Mark Anthony Neal on Hip-Hop and Gender: A Critical Analysis Essay

This essay delves into Mark Anthony Neal's analysis of gender dynamics within hip-hop culture, particularly focusing on the presence of sexism and misogyny and the marginalization of women in the industry. Neal highlights the complexities of patriarchal privilege and its impact on female artists, referencing Lauryn Hill's critique of hypermasculinity and the need for woman-centered narratives. The essay further explores the perspectives of female rap artists and scholars, including Cheryl Keyes's categorization of women rappers, Joan Morgan's hip-hop feminism, Kyra Gaunt's exploration of black girls' musical games, and Tricia Rose's critique of gender dynamics in hip-hop. The essay concludes by emphasizing the potential for hip-hop to promote change and the importance of including diverse voices in critical discussions, particularly acknowledging the impact of gender on hip-hop studies and its potential to engage a wider audience in feminist thought.

Part IV
I’ll Be Nina Simone Defecating on
Your Microphone:
Hip-Hop and Gender
Mark Anthony Neal
I could do what you do, EASY! Believe me / frontin’ niggaz gives me heebee-geebees so while you
imitatin’ Al Capone / I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone
Lauryn Hill, “Ready Or Not” (The Score, 1996)
Rap music and hip-hop culture have often been singularly cited for the transmission and reproduction
of sexism and misogyny in American society. With tracks like Akinelye’s “Six-Foot Blow Job Machine”
and 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny,” hip-hop is perhaps too easy a target. As sexism and misogyny are
largely extensions of normative patriarchal privilege, their reproduction in the music of male hip-hop
artists speaks more powerfully to the extent that these young men (particularly young black men) are
invested in that privilege than it does to any evidence that they are solely responsible for its
reproduction. As journalist Kevin Powell eloquently cautions in the introduction to Ernie Paniccioli’s
collection of classic hip-hop photographs, Who Shot Ya? (2002), “it is wrong to categorically dismiss
hip-hop without taking into serious consideration the socioeconomic conditions (and the many record
labels that eagerly exploit and benefit from the ignorance of many of these young artists) that have
led to the current state of affairs. Or, to paraphrase the late Tupac Shakur, we were given this world,
we did not make it.” But there is also no denying the fact that hip-hop’s grip on American youth allows
for the circulation of sexist and misogynistic narratives in a decidedly uncritical fashion.
The embrace of patriarchal privilege by some male hip-hop artists partly explains the margin- alization
of women among hip-hop artists, particularly when those women don’t conform to the normative roles
assigned to women within hip-hop (the chicken-head groupie, oversexualized rhyme-spitter, baggy
clothed desexualized mic-fiend are prime examples). Thus, many female raps artists are less
concerned with challenging the circulation of sexism and misogyny (Sarah Jones’s “Your Revolution”
notwithstanding) than they are with simply being recognized as peers alongside male rappers. This is
in part what Lauryn Hill asks us to consider in her verse from The Fugees’s “Ready or Not.” Extolling
the legacy of the legendary jazz vocalist and activist Nina Simone, Hill champions a notion of hard-core
hip-hop that is not rooted in the Mafioso fantasy of the day, but that goes back to the risky aesthetic
and political choices made by a woman who, at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s,
spoke “truth to power” in songs like “Mississippi Goddam” and “Four Women.” Hill’s lyrical phrase
represents a legitimate critique of the hypermasculinity and phallocentrism that pervades hip-hop—a
critique that is clearly gendered in its intent.
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What Hill and many other female rap artists, including Salt-N-Pepa, Eve, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah,
Bahamadia, and Missy Elliot, are really asking for is a respect for woman-centered narratives that exist
alongside, and not necessarily in competition with, those of their male peers. As Hill attests, however,
these women are ready and more than willing to battle. Accord- ingly, each of the five women whose

