Music Videos, Performance and Resistance: Feminist Rappers

Popular culture provides us with particularly compelling examples of the tension between dominance and resistance and one of the most engaging sites of such tensions is the feminist rap music video. Feminist rap music videos require the viewer to participate in their construction and analysis.^ This music explores tensions between black and white, male and female, in a direct and explicit fashion. Feminist rap videos are not the only feminist music videos—there are feminist videos of almost every type of music—but feminist rap performers have received less media attention than rock and roll artists like Tina Turner or Janet Jackson. There are reasons for this: unlike Turner and Jackson, feminist rap artists make little accommodation for white audiences and consequently, rap receives less airplay on Music Television, the premier music video station. This is true of all rap artists, masculinist and feminist alike. Yet for the feminist rapper, rap offers unique possibilities. What Barbara Christian suggests about blues singers applies here to the more optimistic musical form, rap: "Perhaps because the blues was seen as 'race music' and catered to a black audience, black women were better able to articulate themselves as individuals and as part of a racial group in that art form" (122). Rap, or hip hop as "the culture of clothes, slang, dances, and philosophies that sprang up in the '80s" (George 40) is sometimes called, can be seen daily on a special MTV program "Yo MTV Raps" and on "Rap City" an hour-long show on BET. Both shows frequently air music videos by female performers and some rap videos like "Push It" by Salt 'n Pepa and "Supersonic" by J.J. Fad received heavy rotation outside the rap show. Rap's increasing popularity has been accompanied by the appearance of a number of feminist performers including (The Real) Roxanne, M.C. Lyte, Shelly Thunder, Roxanne Shante, J.J. Fad, Salt 'n Pepa, Queen Latifah, Sweet Tee, Ms. Melodie, Antoinette, Precious and crossovers like Paula Abdul and Neneh Cherry. These performers draw on rap specifically as a black art form to resist racism; yet unlike most of their fellow male rappers, feminist rappers draw additional energy from their simultaneous discussion of race and