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Ladies! I Can't Hear You! No, Really, I Can't Hear You!Where did all the female rappers go?

By Jonah WeinerPosted Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008, at 6:46 AM ET

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In "U.N.I.T.Y.," though, Latifah voiced doubts about one type of female strength: "A minute ago you was a nerd and nobody ever heard of ya—now you a wannabe hard." The previous year, New Jersey rapper Apache had released "Gangsta Bitch," a Bonnie and Clyde fantasy stocked with matching Carhartt gear and his 'n' hers .9 mms. Gangsta bitch soon became its own microtrend, exemplified by Boss, a sawed-off tough from L.A. On 1993's "Recipe of a Hoe," she taunted, "Ya dick'll be getting shot clear the fuck off if ya keep talkin' that shit, cuz all bitches ain't hos." Elsewhere, she threatened to lure men home and rob them or worse—Boss wanted to reimagine the money-grubbing ho as a Machiavellian gangsta in her own right.

Less aggressive, and far more successful, was Brooklyn's MC Lyte. In 1988 she released "I Cram To Understand U," which turned a familiar hip-hop narrative (a parasitic ho sleeps around and siphons a guy's cash) upside down (here the parasite is a crack-addicted, pocketbook-plundering boyfriend). Gender friction fills Lyte's catalog, but she preferred to dive into the genre's storytelling capacities unencumbered by agenda; she specialized in odd fables with no readily apparent moral. Her "Cappuccino" is a wonderfully strange tale of the afterlife and cocaine abuse; in "Poor Georgie," Lyte mourns a libertine, drug-free alcoholic who suffers from colon cancer and dies in a quasi-suicidal car crash. Missy Elliott, who frequently mentions Lyte's influence, can thank her for the liberating notion that a woman can be not only a serious MC but a serious weirdo.

If the pervasive spirit of female rap's early days was defiance, the mid-'90s gave rise to a sort of radical compliance. In their porno-grade raps, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, and Trina offered themselves up almost as grotesques, inhabiting lewd sexual fantasies almost to the point of caricature. Kim—who offset constant demands for cunnilingus with a famous brag about "how I make a Sprite can disappear in my mouth"—was the best of these, and the only pop star in history to serve as muse to both Notorious B.I.G. and Marc Jacobs. Her take-no-shit attitude appealed to hardened hip-hop fans, while her hypersexualized camp made her a gay icon. Hip-hop femininity is often described in binary: Women are either "independent"—they pay their own bills and, conveniently, ask men for nothing—or they are hos. Lil' Kim made the case for the independent ho. (Sometimes another option, cited in the case of confident female rappers, appears: lesbian.)

So why has female hip-hop made so few lasting inroads over 30 years? For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female rap seem second class, occurring outside the "real," "primary" work of hip-hop canon building, even as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they're what feminists would call hip-hop's unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it's meant that many of the identities that female comers have carved for themselves—Boss' gangsta bitch, Kim's badass nympho, or, recently, Lil' Mama's lunchroom alpha girl—have registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white rappers, whether it's the Beastie Boys' nerdy boogie or Eminem's white-trash horror-core.)

At one point, seeing a way to reach previously estranged female audiences, rappers rolled out protégées the way they roll out energy drinks today: Ice Cube boosted Yo-Yo, Jay-Z boosted Amil, the Wu-Tang Clan boosted N-Tyce (who released an obscure infidelity gem called "Hush Hush Tip"). These days, rappers have learned they can appeal to women by hiring an R&B singer for a chorus—ladies' jam? Check!—then return to their normal business. At the same time, singers like Mary J. Blige, Keyshia Cole, and (the rapperly) Beyoncé have proven that contemporary R&B offers women plenty of room for toughness, too.

The great hope of female rap today lies on the pop fringes and in the fact that the distance between fringe and center shrinks daily. Cultural politics are looser and market concerns less overriding on the indie circuit, where artists like Baltimore's Rye-Rye, Tampa's gay booty-bass duo Yo! Majesty, and the New York eccentric Jean Grae make exciting music for devout followings. M.I.A. and Kid Sister—avant-gardists who admire the '80s-era sass of Salt 'N' Pepa and the sonic experimentation of Missy Elliott—have gone a step further, parlaying hipster popularity into mainstream-rap incursions. Kanye West guest starred on Kid Sister's "Pro Nails," and M.I.A. scored an unlikely smash with her single "Paper Planes," hitting No. 5 in pop and inspiring remixes by 50 Cent and Jim Jones. In September, M.I.A.'s voice showed up, sampled, on "Swagger Like Us," a posse cut starring A-list rap gatekeepers West, T.I., Jay-Z, and Lil' Wayne. The song is a small coup: It's a chest-bumping locker-room bromance, but when M.I.A.'s refrain comes around—"No one on the corner has swagga like us"—the boys' club is breached, the swagger shared. Maybe next time they'll actually invite her to rhyme.