My rhymes aint got no gender
I’m killing both like I’m Caitlin
I’m amazin’
I don’t need no validation from crits
Don’t need to make your MC list to let me know I can script
Don’t need a rapper to swallow
To let me know I can spit
— Rouge
The recent cataclysmic rise of South African hip-hop is an indelible cultural phenomenon, premeating not only our airwaves and nightlives, but also how we speak, dress, dance, earn, spend — and (in many ways) think.
Earlier this year DJ Switch called in Shane Eagle, Kwesta, Reason and Proverb to record the much-talked-about single, Now Or Never. The track functioned as a call to reclaim lyricism in the industry — poetics over posing — all centred on the provocation: ‘what happened to rap?’ The official remix featured a 12-man lyrical legion, including PRO, Siya Shezi, Zakwe, Youngsta, and Ginger Trill, sparking web wars over whose bars hit hardest.
But the remix also rang with this deafening question: why was not a single female rapper featured on the track? Later, we learned that Rouge had received the call-up and declined. In an interview with Balcony TV, she explained that being the only female rapper on the track was neither a complement nor an opportunity. ‘I don’t want to be the only female artist’. Rouge wanted audiences to distinguish her verses, not because they were attached to a woman, but because of their incisive lyricism, their cadence, their flow.
Following the original all-male call-out, Switch asked DJ Ms Cosmo to gather a crew of the country’s best female emcees for the LaFemme Remix. Among Cosmo’s fleet of femme foxes: Rouge, Fifi Cooper, Gigi Lamayne, Patti Monroe, MissCelaneous, Miss Supa, Clara T, Phresh Clique, Nelz and BK. At last week’s Koolin in the City, the squad were out in force, celebrating the release, and the culmination of Women’s Month.
‘There are no women in hip-hop they say,’ said the online advertisements, ‘Now ya’ll know’. It resonated with Ntsiki Mazwai’s recent letter to ‘Brothers in SA Hip-Hop’, in which she wrote: ‘you have conveniently told SA that we [female artists] don’t exist’.
Koolout’s femme celebration had inserted itself amidst a wider contemptuous dialogue about the positioning of women emcees in the industry. Banesa, Koolout’s Creative Director, was well aware of the encasing contestations: “[I was asked] “why is it that you [only] have a female line-up when it’s August?” What about all the other nights? So that’s another debate”.
Indeed, encircling all of us on that Troyeville rooftop were brave, beautiful, and brutal utterances about women in hip-hop: the grind and the glory of trying to make it in an industry that, like many others, is permeated by patriarchy, both subtle and overt. ‘Because of the subjugation that happens in all fields’, said Banesa, ‘women are just not very prominent in anything that requires them to use anything other than their womb. And that includes hip-hop.
She adds: ‘because it’s a female line-up, [we assume] this place should be full of women all of a sudden. That’s not how it’s gonna be. That’s not how it’s gonna go down. Chances are it’s gonna be full of guys that wanna see your tits.’
In speaking with femme artists and audiences at Koolout, I was struck not only be the scope and complexity of challenges for women in the industry, but also the fraught tactical decisions women make about how to rise and resist.
Rouge’s internal conflict over the terms of her involvement in Now Or Never is just one example. And she is not the only one to contest the label: ‘female artist’. ‘We’re rappers. We’re artists’, Phresh Clique told me. ‘Don’t put a label on it. You don’t put a label on another artist. If it’s a guy rapper, you don’t say “male rapper”. If I say I’m a female rapper, it’s like I’m doubting myself. Cos I’m like, “feel bad for me guys. I’m a woman”. Ms Cosmo later echoed: ‘I do strongly believe [that you should] look at me as an artist and look at me for my skills’. The real and relentless frustration for these women is that they so rarely get to discuss their actual artistry. Instead, the conversation pivots around ‘what it’s like to be a female in the game’.
And yet, as Jean Grae once said, ‘It’s not possible to discuss women who rap as “just” rappers until or unless people who consume and participate divest from basic patriarchy’.
Each of the women I spoke to was entangled in charged questions about how and when to wear gendered labels.
‘Female hip-hop, I think, does need to be separated’, said Banesa, although she was very aware that many others held a different view. ‘I was having an argument with one of my friends who was like, “there shouldn’t be a separation”. [But] I think the labels are important because it’s the reality of the world we live in. It [women in hip-hop] is a different animal right now’. On her account, women needed their own space, for now, to grow and to build. The quest to be ‘just an artist’ might involve first asserting oneself as an equal. Clarity, for example, dropped these bars for the Koolout audience — a call for a gender-free evaluation of her craft and her impact:
‘I’m trying to stay positive in a world that’s so negative
Masculine/feminine the gender’s irrelevant
As long as I’ve got time, I’ve got minds to change’
Despite attempts to dismantle categories like ‘female artist’, many also offered sharp articulations of the ways in which the industry is gendered.
