You Aint Got No bell hooks In Your Serato?! A Feminist Critique of 10 Years of Hip Hop Reviews

I started doing album reviews on Facebook literally 10 years ago in 2013 as a college kid scouring the blogs for new music. As a now 30 year old looking back on a decade of hip hop opinions (a bunch of them being bad, for instance in 2014 I proclaimed a Logic album as AOTY *bombastic sideeye*). I have a major critique of myself that sits right in my face. Where are the women? In 10 years of discussing almost 130 albums only 10 are by women and only 3 have cracked the top 5 (2 Rapsody projects and Noname’s latest), with 0 number 1 albums. As someone who listens to so many women who rap, how is this possible? As someone who has taken classes on women’s movements and highly regards the women intellectuals I have learned from, how is this possible. World-renowned academic bell hooks once said, “Hip-Hop is diverse. But the white, capitalist producers and distributors of Hip-Hop are most interested in the Hip-Hip that is misogynist…” I first understood this as external forces pushing a narrative on Black folx, but as I have matured I wonder at which point those external forces become internal. Whether my internal view of hip hop is tainted and expressed in line with this external misogyny.   

If you come to the Bolden household you will hear a lot of women rapping from Sexxy Redd. Monaleo, Lakeyah, Dreezy Noname, Flo Milli, Kash Doll and Rapsody to GloRilla and her ratchet ass friends. It is hard to deny the dominance that women have come to have in the hip hop space with Latto and Cardi going on amazing feature runs over the past two years and the latter putting together the best XXL cypher that we’ve heard in a VERY long time. Not to mention Ice Spice’s dominance over the last few years and the return of Nicki late last year. Women have taken over not only the radio, but also my Tidal and YouTube subscriptions. With that said how come women are not making my lists?

The first answer that came to mind is that maybe I don’t connect with the subject matter of woman centered albums. However, the obvious deeper question would be why do I not connect with themes of love, loss, freedom, and self-aggrandizement when from the mouth of a person with 2 X chromosomes. It is not as though the subject matter of women lead albums is that different from my favorite male lead albums. Further, I often connect with albums that are not true to my lived experience at all. There is usually at least one street artist on my top 10 lists whether it be EST Gee, a Griselda member, or Nipsey (who took my number 1 spot in 2018). My connection to those albums has always been that while I did not live that life, I had friends, family members and neighbors who did. Well, the same can be said on women lead subject matter that I do not have a lived experience of. I have friends, family members and neighbors who have dealt with the themes of womanhood expressed by Meg the Stallion, Doja Cat, or the City Girls. As such, there has to be something deeper.

It was not until this year that I felt the misogyny in my music taste creep up. I am often asked to DJ small get togethers by friends (by DJ I simply mean press play on songs, no disrespect to the craft). While at a friends house I was asked to do what had been asked of me several times and DJ before we went out for the night, however, the audience was mostly straight men (which is not often the case for me). I realized that I did not know what exactly to play for this audience. I do not go out often and the party music that I know is extremely woman lead. I felt as though I could not play Pound Town and it be received as freeing in the same manner that it would in a woman dominated audience. It is important to note that no one told me that I could not play Lick or Sum in this setting, but rather the culprit was my own performative masculinity. I was concerned that playing the music that I honestly enjoyed, in this setting, would not reflect favorably on others thoughts of my manhood. This misogyny is not an external force, but rather something internal.

I believe that this internal feeling is a common factor among hip hop listeners. I do not think it is a coincidence that women’s rise in hip hop coincides with lower sales (with 2023 hopefully showing a nadir). While there are undoubtedly external factors (what is the value of a stream?). I believe I am not the only person who has felt this internal conflict in playing popular woman lead anthems to audiences. Just look at how hip hop audiences have treated our biggest women stars. Physical assaults happened to both Rico Nasty and Ari Lennox while opening for hip hop acts. Little more needs to be said regarding T*ry L*nez shooting Meg and hip hops reaction to the trial. This internalized patriarchy is simply a microcosm of the broader misogynoir that is literally killing Black women today. This internalization is a small part of a much deeper societal issue which has somehow burrowed its way into my thoughts about the latest Kalii record. A mild expression of a much more dangerous thought process.

James Baldwin once said, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I noticed a lack of women on my lists in 2020. But did not quite have the vocabulary to diagnose the issue. Misogyny has a way of hiding in plain sight, even after you have acknowledged its existence. However, we must face misogyny in all of its forms to get to a place of love in this imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy as pointed out by bell hooks.

However. in anything titled in her name, one must honor the dissident and transgressive thinker by going an extra-mile. It is almost sure that bell hooks would not listen to several of the women that I have listed in this piece. Her mantra that everything in her home loves her would disqualify several of my favorite songs written by the women listed here. I am guessing that the lyrics that several of these women espouse would be seen as simply forwarding the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal hegemony. However, I would look to the only women to crack the top 5 over the last ten years to be my saving grace. The highest that any woman has ever been rated is 2. Once by Rapsody’s womanist album Eve, with each song named after a different Black woman and again by Noname’s recent Sundial where she offers an anti-capitalist critique of every artist, including herself. However, mentioning those 2 women is little more than a straw man as I have never required consciousness to be a factor in any male centered album. In reality several of the albums over the decade have been decidedly unconscious. As such, I am doubly entrenched in the patriarchy as I have not only almost exclusively forwarded male voices, but I have forwarded male voices that harm my community. My only retort would be that Pharrell’s production on Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes is too good to not knock in my car, maybe just read my Black novel series “I Shoulda Been Read This.”