NO FELLAS

On November 21, 1979 the New Zoo Discotheque in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn was to host a hip hop battle amid some 10,000 square feet of raw dance floors and under 15,000 watts of colorful lights. In a setting such as this, pulsating with light and shadow, barren and hungry for reverberating bass drums, rhythmic spoken word and the din of stomping feet, the “Battle of the Sexes” would firmly root female MCs into the world of hip hop where they would lyrically spar with the men—as equals. The event’s red and white flyer advertisement displays a roster of early female MCs called “The Fly Girls Crew” with a row of closely cropped photographs to identify each member. Some smile, while one stares aggressively at the viewer. Charming as they are, all of the faces are akin to traditional FBI’s “Most Wanted” mug shots, suggesting that hip hop’s new onslaught of female rappers were certainly a force to be reckoned with. As early as 1977, women’s crews and stars began to gain ground amidst a world of hip hop that consisted mostly of male artists. The Zulu Queens, DJ Wanda Dee, the Mercedes Ladies, B-Girl Crew, as well as MCs Little Lee, Sweet and Sour, and Pebblee Poo were just a few of the women that initially set a gold standard, laying the ground-work for the celebrated female hip hop personas familiar in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. As a gender minority in an arts culture dominated by men, whose modus operandi of artistic dominance revealed itself in the form of ongoing competition for lyrical superiority and style, struggle already existed for women, who, as Christopher “Kid” Reid from the 1980s duo Kid-N-Play notes, “have to work twice as hard to get half the credit.” This struggle for relevancy in the culture created a number of powerful female personas and fashioned identities that attempted to hold their own among the men with lyrical and sartorial style.