What does “charge of the female MCs” mean, and who says Azealia Banks should lead it?
It hasn’t surprise me to see articles celebrating Azealia Banks proliferating on the web of late. nor did it surprise me to find so-called ‘tastemakers’ quickly develop a special interest in Odd Future in March 2011, and a fixation with Donald Glover, the comic who doubles as rapper Childish Gambino, a little more recently. Things like this don’t tend to surprise me anymore. why? Banks, like OF and Gambeezy, is a memorable artist and ‘212’, her breakthrough, is a good track. a good track with a great beat. Banks is “feisty”; her emergence (if we can call it that) makes for seemingly interesting forecasts about women in music and her ‘music’ blends genres in a way that makes genre-inventors go giddy. She rocks a half-English accent, and she’s from Harlem, via the West end and a tough upbringing. when she quits playing around and insulting fellow artists she’s just a big sweetie really, and if she was on XXX Factor we’d all probably vote for her once we heard her story and saw her swagger.
I only partially jest. Whilst I wouldn’t completely dismiss Banks’ ‘212’ as urban music at its most gimmicky, to have Banks leading a “charge of female MCs”, or still worse, a “rise” is completely disingenuous. as far as myself and many other hip hop fans are concerned there’s been a silent movement going on for too long where this mysterious “female MC” (sometimes ‘femcee’) type is concerned. Contrary to what The Guardian and others say, the long, cold winter of women in hip hop has been little more than an invention. we didn’t need Banks’ big bang to begin the ladies’ march towards excellence, and what makes us think that a female artist rapping about her ‘c***’ would start a wave anyway. would we say the same if another male rapper rapped about his d***?
Just as ‘Superbass’ wasn’t the prophecy of John the Baptist, Banks isn’t the messiah. Based on the tracks I’ve heard from her so far (including a cover of Interpol’s ‘Slow Hands’) I’m not even sure she’s an MC. Calling her the next Minaj as every self-appointed rap expert seems to be doing might in some ways be accurate, but it isn’t the compliment we all think it is. For too long female MCs have been placed in a box because we’ve taken it upon ourselves to decide there can only be one at a time. Whilst the Minaj-Banks comparison might come across as a blessing to a would-be star, it’s like calling every white rapper the next Eminem, and such comparisons can be a serious constraint on creativity and experimentation within a genre. Especially when, in Nicki Minaj’s case, the artist placed on a pedestal actually still has a long way to be compared to her male counterparts.
Unfortunately, in slipping into such clichéd stereotypes, music writers and record labels can be just as dumb, and their stupidity can mean that, searching for the next ‘big’ thing, they miss what’s right in front of them. Think of English football coaches in the 90s picking tall kids foremost and thus missing out on the Messis, but replace the coaches with industry A&Rs and online buzz-generators, and the Messis with underrated emcees.
I first started writing articles about hip hop because I was flabbergasted that Jean Grae, one of the best MCs I’d heard in a while (male or female) was advertising her musical talents on Craigslist because she’d failed to breakthrough. Jean, born in Cape Town as Tsidi Ibrahim and signed to Talib Kweli’s Blacksmith Records in 2005, had everything hip hop fans wanted, all the “feistiness’ (see her tweets) and, based on what I’ve heard of Banks so far, double her lyrical talent. She’d been putting out great music for YEARS, but everyone had decided that she was the Immortal Technique of female MCs: too ‘real’ to make it. in reality, her solo ablum The Bootleg of a Bootleg E.P (2003) was much better than that, and Evil Jeanius, an unauthorized collaborative album with producers Blue Sky Black Death, was simply stunning.
Why it wasn’t plugged properly and why she didn’t get any money for it is a murder mystery for which I say the industry as a whole has bloody hands. on ‘Take it Back’ she channelled a young Common on ‘I Used To love H.E.R’, lamenting the state of the industry: “My chest fills with the sorrow of tomorrow’s entrance/Knowin’ that what I say is borrowed and neglected/A young woman tellin’ life as it is, deflectin’ from all the peers who projected to white kids.” Whereas the worst of underground hip hop can be dry and unfriendly, Grae’s music, placed with the right production could be mellow and melodic, and instantly accessible; listen to “Away with Me”, a love-song worthy of Lauryn Hill.
She too could be explicit, but didn’t shape her songs around this. Perhaps Talib didn’t push her to experiment as much as Banks, but the fact that everyone ignored what was already a very attractive product says more about their shortcomings than Talib’s. where was Grae in the press, in NME, and on the blogs five years ago when I first wrote about her? where is she now? why, having made stunning mixtapes which saw her pen her deepest fears, insecurities and passions, and having worked with the likes of The Roots, Pharaoh Monche and Phonte, has she only tasted a fraction of their success? why has a highly capable MC been left to make great music in the shadows, where no-one cares?
All I can leave you with is a number of needy statements:
- Still listen to Azealia Banks, but be careful about calling her THE next great female MC She’s one talent amongst many (I recommend a certain Nitty Scott, MC (that’s her name), as an MC to look out for).
- Listen to Jean Grae’s new track, the kind of lush, jazzy underground track which Radio Gaga hasn’t the patience for. It’s called ‘U&Me&EveryoneWeKnow’, and you won’t find it on Pitchfork or Hypemachine or the 1% of sites that are said to make tastes, perhaps because it’s not easy to Google.
- Search for found the above track on 2dopeboyz.com, which is a sort of online hip hop wholesaling blog, criticised in the past year for its aversion to Odd Future. Named after a classic OutKast song, its bloggers realises that viral does not mean vital and that longevity and craft are still important, even in the digital world.
- When you’ve finished, listen to Jean Grae’s back-catalogue, and write something nice about it. She’s still young.
- Think about this- does the attention Minaj, Banks and Kreayshawn (who I do not have time to rant about), receive suggest that we judge female MC’s by different standards? do any of these artists threaten to push hip hop in a new and exciting direction, beyond one track? Could we place their music alongside that of the best up’n’coming MCs as a whole, the carefully wrought debut albums of breakthrough artists such as J.Cole and Kendrick Lamar? on the other hand, could we not place the work of Jean Grae and Nitty Scott in this context? if so, why is the “female MC” in a category of her own?
Tagged in: Azealia Banks, hip hop, music
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