Far from being secondary players, women and girls have been integral to the history of hip-hop. From JProfessor, for our Summer issue:
Janell Hobson
This is how hip-hop’s “origin story” is told: Cindy Campbell, a Jamaican American Bronx resident, hosted a back-to-school jam for the young people on her neighborhood block. Her brother, Clive Campbell—better known on the streets as DJ Kool Herc—provided the musical entertainment. Nonetheless, she asserts that a feminist history of the past five decades of hip-hop ought to be told. Far from being secondary players, women and girls have been integral to this cultural phenomenon. Gaunt’s award-winning book,, makes the argument that much of hip-hop is shaped by the sounds and beats of Black girlhood: their handclaps, rhyming songs and double Dutch jump rope games.
“I know there’s a lot of controversy as far as record companies, [exploitative] contracts and things that didn’t go well in the beginning,” Barnes said. “Nevertheless, what Robinson has done in creating this label and having hip-hop brought into the mainstream, that was historical. ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was the introduction to hip-hop for many people.”
“I loved going to Martha’s Vineyard because I met the New York kids,” Dixon said. “I got out of D.C., and the New York kids were bumping this hip-hop. The music was so rebellious, so in-your-face and lyrically dense. I fell in love with it!” Of course the history of women in hip-hop would be incomplete without the case against 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album,, which a Florida court found to be obscene under state law. As legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, most of what was viewed as “obscene” were the hypersexualized images of Black women’s bodies, both lyrically and visually in the album art and music videos. When 2 Live Crew ultimately won their case in the U.S.
This has been a constant dilemma for women in the culture: How do we love hip-hop when hip-hop doesn’t always love us back?article “Women Rap Back,” author Michele Wallace highlighted how women rappers have created necessary space for love, critique and feminist resistance, citing Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” , featuring U.K. rapper Monie Love, and also complicated sexual politics , made space for body positivity , gave the video vixen her voice back or protested gender-based violence.
Dixon worked with promising talent like Hill, Kanye West and John Legend, and she sparked the idea behind the hit, featuring rapper Method Man and hip-hop soul singer Mary J. Blige. But her success was violently disrupted, she said, when Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons sexually assaulted her, a story that she shares in the HBO Max documentary, which features interviews with 20 survivors of sexual assault and harassment speaking out against the hip-hop mogul.
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