Making Room & Following The Lead Of Our Sisters In Hip-Hop For 2012

With 2012 upon us, we wanna encourage folks to seriously take some time to invest and make room in the cypher and at the proverbial Hip-Hop roundtable table for our sistas who hold it down on the mic. There have been far too many discussions about where are the female emcees, and why don’t we see and hear more of them, when in reality they are all around us.

It’s up to each of us within Hip-Hop to insist that promoters make sure that women are included in their line up. We’re not talking about a token opening act, but a fair amount woven in the main line up. It’s up to us to insist that radio deejays, including myself, are consistently playing women emcees in our offerings. How about inviting more females to spit a hot 16 on an epic song?

It’s up to each of us who claim to love Hip Hop to be familiar above and beyond a casual name drop. We should know folks’ music. We should know the release date of albums. We should know when and where folks are touring. They should be a part of our discussions and debates. We should allow room for the diversity of expressions, and not fall back on the tired stereotype of all female emcees sounding the same. We should also follow the leads of our sisters, understanding there is much we can learn from them and whole lot of flava we can soak up to improve help improve ourselves.

As males within Hip-Hop, we should not limit our attraction or engagement to female emcees based on overt displays of sex. Yes, we know there are the Lil’ Kims and Foxy Browns who made their mark going that route, but just like we’ve had male groups like 2Live Crew who brought that to the table, we don’t limit the male experience within rap to that group, hence whey should we limit our sistas?

Below are three great websites that’ll hopefully get people familiar with female emcees in 2012. One of them, Hip Hop Sisters, is run by Hip-Hop legend MC Lyte. The other one Femmixx focuses on female Hip-Hop producers as well as deejays and emcees.. That’s run by Tachelle Wilkes.

Another site, The Illest Female Rappers, focuses on independent female rappers, while the Womyns Hip Hop Movement focuses on a soon-to-be-released compilation put together by DJ Kuttin Kandi, dedicated to ending domestic violence.

Folks should be familiar with Momma’s Hip Hop Kitchen. which focuses on Health, Nutrition and Physical Activity using Hip Hop Culture. They are celebrating their 5th year and currently, they’re looking for artists to be down with their upcoming “Be The Cure” event in March.

Since Hip-Hop has as its 5th Element, Knowledge, we urge folks to get familiar with http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/. They bring attention to a lot of issues that are of importance to the Hip-Hop Generation, coming from an unapologetic, uncompromised feminist perspective. They don’t take no mess from nobody.

Over the holidays, I put together a YouTube playlist that has over 100 female emcees. It’s by no means a definitive list, but hopefully it’ll turn folks on to some artists they can add to their repertoire. You can access that playlist below or by clicking HERE.

In 2012, let’s push the envelope, do some serious crate digging, and be the change we say we want….