Sistah MC Droppin’ Rhymes with a Beat: Rap, Rhetoric and Resistance

Book Summary: For over three decades rap music has served as the lyrical mouthpiece for another disenfranchised segment of the African American society-- young Black women. Although rap has been largely a male dominated genre, Black women have also used it to ¿drop their rhymes¿ and articulately channel resistance via their own funky beat. This book outlines the challenges African American women have faced in their collective historic quest to establish and sustain their own voice and ultimately reveals that using lyrics as rhetoric has helped African American women establish and maintain such a voice. This work includes a line by line examination of 260 rap songs performed by six popular female rap/hip hop solo artists: MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim, Missy Elliot and Eve. Additionally 300 young African American females took part in a survey to weigh in on a commonly held perception that black female rappers served as spokeswomen for young African American females. Popular music enthusiasts and hip-hop purists/scholars will find this book gives a new empirical twist on examining black women¿s postmodern resistance in a genre borne out of resistance.