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Rapsody And MC Lyte Discuss Being Women Of Colour In Hip-Hop

Kicking off Black History Month in the US, Billboard magazine has facilitated a discussion of race, gender and hip-hop between the revered MC Lyte and the fast rising star Rapsody.

The discussion began with a question from Billboard about each artists’ first personal encounter with racism: something both recount with clarity. Lyte spoke of being attacked with rocks when she was leaving work one night, while Rapsody remembers her first encounter with racist slurs being hurled at her from another driver in a fit of road rage. From there, the discussion moves to one of being female and in the hip-hop world. Like many musicians who do not appreciate being referred to as being a “female musician” as it’s very clearly a gender segregation, Rapsody muses, “when people call you a female rapper, it seems like they do it to separate you from the pack,” before asking Lyte how she feels about the term “female MC”.

MC Lyte: It doesn’t bother me. I know what I’m doing. I know that when it comes time for a bill for a hip-hop show and they’re bombarded with male entertainment, at that point, they’re looking for a female MC. I’m just born this way — I’m a woman. I’ll take it. Really, for hip-hop, it was very male-dominated in the very beginning and it still is. If it helps them to categorize, it doesn’t have any control over me so I’m cool with it — I’m an MC, I’m a female MC, hip-hop femme fatale, whatever. It’s me.

In response, Rapsody poses that she feels she’s placed into a category that results in only being compared to other females rather than all artists. She adds that she feels it’s deliberately done in order to cheapen and downplay the talent and achievements of women in hip-hop. Lyte meanwhile talks about the poor job the gatekeepers of hip-hop are doing in promoting diversity, along with ridiculous assertions that things like Black History Month and the BET Awards shouldn’t exist. “It was built so that African Americans could receive the accolades, acknowledgment, awards and respect for what it is they did for their past year’s work because there was nowhere else that would do that for them…. I mean we used to have the Lady of Soul Awards and that was taken away. However, when it comes to women in this particular sector of business, we have got to just award ourselves so we acknowledge one another and I think that’s a good thing.

Commenting on the current state of hip-hop versus what was reflected to her growing up, Rapsody says that:

It was about camaraderie. I would go back and you would have “Ladies First” [with Queen Latifah and Monie Love] and see all these women working together. We don’t have that sisterhood today. I think being in this business, you get so frustrated because there is no balance. It seems like there can only be one [female MC] at a time now. Growing up, I remember seeing you, Latifah, Missy and everybody co-existed together. Everybody was different but everybody was dope because they had their own style. Now, it seems like we think we have to be so competitive with each other and I feel like that’s part of the main problem where they use that against us to divide us instead of bringing us together.

Read the entire discussion here.

Image: Billboard