‘I will always be female whether I like it or not’, Ms Cosmo told me later that evening. ‘I’m not gonna shy away from the fact that women in the industry haven’t been given the opportunities that the guys have. And we have to fight tooth and nail to actually get those opportunities’.
‘This is a man’s world’, Phresh Clique explained. ‘You know when women start getting into any male dominated industry, there’s this thing [of being silenced]. They’re sleeping on us. And the thing is we’re here. They’re just turning a blind eye.’
‘As females, we’re doing something really awesome’ says Ms Cosmo. ‘That’s why I did a song like the La Femme remix to really push the female agenda, to push female artists. Actually to the point where the female remix has been dubbed better than the guy’s remix. A lot of people have said that.
Koolout’s rooftop was steaming with some of the fiercest females in the art world. But existing in that space was not always easy. At a prior Koolout event, I recall a small insurrection in which a group of women disrupted a crewe of male emcee’s chanting the hook: ‘bitch wait outside, let me finish what I’m doing’. Indeed, in discussions of hip-hop and misogyny, it is often lyrical content that attracts the most attention and debate. OG, Miss Supa’s freestyle at the August event took direct aim at references to women as ‘bitches’:
Bark is the meanest
Ask me where the meat is
Grab it and eat it just like a dog would do
It’s probable
Never seen one as hungry as I is
No wonder why you would hurry to call me ‘that bitch’
Woof!
Don’t want you pissing in my territory
Hip-hop is mine
His story to her story
‘There are many people at these hip-hop things who hate me,’ chimed Lady Skollie, a hip-hop head, pioneering visual artist, and fierless gender activist. Through her art and online presence, she has publically critiqued sexual violence and misogyny in the local entertainment industry. In a recent interview for Pap Culture, for example, Lady Skollie attacked common assumptions that famous men ‘make’ the women they sleep with ‘valuable’. ‘Oh yes’, she said, ‘because I was never an individual before you injected all that greatness into me through my vagina’. Even Banesa told me that it has sometimes been assumed that, due to her position at Koolout, she must be sleeping with one of her colleagues.
Incontrovertibly, female emcees receive fewer bookings and fewer opportunities than their male counterparts. ‘Sadly we make the least amount of money when we have a female line-up’, Banesa explained, ‘because they don’t have a big pull’. ‘They see us doing and putting in the work’, said Phresh Clique, ‘but do they trust us enough to own it on stage?’
In a genre where self-assurance is currency, some female emcees have also embodied in their work a powerful collision of ostentation and unashamed vulnerability. It resonated when DJ Muptee dropped these impromptu bars:
I know I want to utter
But when I do I stutter
C-c-can we connect on a conscious level, brother?
Among those female emcees that have grabbed the mic, battled on stages, or claimed their space in the booth, there remain concerns of a double standard. ‘Now that women are gaining entry, of course they need time to hone their craft’, Banesa says. ‘But every time there’s a mess up, [the response is] “you see, that’s why we don’t let you guys in’. Phresh Clique agree: ‘if a guy comes in the game and he’s new, they’re gonna hype him up like “yeah yeah yeah, another boss in the game”. But when a female rapper comes through they look at everything. When the critic comes, it’s heavy with us. They check you from the steez game, to the bars, to the way you’re spitting, to the flow. You literally have to work extra hard in order for them to see. We literally have to rub it in their faces like “yo, we’re here”’.
To add to this, women in hip-hop are not only women. The vast majority are also women of colour. ‘You can’t just say “female hip-hop”’, affirms Banesa. ‘Then you’re talking about black female hip-hop. Then you’re talking about coloured female hip-hop. There’s the girls who grew up on the other side of Sandton, or the Soweto cats’. The casting of hip-hop as particularly violent, misongynist, or brash (over and above any other genre) is arguably located in centuries-long attempts to suppress the voices and artistry of black and brown bodies. Academic, Tricia Rose, has argued that female rappers, most of whom are black, might find it difficult to condemn the misogyny of male emcees because of the need to collectively oppose racism, and to avoid contributing to the notion that black masculinity is “pathological”. ‘You’re exposed to a plethora of issues that need to be dealt with. And it gets a bit overwhelming’, Banesa told me.
Each of the women emcees I spoke to was finding her own way to confront knots of power and privelege, grow the industry, and support women’s work — while aso carving out space to be ‘just an artist’. These complex struggles reverberated through their versus, which echoed defiance, sensuality, audaciousness, rage, humour and poetry. ‘What happened to rap?’ In this case: women happened — are happening. And it’s about time we tell that story.
