Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit

Women Rapping Revolution

CALIFORNIA SERIES IN HIP HOP STUDIES

H. Samy Alim and Jeff Chang, Series Editors

1. Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit, by Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay

Women Rapping Revolution

Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit

Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay

Forewords by Piper Carter and Mahogany Jones

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 by Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay

California Series in Hip Hop Studies, 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Farrugia, Rebekah, author. | Hay, Kellie D., 1965– author. | Carter, Piper, writer of foreword. | Jones, Mahogany, writer of foreword.

Title: Women rapping revolution : hip hop and community building in Detroit / Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay ; forewords by Piper Carter and Mahogany Jones.

Other titles: California series in hip hop studies ; 1.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Series: California series in hip hop studies ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004029 (print) | LCCN 2020004030 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520305311 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520305328 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520973367 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Foundation of Women in Hip Hop. | Hip hop feminism—Michigan—Detroit. | African American women—Michigan—Detroit.

Classification: LCC HQ1111 .F37 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1111 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/896073077434—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004029

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004030

Manufactured in the United States of America

28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Rebekah—

For my husband, Matt, and my sons,

Leeland and Huxley

Kellie—

To Karen A. J. Miller and

Tanya Copeland Stanford

Contents

Foreword

By Piper Carter

Foreword

By Mahogany Jones

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Intersections of Detroit, Women, and Hip Hop

1 Detroit Hip Hop and the Rise of the Foundation

2 Hip Hop Sounds and Sensibilities in Post-Bankruptcy Detroit

3 Negotiating Genderqueer Identity Formation

4 Vulnerable Mavericks Wreck Rap’s Conventions

5 Legendary, Environmental Justice, and Collaborative Cultural Production

6 Hip Hop Activism in Action

Conclusion: Women, Hip Hop, and Cultural Organizing

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

PIPER CARTER

Who knew that the work I’d been doing along with other folks would be immortalized in a scholarly publication?!

When I started the Foundation of Women in Hip Hop back in 2009, I hadn’t intended to do any kind of social justice, I hadn’t even heard of the term yet.

After we (the 5e Hip Hop Gallery) had been doing our no misogyny open mic for about three years, I met Dr. Kellie Hay and Dr. Rebekah Farrugia when they asked if they could study our work. They were actually the first ones to point out to me that we were utilizing hip hop culture to create positive social change.

We were just living our culture and honestly I just wanted to be around other women who enjoyed hip hop and identified as hip hop artists and I didn’t want to hear the negative lyrics and I wanted everyone to feel safe to enjoy themselves without being groped and grabbed on.

They were college professors so they would ask us all kinds of questions and we would have lengthy conversations about all kinds of issues. After speaking with them I’d contemplate: how do we bring community folks into the conversation around engaging in the struggle against the incinerator and the fight for clean air, water affordability and water safety, public transit and transit justice, food justice/food security/food sovereignty, climate change, and clean power?

They introduced me to hip hop feminist authors such as Dr. Aisha Durham and Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown. We had debates about Black feminism, hip hop feminism, feminism, and Black women.

All of this reading and debating led me to lasting relationships across the country and to work with all kinds of women in hip hop making the connection to Mother Earth and motherhood and our role in protecting Her, as well as real life solutions that have been created to do things very differently, using imagination as the driving force behind creative expression in community organizing.

Through our exchanges over the years, mostly in loving struggle around ideas and really digging into questions, and through their continued unwavering consistent support of our work, we were able to really uplift our resistance, asking the question: what role does hip hop play in movement building?

There are so many stories I could tell about the learning that took place, from that very first encounter to the various conferences they invited us to participate in to the many late night and lengthy sessions we’ve had over time. But honestly, I would need an entire book to explain how important their capturing and documenting our process has been to us.

Our no-misogyny open mic lasted five years. It was hugely successful and attracted international press and attention. Since it ended we are now a complete reconfiguration of members and participants and have become an organization that offers services to women in hip hop. Our mission and vision have expanded.

