Home grrrls

Rhino's women in rap

by Franklin Soults

Roxanne Shante

One of my favorite bits of sweet inanity in last year's working-class British comedy The Full Monty comes when one of the unemployed-steelworkers-turned-male-strippers consoles a would-be collaborator who's self-conscious about his weight problem: "You know, fat is a feminist issue." He has no idea what that means, but hey, he saw it in a magazine somewhere.

You could call the gag a testament to the political triumph of the right, which in a single generation has reduced the popular conception of feminism to outdated images of militant bra burners and decontextualized slogans about weight. But to borrow a phrase from the great licentious rapper LeShaun, this scene is also a perfect example of the film's "role-reversal switch" -- a complex, contradictory mix-up of power relations and sex roles that demonstrates the triumph of feminism's core precepts at the deeper, inchoate level of lived culture.

A similar dynamic suffuses Rhino's three-CD series compiling the history of female rappers, Fat Beats & Bra Straps. Starting with the title, which gives a whole new twist to the "feminist issues" of fatness and bras, its role reversals document the concurrent cultural sweep and political shortcomings of feminism in ways that can be every bit as odd, giddy, and ripe for deep analysis as The Full Monty. And as with The Full Monty, its pleasures are also accessible to people who could hardly care less about any of that.

In fact, for anyone with a passing interest in rap who doesn't use "bitch" and "ho" as terms signifying all women outside one's immediate family, the value of the compilation should be self-evident. It may be hard to remember, but back when rap was all about good times and sweatsuits, women participated in hip-hop at least as junior partners, if not more. (Remember the coed Funky Four + 1? The all-girl Sequence? Sugarhill label owner Sylvia Robinson?) It was only in the mid '80s that hip-hop took a serious turn toward the macho, transforming female rap into a novelty just when the genre needed its women the most.

Classics, the first and best volume of Fat Beats & Bra Straps, answers that insult by diving into the heart of '80s female rap with forgotten one-shots and granite milestones alike. The latter include Roxanne Shanté's immortally youthful and brash putdown, "Have a Nice Day"; the Real Roxanne's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink novelty stroke, "Bang Zoom (Let's Go-Go)"; and a pair of dancehall-flavored tracks from Queen Latifah's grand debut, All Hail the Queen. In support of these four pillars are some worthy finds like Sparky-D's masterful "Throwdown" (built around a loop of Boz Scaggs's 1976 hit "Lowdown"), LeShaun's debut as 2 Much on the innocently pornographic "Wild Thing" (later reprised with L.L. Cool J as "Doin' It"), and Sweet Tee's sweet groove, "It's My Beat."

Yet if such tracks seem to place these well-rounded women well above their phallocentric male counterparts, listen closer and you'll detect traces of an omniscient man on almost every cut, whether it's Howie Tee burning up the boards behind his partner the Real Roxanne or Slick Rick influencing his fan Sweet Tee in her woozy vocal style. Different selections might have tilted that skew. Perhaps licensing limitations kept the series from being the pro-women comp of every home grrrl's dream. Something's certainly curtailed the line-up. Whereas the Real Roxanne and Roxanne Shanté have several cuts apiece, feminist heroes Salt-n-Pepa get only a single early demo. And a handsome fourth volume could be filled with all the distinctive voices left unrepresented: MC Lyte, Monie Love, Yo Yo, Michel'le, all the new stars from Lil' Kim to Lauryn Hill to Missy Elliott.

Yet in a way these omissions make sense in a series that maps female rap's unpredictable organic course through the culture -- a course that has conformed to nobody's political program. For all that the over-conceptualized second volume, Battle Rhymes & Posse Cuts, is easily the weakest for its relentless sister dissing and brother boasting, the disc reclaims Shanté's notoriously nasty "Big Mama" as one of her boldest moments, and it proves that Suga T does just fine doing nothing more than backing up her main man, E-40. And though the third volume, New MCs, doesn't feature a single big name, yet with tracks like Nonchalant's daring anti-player anthem, "5 O'Clock," and the sad and bitter "Soulsville" by the great forgotten hope Shä-Key, it comes close to trumping the star-heavy Classics. If New MCs doesn't quite hold together in the end -- not every unknown deserves to be heard -- it's nonetheless one more confirmation of hip-hop's resurgent dynamism arriving just when all hope seemed lost in the depths of the genre's gangsta dayz. Guess fat is a feminist issue after all.