The years of the Independent Woman

I just love this hip hop track by Roxanne Shante, she was one of the first female hip hop artists and dates way back to I think around 1984, or it might even be earlier than that, she was fourteen when she first started to use the mic and she is roughly the same age as I am.

When hip hop started to get rough and mean with things like gansta rap, it was difficult for the ladies to be part of it as there was a lot of disrespect towards women with them either being referred to constantly as ho's (whores) or if the music and lyrics were not about women at all the rap videos became soft porn massive with marketing and objectification of women going on at that time.

Roxanne Shante made one rap song bringing down her female counterparts like Monie Love and others who I can't think of their names at the moment, she was basically saying that she (Roxanne) was the first, which she was, but there was no need to dis those that came after her.

They say and I think its true that imitation is the highest form of flattery.

But at this time say early nineties, the days of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, the industry was more about porn and ganstas and it was not what hip hop had been about originally.

It was the girls who really added flavour in the beginning, when they got mistreated, they left hip hop by and large and got into the new R and B, formally and briefly known as swing.

There are girls in hip hop now, like Missey Elliot, good as she is, some of her earlier stuff reflected the bitches and ho mentality when she said that women involved in sex industries are the winners, 'ahead of the game' is the term she used. This is the sort of pressures that women were under then and perhaps to a lesser extent still are now, giving support to an industry that totally undermines women, our health and relationships.

We are not sex objects.

Those early days of hip hop certainly were inspiring and encapsulated a feeling of liberty like no other music form before. Although it has been pointed out to me that groups like 'the lost poets' from the 1960's civil rights movement days where probably the roots of 1980's hip hop.

It is so good that it has lasted coming up for four decades, today there are many political hip hop rappers like Lowkey and Immortal Technique and all kinds unsigned and really excellent ones.

However I would argue that there is still a lack of female rappers unlike in the early 1980's when there were so many.

Roxanne Shante now works as a psychologist.