In reflection, I appreciate the authenticity with which they approached the process of their research. From the very beginning they were more than respectful. They literally took the time to learn from us and be led by us (Black Women). All along the way they were open to critique, criticism, opposition, redefining, and relabeling, as well as unlearning. They practiced deep listening and made changes accordingly when asked and more often self-checked without being asked to do so.

For us, we were just folks in community who wanted to shift the paradigm, and we did. Many of the young folks who attended our open mic are young adults now and organizing their own events and because the rules of engagement were natural to them they now have the same guidelines at their events. That’s pretty profound. And it’s more than what we imagined as an outcome.

I hope that after reading this book folks will reach out to us and invite us to perform or speak or conduct a workshop. I hope that folks will listen to our mixtape series featuring women’s voices. I hope folks will open themselves up to listening to women emcees, and hire women music producers and women graffiti artists and b-girls, and . . .

Foreword

MAHOGANY JONES

I was a NYC transplant and for the years I had been in Detroit (since 2004), I had yet to experience a hip hop open mic scene that came close to mirroring the magic of what I encountered in the late 90s/early 2000s in New York City. Most of the open mics that I attended were chock full of aggression, and cats trying to get put on. Not that the scene in NYC didn’t have its fair share of that, but there was a sense of community and connectivity, service and purpose that was the driving force behind why we religiously showed up every week, that I hadn’t quite been able to place in the hip hop scene in Detroit just yet.

It was the spring of 2011 when I received a text’ed flyer from a Detroit legend then known as Invincible, inviting me to check out this women in hip hop open mic night the Foundation. She (at the time) said it was every Tuesday and she knew I was kinda new to the D and thought it would be great for me. I had been waiting for something like what she mentioned. It sounded perfect. I was hungry to connect with a community of artists and fellow emcees to build with.

At the Foundation, I stepped into what felt like an alternate world—the vibes were high and just right. I walked in to see a woman on the turntables, DJ Lajedi, who was spinning nothing but classics. An all-women band was playing along as the DJ was spinning, b-boys and b-girls were on the dance floor, writers were practicing graffiti in a corner, and a few children were with their mothers catching the vibe. The environment was warm, sincere, electric, and connected.

I was drawn, and what was just a once-in-a-while let-me-drop-by became a weekly practice, especially once I met the gallery owners, DJ Sicari and our founder, fearless leader, and a woman I’m honored to call sister, Piper Carter.

Coming weekly was more than just keeping my skills sharp. We had a mission: to become a presence in the community and a resource center, where we could encourage one another to grow as artists, but also as humans. The heart of the Foundation was about celebrating women in hip hop. It was about honoring the presence, voices, and contribution of women in media in efforts to bring restoration to our sense of identity as a whole. The Foundation had become my Cheers; we all knew each other’s names and hearts. Pipe’s ambition to maintain a weekly open mic on a week night was often met with criticism and resistance, as was her premise—that our open mic night be one that didn’t tolerate misogyny, at all! That was tough. What was hip hop culture without the disrespect and oversexualization of women? I had quickly gone from an attendee to a co-host (alongside Nik-Nak), in order to be a part of finding the answer to that question.

The Foundation found a home at the 5e Gallery. Its purpose was to serve as both art gallery and community center, both maker space and lounge. It was multipurpose in every sense—a space to come and get a meal when needed or catch a multimedia fashion show. Piper and Sicari had created not just an art gallery space, but a movement.

Unfortunately, like most movements, there was red tape and pushback. The Gallery had building violations and therefore, it would not be available for public use, which meant a relocation. This relocation, to Detroit’s famed veterans’ bar the Old Miami, initially felt like a curse, because nothing about it said hip-hop feminism. But it quickly evolved into one of the most renowned open mic nights in the city for about three years, where I had the pleasure of meeting our authors and now close friends, sisters, and comrades, Rebekah and Kellie. These professors not only came to the open mic nights but toiled in the trenches with us, faithfully attending planning meetings for the night and special events and serving as partial sponsors for events. They have celebrated birthdays alongside us and literally did and do life with us, and have invited us to do the same with them.

