From Flys Clothes To Bitches and Hos Article

For support for my paper, I decided to go with a big article called Hip-Hop Feminism: Still Alive in 2011?. It was a bit challenging to find support for my debate on how feminism and intellectualism is prevalent in hip hop, for it is so much easier to only focus on the few mainstream rappers with horrifying misogyny messages. But I found this gem. It supports that feminism can be heard in hip hop"From Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." ("Who you callin' a bitch?") to a 10-year-old's heartfelt plea to Lil Wayne urging him to speak highly of women, hip-hop feminism has almost always been just as audible as the crass catcalls". It mostly critiques Joan Morgans piece, making it very valuable to use because it is another take on the book, which I can use in my paper to show the credibility of my thesis. This article showed me a big part of hip hop and feminism that I missed out on. There's women rappers!! Who could ever forget about MC Lyte, Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliot, or Lil Kim? Women have constantly had incredibly talented mainstream mc's since the early 90s, putting some of the overly gangster pimp rappers in their place. A good criticism of the hip hop feminist movement that Joan morgan created is used saying,But promoting and recognizing artists and lyrics that support women in hip-hop is only part of hip-hop feminism's agenda." While I am a huge supporter of hip hop feminism, it definitely has a very narrow minded way of fixing the women bashing artists that we hear everyday. She even said herself that she forgot the mention of women rappers, "I was never talking about tracks made by female artists," Morgan says of her book, which was the first to articulate the dichotomy of hip-hop feminism. " which certainly should be the first thing covered in a hip hop feminism book. It talks about how more modern rappers are born in a complete different generation then the classic hip hop artists who didn't use nearly as much misogyny as today in their lyrics. It talks about how important freedom, embracing diversity, and progressing was to older hip hop artists such as A Tribe Called Quest or Del La Soul. This was because the 60s-80s born and raised artists, were surrounded by civil rights activists and black power activists, all to push for acceptance and equality. The rappers now adays were not born around that atmosphere, hence the subject matter of rap has changed. As seen through recent times, Nicki Minaj has pushed and had almost a woman dominant subject matter, from a woman's world and prospective as talked about in this article, changing the game up in some ways. It is a longer article and since it quotes Joan Morgan directly, it's definitely the perfect article for me to spice up my paper further more. The article comes from the online black news magazine called the root, and is extremely legitimate. 

http://www.theroot.com/views/hip-hop-feminism