Rapsody blames sexism for downplaying GOAT status of female emcees
Female rappers are burning up the charts with hits, but not everyone is taking their talent seriously, let alone viewing them as equal stakeholders in Hip Hop alongside their male contemporaries. Rapsody says it’s time that all changed.
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The lyricist released her new album, Please Don’t Cry, on Friday (May 17). As part of her media rounds to promote the project, she stopped by “The Breakfast Club,” where the topic of female emcees being slighted by those who view their work as a less valued version of male-dominated Hip Hop came up. On May 12, she tweeted, “There’s no ‘female’ Hip Hop. It’s just Hip Hop, loved ones,” a sentiment she reiterated during the interview.
The North Carolina native explained that critics confuse a predominantly female audience as the line of demarcation between the concept of male and female-led Hip Hop. “[The] audience is women, but what she does is Hip Hop,” she said, defending the genre as a collective of voices and not one of sub-groups contingent upon gender.
“Like, when you label something, labels are just there to separate us. So, if you [are] labeling it female Hip Hop and you put it in a category where this is just for females and you looking at it a certain way, it’s like no, they do Hip Hop. They rap. Their audience may be mostly women,” added Rapsody.
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The “OooWee” artist doubled down on how women forging a way into the rap game are done a disservice by those alienating their music to just one portion of the culture. “I just hate the separation of labels. It’s already hard for us, it’s just another form of sexism to me,” explained the three-time Grammy nominee. “Like, I don’t make female Hip Hop, n**ga, I rap for everybody. You get it or you don’t and my, you know, fanbase shows that I got men, women, older people, younger people. That’s what it is, so it’s like we not ‘bout to do that, and I’ma advocate for it.”
Furthermore, she agreed with Charlamange tha God that women are often absent from GOAT debates purely based on gender. She said, “That’s why we gotta change that. We in the debate, baby," bigging up artists like Lauryn Hill.
Rapsody's fourth studio album, which comes five years after her LP Eve, features several assists from the likes of actress Phylicia Rashad, Baby Tate, Niko Brim, Erykah Badu and someone who is often named in GOAT talk — Lil Wayne.
The NOLA-bred lyrical assassin appeared on track 17, “Raw,” also featuring Brim. According to Rapsody, Weezy’s verse forced her to step up her artistry, resulting in her rewriting her bars about 27 times.
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