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Women find role in hip hop

BY NEDRA RHONE | Staff Writer

October 12, 2004

Jean Grae is known for conscious lyrics.

Jean Grae, an up and coming female rapper, is noted for her conscious lyrics, connections to fans and railing against the record industry. (Newsday Photo/Bruce Gilbert / August 11, 2004)

Jean Grae steps onto the darkened stage not caring who is in the audience. She raises the microphone and tells the crowd she wants to see hands in the air.

"I'm not gonna stand here and give my all when you don't give me your all," she yells from the stage of Joe's Pub in Manhattan. She also wants the stage lights turned up so the audience can see who she is.

What they see is Grae in jeans, a black fitted jacket and sneakers.

Without adornment, save a pair of gold earrings in the shape of 45-inch record inserts, her style contrasts with the bejeweled appearance of many of today's female rappers and the bikini-clad dancers populating rap videos.

What the audience hears is lyrics without the violent invective spouted by some of her male counterparts. When she raps, she unleashes her frustration with music-industry executives:

"I'm Jean, honorable team player for years,

MCing on the low, in videos devoid of the hoes,

For sho' it's crunch time, I'm the one they sent to -- -- -- your label off,

They won't -- -- -- with me, unless I'm parading and taking it off

Naw man, executives, con mans

This record is too hot to get pushed back another minute ... "

The song "What Would I Do?" articulates much of what Grae and other emerging female rappers consider problematic in hip-hop.

Rap music has changed in the 25 years since the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" brought hip-hop into the mainstream.

In the late '80s, the simple male posturing in rap's early songs gave way to the hard-core mentality of urban streets where money equaled power and women.

While women have always been the subject of songs -- from rock to jazz to country -- in hip-hop, their portrayal seems to have taken a particularly raunchy turn. In their lyrics, rappers describe women performing obscene acts.

In videos, partially nude dancers jiggle around swimming pools or shake their thang in nightclubs.

"We are so much more than that, we should be reflected as such," said Grae, who cribbed her name from the X-Men character. "Unfortunately, nobody is really willing to stand up against it and say there is something wrong with this."

Having spent the past 10 years rhyming her way through the underground-rap scene and garnering a solid fan base, Grae faces the challenge of going mainstream in an industry that extols artists posing as thugs while pushing lyrics and videos that objectify women.

"I definitely think the degradation in lyrics has just gone so far that it is so accepted now. I also think there is a certain point where women put themselves in the place where we are not standing up for ourselves," Grae said.

It's hard to say who first began referring to women in such sexually suggestive terms, but for a number of male artists, explicit lyrics became a hallmark.