essays are collected in this section speak to a complex and multifaceted notion of gender and
femininity in hip-hop. While the chapters are clearly in dialogue with one another—Tricia Rose’s “Never
Trust a Big Butt and a Smile” being the now- legendary opening salvo in scholarly criticism of hip-hop
—these chapters are not simply echoing the party line from some mythical center of feminist thought.
These are works that complicate our sense of the obvious gender problems within hip-hop.
UCLA ethnomusicologist Cheryl Keyes charts the formation of “four distinct categories of women
rappers” within the hip-hop performance tradition. Drawing on Jacqueline Bobo’s concept of
“interpretive community,” Keyes examines the observations of female performers and audiences,
identifying the “Queen Mother,” “Fly Girl,” “Sista with Attitude,” and “Lesbian” as the dominant figures
within female hip-hop performance, adding that “each category mirrors certain images, voices, and
lifestyles.” The most provocative of these figures is the “Fly Girl.” According to Keyes, “Rap’s fly girl
image ... highlights aspects of black women’s bodies consid- ered undesirable by American
mainstream standards of beauty.” Citing the example of Salt-N- Pepa, hip-hop’s quintessential “Fly
Girls,” Keyes asserts, “they portray via performance the fly girl as a party-goer, and independent
woman, but additionally, an erotic subject rather than an objectified one.”
Journalist Joan Morgan also finds value in the identity of hip-hop’s “Fly Girl” and the asso- ciated erotic
power she possesses. In the opening pages of her book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My
Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist, Morgan relishes the opportunity to replicate the “proper Bronx Girl Switch”
that she watched “project girls” employ when she was a young girl growing up in the Bronx. As she
notes, these were woman-girls who could “transform into Black Moseses capable of parting seas of
otherwise idle Negroes.” Given the reverence for the South Bronx in hip-hop lore, it is not a stretch to
suggest that the prototype for the hip-hop “Fly Girl” may have been born on the streets of New York’s
uptown borough.
It is in the context of black female sexuality that Morgan posits a hip-hop feminism that champions
both a critical discourse around gender in hip-hop and the pleasures associated with flaunting the very
female sexuality that is regularly objectified by some hip-hop artists. As Morgan queries in one
passage:
Is it foul to say that imagining a world where you could paint your big brown lips in the most decadent
of shades, pile your phat ass into your fave micromini, slip your freshly manicured toes into four-inch
fuck-me sandals and have not one single solitary man objectify—I mean roam his eyes longingly over
all intended places—is, like, a total drag to you?
Morgan, in fact, uses the power of female eroticism to flip hip-hop sexual politics on it’s head as she
brazenly asks, “how come no one ever admits that part of the reason women love hip-hop—as sexist
as it is—is ’cuz all that in-yo-face testosterone makes our nipples hard.”
Morgan opens When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost reminiscing about being a young girl,
disappointed that she couldn’t accompany her mother to a performance of Ntozake Shange’s drama
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Here, Morgan is the ten-year-
old girl dreaming of black feminist possibilities.
Treading similar ground within the context of hip-hop, Kyra Gaunt finds these possibilities in the very
“girl” games that Morgan herself likely played as a child. Exploring the concept of “play” in black
expressive culture, Gaunt writes, “Black girls’ musical games promote the skillful development of
musical authority that reflects blackness, gender, individual expressive
PART IV: I’LL BE NINA SIMONE DEFECATING ON YOUR MICROPHONE • 249
ability, and the very musical styles and approaches that later contribute to adult African- American
musical activity.”
Challenging the pervasive notion that women exist in hip-hop solely as “chickenhead” groupies, Gaunt
posits female hip-hop fans as “nurturing a ‘real’ appreciation or understanding of the creativity and

production (the work) involved in rap music.” Specifically linking the games of black girls to hip-hop
music and culture, Gaunt argues:
Play is considered an experience or an act that is performed for its own sake, for pleasure or reward
known as flow. The rewards for flow experience are said to be intrinsic, often marked by imaginative
creativity, improvisation, and adventurousness.... Coincidentally, flow is the same word rappers in hip-
hop use to characterize the creative energy they experience when writing, performing, or
extemporaneously “freestyling” rhymes or spinning records.
In a particularly fascinating segment of Gaunt’s chapter, she discusses black girls’ game- songs that
reference black female sexuality, such as “Mailman, Mailman,” where the postal worker warned about
the “lady with the African booty,” and “I’m a Nut.” “Mailman, Mailman,” Gaunt notes, “exploits the
powerful meanings of movement and display in the black female body.”
Such sentiment could have been echoed in any number of hip-hop recordings, including LL Cool J’s
“Big Ole Butt” and Sir Mix-O-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” but it was a recording by the hip- hop/R&B hybrid
group Bell Biv Devoe (BBD) that put the power of black female sexuality into a hip-hop context.
BBD’s “Poison” featured the refrain, “never trust a big butt and a smile,” a phrase that was adapted
into a ground-breaking critique of gender and hip-hop by noted hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose. In her
comments about the song, which she extends to men in general, Rose suggests, “‘Poison’ explains
both their intense desire for and profound distrust of women.” Rose then states, “the capacity of a
woman to use her sexuality to manipulate his desire for her purposes is an important facet of the
sexual politics of male raps about women.”
In accord with the chapters in this section, Rose refuses to discuss gender in a strict, male versus
female context. For Rose, such a rigid framework fails to acknowledge that
One of the remarkable talents black women rappers have is their capacity to attract a large male
following and consistently perform their explicitly pro-woman material. They are able to sustain
dialogue with and consequently encourage dialogue between young men and women that supports
black women and challenges some sexist male behavior.
Thus, throughout her chapter Rose focuses on themes in female hip-hop, such as failed rela- tionships,
the lyrical dexterity of women rappers, black female sexual expression, and the relationship of black
women rappers to white feminism. Of the latter dynamic, Rose notes, “in the case of black women, the
realities of racism link black women to black men in a way that challenges cross-racial sisterhood,” a
sentiment subsequently echoed several years later in Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to
Roost. Most important to Rose is the fact that black women rappers “have expanded rap’s territory and
have effectively changed the inter- pretive framework regarding the work of male rappers,”
transforming the dominant gendered discourses in public circulation.
It is in the spirit of Rose’s comments that Gwendolyn Pough’s chapter completes the section. Although
Pough does not offer an explicit critique of hip-hop and gender, her work acknowl- edges the impact of
gender on the wider field of hip-hop studies. While women critics and scholars have always been a part
of the critical community that enunciated the significance of hip-hop music and culture, very often
they’ve been relegated to a limited role, providing the
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“gender critique.” The underlying theme of Pough’s chapter is that hip-hop possesses untapped
potential. Noting that young white men represents hip-hop’s core audience, Pough queries, “Imagine if
that same consuming audience became immersed in not just rap music but also a hip-hop toward
change? ... I mean really imagine the future presidents and CEOs of this country’s White patriarchal
power structure really getting down with a hip-hop movement towards change?” Pough’s observations
about the undisputed whiteness of hip-hop’s primary consumers could easily be extended to
encompass hip-hop’s relationship to feminist thought and thinkers. As Nas says, “Imagine that!”