Raised on a steady diet of bars and breakbeats, I take pride on my knowledge of hip-hop. As a rapper and teacher of the poetics of rap, I take myself to be more than a casual listener. I picked up God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-hop hopeful to have my understanding of hip-hop history challenged and my playlist blessed by a batch of new-to-me female emcees. On both counts, the book didn’t disappoint.
Acclaimed hip-hop journalist Kathy Iandoli shows how women were central to the story of hip-hop from the start: It was Kool Herc’s sister, Cindy Campbell, who came up with the idea to throw hip-hop’s first party to raise funds for her back-to-school wardrobe. Women also lay claim to the first hook in hip-hop on “Funk You Up” by The Sequence, an accomplishment usually attributed to Kurtis Blow on “The Breaks.” In the early chapters, I most appreciate Iandoli for introducing me to Sparky D, Monie Love, JJ Fad, Oaktown’s 357, Queen Pen, and Us Girls; I appreciate her for re-introducing me to Roxanne Shanté, who I’ve subsequently fallen in love with, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Yo-Yo, Ladybug Mecca, and Salt N Peppa. Here, I especially appreciate how Iandoli outlines the way Roxanne Shanté transformed battle rap at the age of 14. By my estimation, Iandoli’s greatest blunder in these early chapters describing the birth of hip-hop and female rappers of the 80s is her failure to include anything about female gang culture in New York at the time. Hip-hop was in many ways a response to gang culture of New York, a story frequently dominated by boys and men, although there were also female cliques with their own histories.
As the book started to dip into hip-hop history more familiar to me, into the eras of Rah Digga, Lil Kim, and Foxy Brown, and Da Brat, I was disappointed by Iandoli’s over-emphasis on numbers, how many hit songs the women managed to produce. While commercial success is a laudable accomplishment and an important landmark in hip-hop history, I appreciated the moments where the book dove into the personal stories of emcees, as it had with Roxanne Shanté. Otherwise, the brief sprinkling of biographical detail makes the personal feel more tabloid-ish than analytical, historical, and political. In the 90s and early 2000s, Iandoli focuses her attention on Gangsta Boo of Three 6 Mafia, Missy Elliot and of course the incomparable Ms. Hill. As someone raised in the “Stay Fly” era of Three 6 Mafia, I appreciate Iandoli for reintroducing me to their dark and melodic earlier music.
Iandoli successfully breaks down how the hip-hop industry limited women, placing them in either a sex kitten or Nubian goddess binary early on, before pressuring all their female acts into the sex kitten category by the emergence of Lil Kim. Throughout these conversations, it was strange not to hear an invocation of Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Perhaps this is a place where Iandoli’s perspective as a white woman falls short a little.
Once the book entered eras of hip-hop I was more familiar with, the number of insights I experienced went down significantly. Although I still encountered a plethora of new-to-me names, including Amanda Blank, Audra, the Rapper, Bahamadia, Charli Baltimore, Amil, Kid Sister, Lady Luck, Nyemiah Supreme, Invincible, and Sister Souljah. I was most excited by Sister Souljah, who became a member of Public Enemy and whose fiery rhetoric is raw and ragingly woke.
noname
This book’s greatest sin is its exclusion of Noname. Other female emcees inexplicably left out of the conversation include Doja Cat. Nitty Scott, Princess Nokia, CHIKA, cupcakKe, Ill Camille, Blimes, Mystic, Yungen Blakrob, Gifted Gab, Gavlyn, and Reverie. This happens because Iandoli wrote a mainstream-centric book, which is a shame considering the plethora of female emcees doing truly groundbreaking work right now. No one needs to read more about Nicki Minaj and Cardi B when there’s so many other female emcees doing genre extended work.
There are two more significant criticisms I have of the book: 1) It’s emcee-centric, trailing the stories of female emcees almost exclusively. Hip-hop is more than just rapping. An Essential History of Women in Hip-hop should talk to us about our female deejays, producers, b-girls, graf-writers, fashionistas, and poets. 2) It is US and English-centric. Hip-hop is a global phenomenon. It is shame that the book could not make room for our legendary Latin American raperas, such as Ivy Queen (who has rapped on stages for complete days while pregnant!), La Materialista, Rebeca Lane, y innumerable otras, whether they speak Spanish, French, Zapotec, or whatever else.
Ivy Queen performing pregnant in 2013.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in feminism, women’s history, and hip-hop.