Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop.
Okay, I should probably admit upfront that I didn’t know who Ice Spice was until like a month ago. While I keep up with Black movies and Black TV and Black books, I find that music kind of slips through the cracks for me. Drake has been my number one artist for the last three years on Spotify Wrapped (that embarrassing thing where they announce your particular neuroses via the artists you listen to the most). It’s partially because he’s so moody that I listened to him so much, but it’s also because that was the music I was listening to when I was in high school, Take Care and Thank Me Later and So Far Gone. I listened to Lil Wayne a lot too back then, fell in love especially with his flickers of vulnerability in “Drop the World” and “I Feel Like Dying” and “Tie My Hands.” I find myself orbiting that same music from 10, 15 years ago, not because I want to time travel back to who I was then (lol), but because it reminds me of when I was figuring out who I was for the first time.
Okay, to walk it back, I listened to Drake in high school, but I definitely also listened to him in grad school, at Iowa, where the only way to not talk about workshop at house parties was to take over as DJ (one privilege of being Black) and blare the music as loud as I could. I didn’t dance (a Black privilege I never received) so much as jump up and down and scream the lyrics with people who also knew the lyrics and some who did not but politely let 2000s hip hop take over what might otherwise be a very specific kind of artsy space. I loved to DJ and played Drake most of all: “One Dance” and “Nice for What” and “Fake Love.” Regardless of if people listened to hip hop generally, it seemed like everyone loved Drake because he was our kind of artist: feeling too much and fragile and easily insulted. We were trying to be writers in a place that could take us to the top of the game or bitterly become our peak, so what else could we do but wear black and scream “Fake Love”?
I played Drake. I played R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” (another high school favorite) until someone told me to turn it off, and then I watched the documentary about his abuse and couldn’t listen to him after that without feeling nauseous. I played Cardi B. I loved how she was an artist and sensitive but not easily insulted, instead turning whatever hurt came toward her into something so alive and specific that I almost wanted to go through what she went through just so that I could understand her better. I’m thinking of “Thru Your Phone” and “Be Careful” and of course “Bodak Yellow,” which I could not stop playing at parties, could not stop jumping up and down to and spinning around the room to, drunk and 22, yelling with a kind of assertiveness that I never managed in the daytime.
I listened to Cardi B, but I didn’t know who Ice Spice was. I listen to Spotify’s Feelin’ Myself, that incredible playlist of Black women rappers, but I couldn’t tell you who any specific track was by except maybe Doja Cat because she’s so weird except now I guess she might also be cancelled. The older I get, the harder it is to keep track of what’s going on musically. My brain and my body feel too wired to sit down and listen to an album, even in the car. I want podcasts and audiobooks and TV with the subtitles on. It’s like by reading so much so often, my brain needs sentences now and long stretches of text and something more linear than poetry to process. But I think it’s a shame, especially because save Cardi and Nicki Minaj and Megan thee Stallion, I don’t really know that much about women hip hop artists. I was born in ’94, took what MTV gave me in the 2000s, was off in religious land by 2013 and when I came back, I just reached for the old stuff.
I turned on Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop because I wanted to know that history, and I found it to be such a brilliant crash course. I learned about Roxanne-Shante and MC Lyte and Da Brat, who looked so perfectly queer when I saw the clip of her saying that she thinks Lil Kim and Foxy Brown should be able to talk about their bodies however they want that I Googled her to see that yes, she married Jesseca Dupart last year and they’re having a baby. How did I not know about all of this? How—when I found out who Ice Spice was and played “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2” for my boyfriend on repeat until he said he got the gist—have I never really looked into any of this before?
I guess maybe it’s a bit of grew-up-in-the-suburbs guilt and talk-like-I’m-White-because-I-don’t-really-know-how-to-talk-any-other-way guilt. I think that as much as I admire these women and love the music, growing up middle class separates me from their experiences in a way that sometimes I feel embarrassed by. I didn’t grow up in the hood even though I love hood culture. Sometimes people think I’m a certain way and then I open my mouth and they think I’m a different way, and there’s no way to tell them that I’m in some unlocatable place in between. I think when I listen to, say, Lil Wayne, there’s already gender that separates our experiences so I don’t really line up the way I am with the way he is and feel culturally lacking in the way that I might with, say, Nicki Minaj. But that’s hilarious because who’s like Nicki Minaj? And what two Black women align perfectly with each other anyway, what two rappers even do? Nicki Minaj was influenced by Missy Elliott, but she’s also very different than her. Tierra Wack is a weirdo too, but she’s different from Missy and Nicki in a lot of ways. As much as I think class difference should be acknowledged when speaking and writing on Black people (especially because so many of the people who write on Black culture and study it and teach it and create a lot of the stories are middle class Black people, and therefore don’t always know what they’re talking about, even if White people can’t tell the difference), it’s also important to remember that no two Black people think and are and express themselves in the exact same way, which means even if you talk White and grew up in the suburbs and don’t know who Ice Spice is, you can watch a documentary about Black women rappers and cry a little because there it is—there is the crux of it, what they’ve done, and maybe you have some of that in you too.
Image: Netflix
Note: Another great project on Black women rappers is the TV show Rap Sh!t, Issa Rae’s show after Insecure. The well-rounded and diverse representation of Black people in it is some of the best I’ve seen. (And it looks like the second season just came out!)
