Ladies Last
Once Atop The Scene, Female MCs Are Singing the Blues
By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 31, 2004; Page C01
It's 1989. Kente cloth and door-knocker earrings were the couture du jour. And flickering on your BET -- MTV was just getting hip to black folks -- was Queen Latifah, looking every inch the Afrocentric diva, posing against a backdrop of warrior women: Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. Winnie Mandela. Angela Davis. She's trading lines back and forth with her partner in rhyme, Brit rapper Monie Love, and they're rapping about how it's all about "Ladies First." They're sounding strong, "stepping, strutting, moving on":
The ladies will kick it, the rhyme it is wicked
Those who don't know how to be pros get evicted
A woman can bear you, break you, take you
Now it's time to rhyme, can you relate to
A sister dope enough to make you holler and scream?
Back then, the Ladies claimed their place: Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Sister Souljah, Salt-N-Pepa, Neneh Cherry, Oaktown's 357 . . . They were there, and they were representing. Compare and contrast with today. In this year's Grammys, to be broadcast in February, only one woman rapper has been nominated: Remy Martin. It's a far cry from 1999, when Lauryn Hill became the first woman -- not to mention the first female MC -- to take home five Grammys, including one for album of the year for her solo debut, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill." Note, too, that Remy Martin's been nominated as part of a group, Boricua rapper Fat Joe's Terror Squad, the posse behind last summer's hit "Lean Back." One lone female surfing a sea of testosterone.
After 30 years of breakbeats and bombast -- 2004 marked the 30th anniversary of rap -- hip-hop has given women the boot.
Indeed, the female MC (Mistress of Ceremonies) has all but disappeared. Queen Latifah has moved on to acting and singing standards; the door-knockers replaced with designer duds. Monie Love is missing in action. So is Hill, who disappeared, then reappeared only to slam the Vatican in December 2003, disappeared again and then reappeared -- briefly -- last September in a clandestine concert before disappearing yet again. And in the rare instances when you do see a woman rapper, she's almost always a bad girl. A really bad girl. The one who thinks being a ho is something to brag about (or the way to platinum record sales). Witness the scandalous skankiness of Lil' Kim, she of the engineered face and the ever-expanding bosom, bragging about her sexual exploits with a Sprite can. Or Trina rapping about how her love costs, because, let's face it, "ain't no way you gonna get up in this for free."
If you're a woman, and you're a fan of hip-hop, you're happy to see these bad girls, because, at the very least, there's evidence that some estrogen still lives on in hip-hop. And then you come to your senses, because is that any kind of thing to choose between, being a whore or being invisible? Loving hip-hop starts to feel like being in an abusive relationship.
As poet and "hip-hop activist" Jessica Care Moore has written, women don't want to content themselves with playing cheerleader, relegated to the sidelines in a game where they used to be Queens, or at the very least, Ladies.
"There are so many [female] MCs," says rap pioneer
(note: and member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.) MC Lyte, who now appears on the sitcom "Half & Half." "They just don't have record deals. That's the unfortunate part about it. As a female MC trying to stand on her own, trying to get into the business, it's rough.
"There are so many that are just waiting for the opportunity."
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