Hip hop culture is not a spectator sport; it’s best experienced as a participant. It would have been easy for Kellie and Rebekah to have entered our world and comfortably posted their tents on the edges, looking from the outside in. Instead we have grown together as artists, educators, advocates, some of us academics, but most importantly as women and sisters. This journey has not been a comfortable one; it has been full, rich, thick, and provided plenty of moments for both professional and personal growth. There are no two other individuals, aside from Piper Carter herself, who I feel are more qualified to lend voice and insight into what was the Foundation, what is now We Found Hip Hop, and what ultimately became a piece of Detroit’s hip hop historical landscape, and will be a capstone for Detroit women in hip hop.

Preface

There is a lack of research that examines Black women’s contributions to the hip hop underground. Women Rapping Revolution begins to fill this gap, opening conversations about Black women’s cultural production and community building work. Our project is the product of seven years of immersion in a women-centered hip hop collective in Detroit. Created by cultural organizer and hip hop aficionado Piper Carter, the Foundation’s initial purpose aspired to provide a stage where women could showcase their talent and create a community to foster their development. Over the course of our engagement with the Foundation we witnessed the evolution of the collective’s artistic and political growth. In this context cultural work often constitutes political work.

Historically, the dominant narrative about hip hop’s development was drenched in New York and Los Angeles, which came to define East Coast and West Coast rap. Following the coastal paradigm, cities like Miami, New Orleans, and Atlanta led the South to emerge as a dominant player in hip hop cultural production. While the Midwest has produced its fair share of artists, including Kanye West, Chance the Rapper, and Lupe Fiasco from Chicago and artists like Eminem and Big Sean from Detroit, as a region it remains an understudied site of US hip hop. A study of Detroit hip hop has much to contribute to this narrative. Its industrial past, musical heritage, and social movement history situate Detroit as a unique site. It is an ideal neoliberal city that has much in common with other postindustrial cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cleveland. Detroit’s economic, racial, and cultural particularities produce a distinct aesthetic, sound, and politic that shape the ways that hip hop’s five elements are lived in the city.¹

Neoliberalism, whether it is imagined as a worldview, a mechanism to ameliorate economic issues, or an idealistic conception of market and consumer behavior, reproduces the unevenness between rich and poor, often white and Black. We view it as a stage in late capitalism that radically departs from earlier formations of the welfare state where government was felt to be obliged to care for its citizens. Instead, neoliberalism places stock in radical individualism. That is, citizens are independent and responsible for their own welfare. Big government is viewed as threatening and ill-conceived, and any form of regulation that limits market activity is considered dangerous. In this philosophy, the market replaces the state. Instead of providing programming, training, or subsidized schooling, medicine, or housing, neoliberals believe in individual responsibility. Since markets are deemed to be the best way to create capital, jobs, and profit, the function of government shifts from welfare to business management. Corporations have a lot at stake in this shifting modality of capitalism as they become the role models and stakeholders after which government models itself. Risk management becomes a high priority, akin to the way actuaries forecast profit and risk potential in insurance companies. Profit, business, and managed populations are high priorities in this iteration of capitalism. In contemporary Detroit, neoliberal planning has taken the form of urban renewal. Foundation artists actively push against these ideologies and practices, especially as they impact urban planning; they expose the displacements and political distress that they see as urban removal rather than urban renewal.

Black people constitute more than 80 percent of Detroit’s population, making it one of the blackest cities in the United States. Racial pride and politics are at stake in the cultural production we analyze. We think it is powerful to highlight women’s particular contributions to hip hop culture as well as their organizing strategies. We simply do not know enough about Black women’s contributions to the hip hop underground. Similarly, outside of the concrete boundaries of neighborhood associations and activist organizations Black women’s cultural work is virtually unknown.

A shared interest in hip hop music and culture led us to pursue this project together. Our differing working-class backgrounds, ethnic identities, and academic training also shaped how we imagined the project. While we are both white women, we are shaped by structures of whiteness and class location in different ways. Given the population shifts going on in Detroit and its racial history, understanding how we came to this project and what the stakes are when white women study predominantly Black populations matters—methodologically and politically. Describing key moments in our histories situates our interest in pursuing the Foundation as a rich and worthy site of investigation.

