“But he still isn’t fully embraced by all corners of the industry, as he documents in his own songs. “Lil Nas X has pushed hip-hop to really grapple with his camp queer aesthetic in a very mainstream way,” says Kehrer. Says Blanco: “Online communities like Tumblr and Twitter, and early Instagram and Facebook created these international networks, where queer communities across the world could say, ‘hey, we’re here, we love Mykki Blanco, and we’re really interested to see what’s going to be happening with this artist’.”Ĭhallenges remain, even for the likes of Lil Nas X, a Grammy award-winning artist who is perhaps the most successful gay rapper in hip-hop. File sharing and streaming sites rendered the traditional gatekeepers of the genre less relevant, allowing it to reveal its true colours (albeit while starving musicians of record sales – the internet giveth and taketh away).Įmerging artists like Blanco no longer had to play the game in an industry that “ghettoised” them – they could find their own audience online. And just as boomboxes had helped people in the Bronx escape hard lives through hip-hop, the genre itself was freed from its strait-jacket by technology. A string of high-profile artists came out in its wake, among them Frank Ocean and hip-hop trio Deep Dickollective.Īnd then the internet took off. Exploring love and motherhood, it claimed a space for feminism in hip-hop, kicking open the door for other female artists and arguably the queer underground hip-hop scene that flourished in the following years. Released in 1998, Hill’s record is one of the most influential works by a female artist in US music history. “The black and brown women who’d helped create the hottest party of the late-20th century were being summarily written off the guest list,” writes award-winning author Joan Morgan in She Begat This, a book examining the significance of Lauryn Hill’s seminal album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The rise of gangster rap also sidelined female artists, despite the success of acts like Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah. So, I guess my presence kind of counteracts that.” But as far as presenting a thug image, I’m not here to do that. “Being a child of the 90s, I’m always influenced by that – that’s why I rap the way I rap. “The record labels kind of pushed in the 90s,” he says. “The earliest iterations of hip-hop music were really indebted to what DJs were doing in disco, which emerged from black queer dance cultures,” says Kehrer, assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Western Michigan University, US.Ĭakes da Killa, a Brooklyn-based artist credited with pioneering queer hip-hop, agrees. This soon entered common parlance and can still be heard today.īut in her new book Queer Voices in Hip Hop, academic Lauron Kehrer puts “queerness at the roots of hip-hop”, which stepped out the shadow of disco in 1970s Bronx, when boomboxes gave voice to marginalised people as New York descended towards bankruptcy. Rappers began peppering their tracks with a homophobic catchphrase – ‘no homo’ – to ward off any suspicion that they might be gay. For a time, homophobic lyrics were the norm, found in hits by the biggest stars of the genre, from Eminem to Snoop Dogg. That the Beastie Boys wanted to name their debut album Don’t Be A Faggot (it was released as Licensed to Ill) is one of a litany of misdemeanours on the charge sheet. Hip-hop’s reputation for homophobia and sexism is well known.
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