As the genre celebrates half a century of history-making, the industry owes its female creators more.
as hypersexual, artless, demeaning, and derogatory — words no different from the derisive rejoinders that plagued the likes of Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Trina, and Khia in their heyday. “We have people like Too Short, Luke Skyywalker [of 2 Live Crew], Biggie [Smalls], Elvis Presley, Prince, who are very, very, very sexual, and they don’t get trashed because they like to do it,” noted Lil’ Kim in a. “But all of a sudden, we have a female who happens to be a rapper, like me, and my doin’ it is wrong.
“There has been — just in general in hip-hop — more of an acceptance that there’s a costume being worn,” Hope says, pointing out Jay-Z’s hustler persona and Rick Ross’s infamous correctional officer past. “People don’t allow for maybe multiplicity in women in the same way.
These few examples shine light on the informal but bright line between women who embraced their sexuality as performers and those who didn’t, and their cis male counterparts fought to enforce that artificial binary by performing respectability at the expense of solidarity with the emerging class of women in the genre.
Another tried-and-true tactic for invalidating a woman’s mainstream accomplishments is to interrogate their writing capabilities. Despite the act of ghostwriting and co-writing being a part of hip-hop since Grandmaster Caz helped pen “Rapper’s Delight,” women have been particularly plagued by accusations that they were helped, as if to imply that their presence on a record is one of convenience and easily replaceable.
But of course women’s role in hip-hop has never been that of the spectator — something that fans have understood for far longer and more deeply than the powerbrokers of a subculture that long ago went corporate. Social media in particular has allowed for the emergence of powerful counternarratives to women’s historically dismissed impact on the genre. Just look at the bevy of
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