say Nicki Minaj. I really wish she could make up her mind if she is going to reclaim certain misogynistic slurs. Because she does use some to describe herself but not in a negative light. But at the same time she seems to love to put other women down by using the same slurs. Sigh…

  2. I’m so sheltered in this area, since i tend to favour more punk/rock/folk influences.. the only name that came to mind for me was Princess Superstar, and if you want to get all Canadian, Michi Mee (who would probably be more in the early 90’s vein that they mentioned)

  3. Pingback: Where are the lady rappers? – Feministe (blog) | HipHoped News

  4. OMG! OMG! I clicked on the tumblr linked in the article and Rah Digga has put a new album out! *Fans self* I’ve been waiting over 10 years to hear this *Breathes fast*

    Andie – Princess Superstar is very underrated yet she’s put loads of albums out and is also brilliant, if a bit better on albums then live. She’s funny too.

    Is Bahamadia still going, because she is also wonderful. Likewise, I cannot believe Jean Grae has had so little mainstream success.

  5. Rye Rye is a good MC! I just was linked to her recently and really like her, but there’s not a lot of mainstream stuff of female MCs currently, which is sad. I listen to a lot of older female MCs, but I want some fresh stuff!

  6. Wow. This feels so conincidental – I spent much of yesterday in a “where are the lady rappers” debate on the phone with Apple, due to total Garage Band sexism.

    I started working on a hip hop collabo two years ago, with these male emcees who have been my friends forever. It’s progressed a long way, I have progressed in ways I never expected, and now I’m learning to record my own stuff, use all these music programs, etc, with the support of the awesome guys from my neighborhood.

    I had something quick to record yesterday, so I flipped on Garage Band for mac – not my favorite, but it’ll do. I’d actually never recorded vox on it, thought I’d give it a shot.

    I opened a vocals track, and took a quick look at the effects available.

    And what do you know? “Female Diva”, “Female Pop Vocal”, etc were all available. And there were equivilant effects for male voices, tho not “Diva” I noticed…

    However, when it came to rapping or spoken word, only “Male Speech” was available. No female equivilant.

    The stereotype that we just sing on dude’s rap trax is WAY problematic. I couldn’t believe that the same effects available for males were not available for females – in a freakin 2009 version of a program. Not that I was going to use effects anyway, but… it just infuriated me.

    So I called Apple. And the female-sounding customer service rep was also infuriated. I’m in the process of writing them a letter and a proposal about how to make it right.

    There are still SO MANY barriers to women in music, period. Barriers exist for women in rap and hip hop, and women who are overcoming those barriers deserve celebration and encouragement. I could not believe that Apple was just so flagrantly discriminatory like that. Neither could their customer service rep, for the record.

    There are so many female emcees who are the shit. Invincible is completely dope, people should check her out.

    Sorry for the long rant. I’ll be calling Apple back, and writing them a letter and proposal.

  7. I find it amusing that people no longer recognize that Queen Latifah started out as a rapper. She’s now better known as an actress. I wonder why she was so eager to cast aside her music career for the sake of another career.

    But I do remember that the female rappers back in the day received a huge amount of airplay and media exposure. I’m not sure if this was because they were different stylistically or because they were an alternative to the male variety.

  8. “I wonder why she was so eager to cast aside her music career for the sake of another career.”

    Several years ago she gave an interview talking about the racism and homophobia in the “community” of rappers and in the black community as a whole. I don’t know how much that lead to her leaving, but I’m sure she gets a lot more respect now.

    BTW, her singing voice is awesome. I’ve heard her sing live. Amazing.

    The lack of women is not just an issue for rap. During the height of the Blues era, the ratio of male singers v. female ones was also very tilted in terms of what came to the public eye. It wasn’t that there weren’t women who wanted to sing, it’s just that they didn’t get put forward. I’d argue that the greatest Blues singers were women. Aside from Native American women, you can’t argue against the fact that black women have a unique place in Western society (particularly American society) that would give them the right to sing the Blues. So why were there more men than women?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues#Musical_impact (Look at this article, the word woman/women doesn’t even appear once).

    If you look at music as a whole, women’s voices just aren’t there unless they are young, pretty, and prepackaged. A woman like Janis Joplin would not be given the time of day. If you look at the current crop of country singers, they are pop princesses rather than Loretta Lynns. I was recently in Nashville and there are a lot of talented women singing on Broadway who don’t fit the Taylor Swift mold. So why aren’t they getting deals, I wonder?

    If it’s this hard for women as a whole to get the attention and support, it must be hard for a WOC who wants to rap. I say WOC because not all female rappers are black.

  9. PS When I lived in Chicago in the late 80s and there was a lot of House music and street Hip Hop and Rap, there were almost no women. Women tried to break in, and they got smacked down.

    I used to go to step shows (and be the lightest skinned person in the room) and even participated a few times. Often there were rap/hip hop/house other competitions as well. Women just were NOT allowed to compete at anything other than stepping. Even then the AKAs always won. Always. Not because they were technically the best, either.

    The few times I did compete, I was flat out told by my mates that one of the criteria used in judging was essentially looks and polish and clothes. I had a few women in other groups get mad because my group had “that pretty white girl” and they thought it was unfair. (I’m mixed race, but pass for white to all but those of my ethnicity who somehow know). They knew overtly that they weren’t being judged entirely on their skill. At the time, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to be enraged.

    Looking back, it was some serious bullshit.

  10. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been listening to more and more Asian music (mainly Korean and Japanese) and one thing I absolutely love about it is the abundance of female rappers. There are tons of them. They’re accepted as being a normal part of the marketplace, so it’s not like they have to compete with each other for the two or three spots in which they’ll be tolerated. This also means that there’s a lot more room for variety: in any given performance, CL from 2NE1 is just as likely to be wearing a tracksuit are she is to be more dressed up, Secret’s Zinger went from a being very sexy for Madonna to being cutesy in retro for Shy Boy, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Amber from f(x) look like anything but a complete tomboy.

    It’s really jarring for me to browse through North American charts now, because I spend the whole time wondering where the female rappers are. And when I find them, they’re either already well-established, or making a name for themselves by being really sexualized, raunchy, and using misogynistic slurs. It’s a sad contrast.

  14. Andie:
    I’m so sheltered in this area, since i tend to favour more punk/rock/folk influences..

    Can I just say this bothers me a tiny bit –hear me out! I pretty much ONLY listen to hip hop/neo soul/ r&b so why weigh in on the discussion if you don’t listen to the music? It seems someone always comments on posts about hip hop music with, “I don’t really enjoy rap but here is my opinion anyway.” It reminds me of the countless times I (female) have heard women say, “I don’t really get along with women; all my friends are guys.” Please spare me.

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