REBEKAH

Growing up in Windsor in the 1980s and 90s, I saw Detroit as a mysterious and dangerous place whose tall buildings I observed from a safe distance across the river. I was a product of a racist culture that propagated stereotypical views about Detroit and its people. I learned about its gun violence, Devil’s Night destruction, and designation as a murder capital from the nightly local news. By the time I was fifteen, in the early 1990s, I was taking the tunnel bus across to explore a limited area of downtown that was home to concert venues like Saint Andrew’s Hall and The Shelter where I’d check out punk and alternative bands. I would roam the blighted streets of Detroit unsupervised, dreaming about what Woodward Ave must have been like in decades past. I imagined the mostly deserted and boarded-up shops I wandered past to be selling fine clothing and furniture, full of customers—Black and white—while Martha and the Vandellas played from the transistor radios of Cadillacs and Fairlanes cruising down the country’s first highway, their drivers proud to live in the city that birthed both the auto industry and Motown. It was a romanticized imagining, but I was young and the city—both its past and present—fascinated me. It was an Other world that I mostly imagined from a distance and sometimes stumbled into, but rarely interacted with.

At nineteen I discovered Detroit techno and Chicago house. I fell in love with electronic music after my first rave experience and was euphoric upon learning that the DJs and producers I made my way across the river to dance to on Saturday nights were locals with worldwide notoriety. They were pioneers, repurposing synthesizers and drum machines, whose experimentation culminated in the creation of Detroit techno. Long before cellphones, let alone smartphones, it was exhilarating to pull up to a venue and be assured by a banging bass line that we’d finally found the spot. But this was the mid-nineties, and by then white suburban youth dominated warehouse parties in the city. Occasionally DJs would throw down ghettotech sets. Combining elements of various subgenres of electronic music including electro, Chicago house, and Miami bass, but sped up to 160 beats per minute, ghettotech could be heard every Friday night on the local hip hop and R&B station WJLB. Tracks often included repetitive and at times sexually provocative lyrics. Live broadcasting from the club Legends sparked my interest in Detroit’s Black dance music and hip hop scene. However, as a young white woman from Windsor without any connections to Detroiters, I felt like this wasn’t a world that was available for me to explore beyond the bins of record stores and radio play. Three months after the first Detroit Electronic Music festival in 2000 I left the area for graduate school. Nine years later I would return, this time settling on the US side of the border and determined to find my way into Detroit: its people, complexities, and relationship to hip hop.

KELLIE

I grew up as an Okie-identified white girl. Both of my parents were raised on country music, but only my father was passionate about country and bluegrass. Billy Crash Craddock’s Cajun Baby spun daily in my house, along with Loretta Lyn, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty. Only old country pleased my dad—other genres and new forms of country did not matter to him. My mother also grew up around country music; however, she loved to dance and country was not her style. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard were her favorite artists. She was a dope swing/jitterbug dancer. In my childhood, I remember her singing and dancing around in the kitchen to Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill—her all-time favorite song—when she did chores. R&B, soul, and artists like the Jackson 5 offered acceptable styles of music; they crossed over just like my mother’s favorite Black entertainers.² Everything I thought my mother loved about Black music changed when hip hop hit the radio.

Like many white kids uneducated in hip hop culture, I thought I was down with rap music when the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 hit Rapper’s Delight rippled across commercial radio. My parents had no patience; in their minds rap was talk over phony sounds, not real music. I had to sneak my new fascination with music that I did not know, but loved anyway. And even though I listened to whatever commercial rap radio offered from age fourteen onward, in 1994 my worldview changed when Tricia Rose published Black Noise, one of hip hop’s foundational scholarly texts, and Nas dropped his first album, Illmatic. Both artifacts opened my eyes and my heart. So too did my immersion in graduate school, where postcolonial theory, Black feminist theory, and the godlike figures who created British cultural studies turned everything I was raised to think inside out. I had to learn the conditions that birthed hip hop’s history, the repurposing of technology, all the elements that form the culture. Most of all, I learned that in the absence of forming relationships with hip hop heads and the communities living hip hop, I was no different than what my parents learned to be: Okie crossover consumers of Black music. I was a reader of hip hop, not a maker, far away from anything that resembled a hip hop community. And then came our immersion in the Foundation. I let my shy poet-self out of a box. Mahogany Jones and Miz Korona, two well-known Detroit emcees, graciously took me on as their poetry student; they encouraged me to perform in public and propelled me onto the Foundation’s stage.

