Hip-hop’s 50th anniversary spotlights women’s influence and struggles

It’s been a year-long celebration of hip-hop’s fiftieth anniversary with the highlight on the artwork kind’s plain impression on music and tradition. And a notable cap to the yr was Grammy-winning recording artist and producer Missy Elliott changing into the primary feminine rapper inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in November.

It’s wild to suppose in 2023 Elliott is breaking floor on this regard. Nevertheless it solely illustrates how lengthy it’s taken not just for hip-hop’s affect throughout genres to be acknowledged, however for girls within the house to be acknowledged as properly.

Netflix’s docuseries Girls First: A Story of Girls in Hip-Hop, which dropped again in August, pays tribute to girls in hip-hop previous and current who, like Elliott, have been instrumental in curating the hip-hop trade because it stands now.

Produced by Tradition Home, a manufacturing firm centered on the intersection of politics and popular culture, Girls First spotlights among the most influential girls in hip-hop together with Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Sha-Rock, Roxanne Shante, and Rapsody who share their tales of arising within the trade and the problems they confronted therein.

“I’ve this very unfastened working idea that you may map numerous eras of ladies in hip-hop alongside waves of feminism,” says Carri Twigg, founding companion of Tradition Home. “That acquired us began right into a dialogue simply in regards to the ways in which girls in hip-hop actually mirror and replicate again to us what’s happening within the broader constructions within the nation.”

One instance: Sexism within the office.

TV persona and rapper Dee Barnes hosted the hip-hop discuss present Pump It Up! within the early 90s. However, as she alleges in Girls First, she was blacklisted within the trade after being bodily assaulted by rapper and producer Dr. Dre at a membership for working an interview clip he didn’t agree with. Music producer Drew Dixon outlined her experiences as usually being the one girl within the room which she feels led to the erasure of her contributions to hip-hop. In a separate documentary, Max’s On the Document, Dixon and several other different girls additionally alleged a history of sexual abuse by the hands of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.

“What we tried to actually do [in Ladies First] was to provide loads of these girls the house to inform their very own story and experiences from their viewpoint,” says Raeshem Nijhon, founder and government producer of Tradition Home. “It actually looks like we scratched the floor of the tales and the experiences which are on the market. And the extra that we speak about it, the extra we will take that misogyny and violence head on.”

Serving to empower girls within the music trade is precisely what prompted Heather Lowery to create her music and leisure firm Femme It Ahead, a three way partnership with Stay Nation Leisure.

“Girls face loads of boundaries throughout all industries, hip-hop isn’t any completely different. It continues to be a male-dominated house with little or no room for error,” says Lowery, president and CEO of Femme It Ahead. “I can solely actually converse on behalf of myself and say that a few of my best challenges, particularly after I began my profession, have been largely tied to the false perception system {that a} Black girl just isn’t able to working her personal enterprise.”

Based on the Harvard Business Review, Black girls are the main group of entrepreneurs within the U.S. at 17% in contrast with white girls (10%) and white males (15%). But, solely 3% of Black girls are working mature companies. Sadly sufficient, that determine is mirrored amongst Black girls music executives who, in line with a 2021 report from USC Annenberg, account for lower than 3% of the trade.

A technique Lowery is attacking the issue with Femme It Ahead is thru mentorship packages. Subsequent Gen Femme goals to extend alternatives for girls of shade by pairing promising expertise with trade titans and entrepreneurs. Thus far, Subsequent Gen Femme has labored with greater than 600 girls serving to them get jobs, internships, mentors, and extra.

“They’re getting lifelong sisterhood,” Lowery says. “I’m constructing a neighborhood to assist different girls trying to break via.”

After all it’s extra than simply breaking via—it’s about getting paid.

Based on a study conducted by the Recording Academy, girls within the music trade work a number of jobs to make ends meet. Greater than half (57%) have two or extra jobs, whereas 24% work between 40 and 51 hours every week. On high of that, 36% earn lower than $40,000 per yr.

In 2022, Michigan Consultant Rashida Tlaib and the Union of Musicians and Allied Employees launched a decision concentrating on music streaming providers to pay artists direct royalties from streams. And within the wake of the lately resolved SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, there’s much more momentum to create fairer requirements throughout the music trade.

Legendary rapper MC Lyte says there are conversations taking place behind closed doorways, however the nature of the music trade might show troublesome to kind an actual union or pull different artists into solidarity.

“We’re the least protected on this house of leisure,” Lyte says. “We don’t have insurance coverage. And it’s fairly unfair to have contributed a lot to an trade and nonetheless not having the ability to go have your tooth handled. We do should be organized to make the distinction that should occur.”

A powerful union effort might additionally assist in different urgent points akin to predatory document offers the place artists don’t see nearly all of their income.

In Girls First, many artists expressed how they didn’t perceive the main points of their very own contracts, which we’ve seen play out in public through the years. Pioneering R&B group TLC offered hundreds of thousands of albums worldwide. However after profitable their first Grammy in 1996, they introduced that they have been as “broke as broke might be” and had filed for chapter. Extra lately, Megan Thee Stallion was embroiled in a public battle together with her former label 1501 Licensed Leisure. Accusations of mismanagement and squandered funds led to a lawsuit which resulted within the rapper being launched from her contract.

Positive, the panorama of ladies in hip-hop right this moment is extra strong than we’ve seen in years. Nevertheless, there are a variety of points which have traditionally plagued artists and proceed to take action to this present day. And, as Queen Latifah so rightly identified in Girls First, hip-hop wants girls throughout the style: on the mic, within the boardrooms, behind the blending boards, and past.

“If the girl’s voice just isn’t heard, then sure, hip-hop is useless,” Queen Latifah stated. “You want us in hip-hop, you want that beat, you want that rhyme.” Girls have contributed greater than sufficient up to now 50 years of hip-hop. They set traits, break boundaries, and are all the time reinventing and redefining what it means to be a rapper. Girls First is only one of many initiatives that celebrates Black girls because the cultural tastemakers that they’re.

“Girls First was a transfer in an ideal course,” MC Lyte says. “It permits individuals to look into the world of what makes a girl need to seize the microphone. I consider hip-hop was really a blessing from God, for the disenfranchised to take it, mildew it, form it—nobody else owns it.”