My Mic Sounds Nice, Check One, Think Two

by Latoya Peterson

“Male rappers have such an amazing amount of power and influence. If they spend their time dissing African American women, then what’s expected of the people that are buying their records; its not much to be said for them to want to spend money to hear an African American woman speak her mind.”  — MC Lyte

Reader Tatisha sent in a request for us to cover BET’s My Mic Sounds Nice, saying “If that network could revamp it’s current negative image with one show, that was it.”

And was she ever correct. Over the long weekend, I caught up with my backlogged programming and found that in just one hour, the documentary managed to outshine all of the panels and conversations on hip hop and present a truly engaging conversation about the role of women and the evolution of hip-hop culture.

Ava DuVernay’s amazingly smart documentary relies on first hand testimony from those in the industry to provide the narrative, cutting between interviews with people like Eve, Trina, Joan Morgan, Chuck D, Roxane Shante, MC Lyte, Missy Elliot, Salt N Pepa, Rah Digga, Jermaine Dupri, Swizz Beatz, and Smokey Fontaine.

“Females don’t get as much exposure as men in hip-hop.” Eve provides a strong start, as the documentary begins to frame some of the challenges for women in the hip hop space.

Much of the discussion is reminiscing. Missy talks about crafting her first ryhme as a freshman in high school. A raft of women MCs including Roxanne Shante and MC Lyte reflect on how they got started in the industry, watching hip hop battles, providing answers to the assertions men made, or watching other women representing on stage.

MC Lyte and some of the other pioneers added moments of history in. Lyte traced the start of women in hip hop all the way back to Mercedes Ladies, then to Sequence and B. Angie B, who later became as neo-soul songstress Angie Stone. MC Lyte remembers Sha-Rock from the Funky Four and One More. Salt-N-Pepa wax on Roxanne’s Revenge, tributing Roxanne Shante.  Shante herself explains she was a “battle emcee…willing to battle anyone at any time without fear.”

Shante credits her willingness to go to war as a reason for her initial success. Salt N Pepa concurred, explaining “no one was trying to hear you unless you challenged someone one.” Battle rap was really how a lot of women were put on in the beginning, and its a sad reflection of our culture that this write of passage has fallen out of favor. But we’ll return to that in a moment.

Rah Digga observes how in that day, women had to rhyme like men in order to be taken seriously. Later in the doc, MC Lyte discusses studying her craft, and how she learned to rap from her diaphragm and not her throat. She demonstrates, and it’s hard not to notice how her voice also drops a few octaves, giving her that trademark depth. Was she subconsciously mirroring a male voice? That’s hard to say.

Jean Grae, looking nerdy-fabulous, talked about diversity – everyone in the game being themselves, and not feeling the need to conform to a mold. While women in the 80s had to prove they were vocal equals to men, visually speaking, women had a lot more options for presentation. The idea of rapper as eye candy wouldn’t come into vogue until the mid-90s, so women like Queen Latifah had a lot of fluidity with their images and could adopt a variety of images. Indeed, Queen Latifah came up often as a role model, with everyone from Lil’ Mama to Diamond to Medusa admiring that she claimed her own space “like an Amazon” and demanded respect.

Joan Morgan put the idea of women in hip hop in the 80s succinctly: “We thought of hip hop as ours – this wasn’t a male field and we were trying to break in.”

Most named the 90s as an era of change, where hip hop’s image of women stated to metamorphose into something completely different.

Lady of Rage talked about feeling pressured in as time went on to soften her look, to lose weight, to become more visually appealing, and all the female emcees echoed similar sentiments. They showed images of Da Brat at her debut and in the 1990s, noting that most women felt obligated to trade in their jeans, caps, and Tims for a more stereotypically feminine look.

However, the 90s wasn’t all negative – it was a time of redefinition for women. Kim Osario says it is hard to define a golden age of hip hop, but most women agreed that the mid 90s 90s was definitely a golden age – particularly in terms of framing the image of the genre.

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