Turning 50: Writing Women into the Story of Hip-Hop, Five Decades After Its Founding

” broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection, reporting for theClockwise, from top left: Cindy Campbell takes the mic at a hip-hop anniversary concert in 2013 with her brother, DJ Kool Herc; Queen Latifah performs in Newark, N.J.

During the final days of summer, Herc migrated the sound system culture popular in Jamaica’s dance halls to New York City, while he emulated the two-turntable technique of DJs at the popular discos of Manhattan. Out of this mixing style, he created a continuous looping of the musical breaks of a James Brown funk record with Black and brown underground music—the kind not yet played on the radio.

Apart from providing the domestic and sonic spaces for hip-hop, women also participated as rappers, DJs, breakdancers and graffiti artists. Earlier this year, MC Sha-Rock was featured in an Instagram post and podcast highlighting women emcees from the early years of hip-hop and reclaiming her own history as the first female rapper, part of the group Funky 4 + 1.Much of hip-hop is shaped by the sounds and beats of Black girlhood: their handclaps, rhyming songs and double Dutch jump rope games.

Drew Dixon, a former executive at Def Jam Recordings, a record label that launched the careers of many prominent artists, said this was the case for her. This is how hip-hop would cross the country and, indeed, the globe. It followed along with Black and Latinx youth who were listening to the music via bootleg cassettes, mixtapes and guerrilla radio. The music began to permeate the airwaves. Over the decades, hip-hop would eventually remix and mutate across diasporic communities in the U.S., and from Jamaican dancehall to Nigerian Afrobeats to Ghanaian Hiplife, from Latin reggaeton to Punjabi bhangra to K-pop and J-pop.

Enter the video vixen from the “dirty South,” her scantily clad body on display in the hot climate of the region: on a Miami beach, or a Freaknic gathering in Atlanta among Black college students, and especially in the strip clubs, a ubiquitous spectacle in millennial rap and trap music. Her objectified presence in lyrics, on album covers and in music videos ignited public conversations over obscenity, including from Black feminists and elder members of the community—most notably C.

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Developing Hip-Hop Feminist Scholarship: The Ms. Q&A With Tricia Rose and Gwendolyn Pough - Ms. MagazineIn our continued coverage of hip-hop feminists for our “Turning 50” series, we highlight two important voices and pioneers in hip-hop feminist studies.Tricia Rose, a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, was born and raised in Harlem and the Bronx in New York City. Her groundbreaking book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), explored the emerging culture of hip-hop and helped to establish the birth of hip-hop studies. Her work addresses Black feminisms, Black women’s sexualities, and systemic racism. Gwendolyn D. Pough, a professor of women’s studies and rhetoric at Syracuse University, is renowned for her scholarship on hip-hop feminism, begun with her seminal work, Check it While I Wreck it: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (2004).
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