Doesn't Anyone Miss Having Ladies In Hip-Hop? [No Rhyme Or Reason]

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Ella S

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We've posted about the lack of female rappers before, and yesterday, Jonah Weiner had a story on Slate in which he wrote, "Today, female rappers are flukes on the charts, and exactly zero women were nominated at this year's BET Hip-Hop Awards and VH1 Hip-Hop Honors. What happened?" Word. Sure, Queen Latifah has a CD coming out in the fall. But the rap charts are fueled by testosterone, and it wasn't always so. In the early days of hip-hop, there was room for female MCs; it wasn't such a boys club. Weiner argues that women have been so marginalized in rap music that they're basically a joke:
When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they're what feminists would call hip-hop's unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it's meant that many of the identities that female comers have carved for themselves—Boss' gangsta bitch, Kim's badass nympho, or, recently, Lil' Mama's lunchroom alpha girl—have registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white rappers, whether it's the Beastie Boys' nerdy boogie or Eminem's white-trash horror-core.)
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A couple of weeks ago, NPR's Farai Chideya
 
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