A lot of them were about other genres such as pop, rock or even country, and I could not find many, if any, at that time that were about hip-hop or young rappers. On the Foundations of Their Respective Books:Īngie Thomas: “I was specifically thinking about young adult music books. To honor women scribes in hip-hop culture, spoke to eight authors, including the aforementioned Hope, Fitzgerald, Iandoli, and Krishnamurthy, along with Angie Thomas, Cristalle “Psalm One” Bowen, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, and Sesali Bowen. These are just a few works from a legacy of impactful hip-hop reads by women, like Kim Osorio’s tell-all Straight from the Source, Sophia Chang’s memoir The Baddest Bitch in the Room, and Angie Martinez’s autobiography My Voice. In her forthcoming book debut, Ladies First, writer Nadirah Simmons credits women pioneers for their contributions to hip-hop. This October, music journalist Sowmya Krishnamurthy will deliver Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion. Kathy Iandoli, author of God Save the Queens, co-penned Lil’ Kim memoir, The Queen Bee, expected to release in 2025. I feel like white men kind of have a monopoly on hip-hop right now as they have since the very beginning, unfortunately.”ĭespite the sexist and misogynistic standards that have positioned men as the face of hip-hop lore, women continue to rise within the space. “But I think there have been many books about hip-hop that have a male perspective, especially white men. “There aren’t very many books by women about hip-hop aside from the more recent works, and of course, there’s some seminal works in the past, as well,” says Kiana Fitzgerald, author of Ode to Hip-Hop. That’s what I’ve noticed, it was kind of a blind spot for them.” “Part of that process as a hip-hop fan, I’ve discovered artists of whatever gender outside of what I was used to, and I’m not sure that men have that same practice. “I think that if you’re a hip-hop fan, especially a ‘rap nerd,’ you’re used to doing a ton of research and finding CDs of artists you don’t know, or really digging in the crates,” says Clover Hope, author of The Motherlode, which spotlights over 100 women who shaped rap music. As hip-hop reaches its 50th anniversary, the reach of women hip-hop authors stands firm against the patriarchal ideologies that have tried to silence their stories, from fictional to autobiographical. Unless they were music journalists or orators, women were rarely given authority to critique and detail their connection to hip-hop in longform men largely postured themselves as experts on the genre and its roots. In 1999, journalist and author Joan Morgan published When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, once deemed curio within music literature. It took just over 25 years after hip-hop’s inception for a woman author to engage the culture with feminist thought.
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