Arn't I A Woman?

This list is by NO MEANS: exhaustive, complete, ranked, compiled by the artist's best song, for educative purposes, overwhelmingly informative  I recognize that the sounds of Black women, as well as many women of color, are incredibly varied in rap but their contributions often don't get proper exposure. I want to make sure I listen to more of these stories. Any of my writing related to female rappers is -at least on a subconscious level- inspired by the work of Tricia Rose, specifically from  Black Noise,  her seminal research on rap music which you can buy here Day 30: June 30, 2019 Sasha Go Hard “Alone” I think the Alone video is a perfect place to stop. The masks, Sasha's barren face, the black and white footage, and the theme of societal betrayal reminds us that the female rapper, whether we like it or not, holds a unique position in hip hop. She serves as a mouthpiece for the many familial, sexual, and domestic roles and obligations ...

You can read my follow up article:  here Let me just preface this article with the following statement: I think BOTH Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri deserved to be inducted into the 2018 Songwriters Hall of Fame (SHOF). However, only Dupri was bequeathed the honor this year, despite both he and Carey-long time writing collaborators- being nominated. As an Atlanta native and an unabashed lifetime member of the lambily (MC’s name for her fandom), I feel relatively well-versed in both Dupri’s and Carey’s songwriting catalog, so I was pretty shocked at the brush-off knowing what I know.   Carey fiercely guards her songwriting capabilities and credits. As a broke, struggling 18-year-old in New York City, Carey-  without a penny to her name and   no proper shoes upon her feet - refused to sell her songs to other artists, allowing her to retain the rights to her catalog. That’s a pretty bold move and one that could only come from an artist fiercely protective an...

new piece on Beyonce, Rihanna, and Identity Formation over at Wussy Mag! http://www.wussymag.com/all/2016/4/11/ok-ladies-now-lets-get-in-identity-formation

Listen up nerds: It’s time to finally start a legitimate discussion about Canada’s finest MC and rap’s go to punching bag Aubrey Graham, more affectionately known under his stage moniker, Drake. My man Drake has managed to really ruffle some public feathers since his rap career took off, launching him from the halls of Degrassi High into music’s megastar stratosphere. Why the constant hate for Drake from almost everywhere regardless of taste preferences, intelligence, race, gender, or other identifiers? Well, he rebukes the stereotypes society tries to subscribe to him for one. A Jewish childhood actor turned rapper from Canada who sings about his feelings? Wait a second, that doesn’t fit into any of these neat little boxes we have laying around! This is bullshit, Drake. If you’re gonna rap, then why are you smiling?! People are uncomfortable with Drake because he doesn’t force packaged “hardcore” rap rhetoric into his rhymes, but still frequently expresses himself as a h...

  I started wearing the patch two days ago in an effort to quit smoking. Apparently, it makes you have REALLY vivid dreams, aka nightmares. It’s some lucid dreaming, inception shit. So the first night I had been an accomplice to murder and the whole dream was basically me having a panic attack until I woke up at 4:30 am, and can I tell you, I’ve never felt so happy that I didn’t kill anyone before in my life. Last night I had some weird dream where my family decided to get someone else to be me, and I slowly started to become invisible. God, that was weird. Weird dreams aside, the point is I’m waking up super early. So I naturally check the news aka refresh Buzzfeed incessantly, and there was a really interesting article today about a man who has written personal e-mails to Jay-Z for the past few years,  and the e-mails are embedded with some tracker that allows the sender to know if, when, and where an e-mail has been read. You know the rest, man notices e-mails have been...

I like Crime Mob a whole lot. For anyone who doesn’t know they were a rap collective from Atlanta Georgia, probably most famous for “Knuck if u Buck” and “Rock Yo Hips”, and my personal favorite “Circles”. Crime Mob’s sound is very gritty, the production fast-paced and jolting. (I don’t really know anything about musical production or how to describe the sounds I hear. ) A lot of hip hop production and instrumentals forgo the use of the diatonic scale traditionally seen in Western music. Leroi Jones traces hip hop music back to blues music, blues music back to field music, field music back to slave hymns, slave hymns back to traditional West African music. A lot of this music manipulates instrumentals into sounds you can’t hit on the diatonic scale, most notably mimicking human voices, and uses rhythms that are based on a totally different framework for musical creation. (See: ‘Blues People'.) Sometimes in modern music pop and hip hop become intertwined, a sort of melting...