Miss Rap Supreme and gender in hip hop

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

I started watching the new VH1 show Miss Rap Supreme after catching a few clips on either Talk Soup or Best Week Ever.

It’s the ego trip crew’s follow-up to The White Rapper Show, with the same tongue-in-cheek tone and painfully corny humor. (Case in point: MC Serch wears a postal worker outfit for a challenge in which the contestants have to dress up as famous male rappers. Mail. Male. Get it?) It purports to explore “the intriguing plight of yet another disenfranchised group in the rap game-the female MC.”

This week’s episode contained some run-of-the-mill reality show racism, with a white contestant telling a black contestant she’s the devil (because of a dream she had), and the black contestant retorting “Who’s the one with white skin?”

But what caught my interest more than the race stuff was the gender stuff.

One of the challenges on this episode was a he said/she said scenario, where the contestants were asked to respond to a sixteen by Too Short. His verse comes around -01:00:

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Here’s what they came up with:

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It was a pretty clear illustration to me of how hard it is to counter a sexist attack. There are no words equivalent to “bitch” or “ho” or “pussy” to denigrate a man for his masculinity. The worst thing you can call a man is a woman (using misogynistic terms). Or a gay man (using homophobic terms).

As with The White Rapper Show, I’m left wondering what ego trip’s point is. By singling out white rappers and female rappers, it seems like they’re trying to make some comment on race and gender in hip hop. Anyone care to venture a guess as to what that comment is supposed to be?