Meet You @ Beat Street & Some Political Playlist Standouts
6/8/20
Alas we begin another week, so here’s the latest playlist, some powerful highlights below, and a look into some of the earliest female rappers in cinematic history.
Playlist Highlights: Your Protest Soundtrack
Dua Saleh, a Sudanese-American recording artist who identifies as nonbinary, currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota—aka the current hotbed of our time. Therefore, it is only fitting that they released this past week a moving and poignant track condemning police brutality. "This is a song I made...last year and intended to save it for a project in the future but I can't wait that long with what is happening in my city of Minneapolis," they shared on YouTube. The single’s artwork features an exhaustive list of names of unarmed black people who have been killed by police over the past couple years, and Saleh has already stated that they’ll be donating 100% of the proceeds to Black Visions Collective, an organization working to mold a political base for Black people across Minnesota by developing and promoting the state’s emerging Black leaders. The track itself is simply beautiful, and effuses an incredible amount of intense emotional anguish. It first commences with a sound byte of what seems to be a troubling and aggravating encounter, but the real wash of despair happens when Saleh starts singing and rapping with a strained tremor in their voice, slowly traipsing through poetic lines over a somber choral hymn. It almost feels as if Saleh is fighting back tears trying to make it through the song. The words themselves are also very much worth paying close attention to—lines like “Ghost in a shell/Put your penny in a well/Iron out my organs ‘till my body starts to swell” will leave you feeling absolutely gutted.
Dubbed the “Female J. Cole”, Julisa is an up and coming rapper with a warm, soulful voice and buttery flow. Jazz and soul are in her blood—literally—as her grandfather was recruited by Duke Ellington himself to play the drums before he became a household name. Previous singles of Julisa’s have felt more carefree and optimistic, like “Happy”, where the hook literally sings “I can’t hold it anymore, I’m so happy...I’m in love, I’m in love…”, but her new single, “Black American”, takes a different turn, and is a quick little track that covers a lot of ground. It does start off light as well—with prideful, uplifting jazz horns, but quickly Julissa chimes in with the attention grabbing line “She wants me to be proud to be American, but never lets me forget that we’re African.” As the cheerful jazz horns slick on, the rapper continues to cover true and painful facts about Black America. “What’s being patriotic to a slave anyway?” and “Which record label you know don’t promote black hate?” are just two of the poignant questions Julissa asks throughout the track. Perhaps intentionally, these jolting lyrics paired with the playfully light horns make for a killer combo—surging a message through your veins that you could be feeling all chipper and comfortable in your place until you start to pay attention to the harrowing details.
Hailing from South Africa, Dope Saint Jude is a fascinating specimen. A former drag king who launched the first drag king troupe in her city of Cape Town, South Africa, she’s now a rapper and singer who isn’t afraid to be political and polarizing. On her 2015 track, “Hit Politik”, for example, she raps this incredibly insightful activist line packed in a delicious rhyme scheme: “If everyone is accountable, it won’t be insurmountable.” Jude describes that her latest single, “Go High Go Low”, is about her journey of self-love, where she explores and reflects upon the path from feeling small and insignificant to feeling strong and worthy. With its booming bass intro and invigorating tribal chants, it could easily double as a motivating protest anthem for a large crowd with pitchforks and torches in tow. In one empowering moment, for example, while backed by a faint cheering uproar Jude triumphantly declares: “This is a warrior cry, coming aloud from the sky.” The song is so Herculean in sound it feels like it should soundtrack a battle scene led by the Dora Milaje in a Black Panther movie. And that is exactly the kind of music and feeling that Jude wants to barrage the world with. According to her: “I want people who listen to my music to remember me for being bold and unapologetic.” And that’s precisely the kind of music from black women we need today.
This Week In Hip Hop Herstory: Us Girls Can Boogie Too
36 years ago to date, the pioneering film Beat Street debuted to the world on June 8th, 1984. The movie prominently featured NYC’s hip hop culture of the 1980’s, showcasing rap, DJing, breakdance and graffiti, and is credited as one of the first hip hop films in existence. Filmed in 1983 across four of the five boroughs (sorry Staten Island), as well inside the city’s subway system, Beat Street follows a pair of brothers and their friends who are all deeply devoted to various elements of early hip hop culture. Though the film predominantly centers around this group of men and features the music of many early male hip hop legends like Grandmaster Melle Mel and Afrika Baambaata, there is one scene in particular that marks the important presence that women played in hip hop at the time.
During a party scene in the film, three female MCs appear together as a trio called the Us Girls, where they sing in unison “Us Girls/Can Boogie Too” after which each emcee performs a short solo rap in sequence. This marks one of the first times female rappers were ever showcased on the big screen, and thus serves as a groundbreaking moment for female rappers in the genre’s history. Others, however, disagree and deem this scene a limiting performance that diminishes the significance of women in early hip hop and marks females as already the exception in an emerging and developing musical genre. Regardless of which side of the argument you fall in line with, what should be noted by all is who these three women really were, and what mark they actually made in the hip hop community outside of Beat Street.
First and foremost, the Us Girls did not really exist as a band in the real world, as they were grouped together as a trio for the sake of Beat Street alone. But individually at the time, its three members were already prominent names in the genre in their own right, and today are all considered matriarchs of hip hop. The first member of Us Girls was MC Sha-Rock (real name Sharon Green), usually coined “the first female rapper” or “Mother of the Mic”, due to her being the first female rapper “on wax” (i.e. recorded on vinyl) in 1979 and for her role as the sole female member of the Funky 4 +1—the first hip-hop crew to ever appear on national TV— when they performed on SNL in 1981 (see 11:10 minute mark).
The second member of Us Girls was MC Debbie D (Debora Hooper), who in 1979 joined as the only female MC in DJ Patty Duke & The Jazzy 5, and in 1981 broke off from the crew to emerge as the first female MC soloist to exist, only to then later align herself with the legendary hip hop collective The Juice Crew. The third and final member of the Us Girls was MC Lisa Lee (Lisa Counts), who at age 13 joined Afrika Bambaataa’s Mighty Zulu Nation, becoming the only female member of his Soulsonic Force and thus was part of their first recording in 1979. She also subsequently dropped her first single, fittingly called “I’m A Pioneer”. Notably, Lee also appeared and rapped in what is considered the second of the two pioneering hip hop films, Wild Style. In 1984, each of these three women were brought together for Beat Street because they had already been laying the foundation for female MCs for years. Today, they deserve to be remembered as legends, as some of the first females who can claim responsibility for the strained but persistent visibility of black women in hip hop since day one.