FEMINIST CO-ETHNOGRAPHY

Our stories and experiences illustrate how our intersecting identity locations are advantaged by structures of whiteness and simultaneously fall through its cracks; that is, as white women with working class backgrounds, one of whom identifies as queer, there are many points of intersection that we came to share with Foundation members and Detroit’s broader hip hop underground. Race, however, has been the stickiest point of connection. In Detroit, the anxiety about who speaks for hip hop is amplified because of the city’s racial history and contemporary uphill battles. Whether we asked for it or not, like it or not, we are assigned and possess obvious racial privilege that we have had to constantly work to navigate. We are aware of the power dynamics that are always at play. These underlying forces are as embodied as they are conceptual.

Our commitment to document what the women in our study find culturally relevant in their lives connects to the larger agenda of feminist activist ethnography.³ This methodology encourages reflexive research strategies and intersectional understandings of social identity. It also requires the researcher to question power dynamics in a myriad of ways, including those between researcher and researched. Additionally, feminist activist ethnography identifies the connections researchers share with participants that collectively push back against the disparities produced in neoliberal economics and cultural values. What is more, Craven and Davis locate this project within the confines of neoliberalism as it is effected in North America.⁴ To this end, we practice feminist activist ethnography from the perspective of collaboration. That is, as ethnographers we are co-creators of this and other research work; at the same time, we often co-create with Foundation members—planning events and making art. This bond brings cultural practice and political resistance together. Unlike the classical ethnography produced within a positivist scientific gaze, we do not accept any notion that objectivity is attainable and desirable in ethnographic fieldwork, or in the writing practices of scholars doing ethnography. Intersubjective, relational work produces what counts as data in our scholarship. In each move we make, problematizing power differences is at stake, whether they exist between us as co-ethnographers, between us and our research partners, or whether they are those that beset all of us involved in this study.

Throughout Women Rapping Revolution we link micro racial moments produced in talk, music, and hip hop culture to larger structures so as not to risk pathologizing Blackness, Black women’s relationship to gender disparities, and/or their roles in creating inclusive Black communities. Scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod who critique and advance openly activist methodology question the ways that researchers who study marginalized populations have crafted their subjects as oppressed victims, resulting in frozen-in-time universalized and romanticized women.⁵ Foundation women reject the category of victim. Moreover, we employ the language of oppression cautiously, to aptly point at social structures and living conditions. We have come to learn that these women imagine themselves as revolutionaries, and in some cases organizers who fight against both material and affective conditions. Feminist ethnography articulates well with Anthony Kwame Harrison’s conception of ethnographic comportment.⁶ His embodied, mobile construct captures the power dynamics that we are obliged to address. For Harrison, ethnographic comportment is both historically informed and future oriented; it includes familiarity with ethnography’s problematic past and a disposition of accountability for one’s role in advancing ethnographic practices.⁷ Taking stock of how white liberal ethnographers have historically sensationalized Black urban culture through one-dimensional reports, we endeavor to write a more dialogic narrative that invites our participants to speak in their own idiom, on their terms. In spite of our efforts to earn/achieve transparency, however, we own our agency; that is, our hands, hearts, and heads fashioned this text. Inasmuch as ethnography is relational, it is also rhetorical. We make aesthetic decisions writing ethnography, just as the artists we engage intentionally fashion their lyrics, music, visual art, dance, and turntabling. Texture, layering, and flow are not only embraced by emcees; they are rhetorical/aesthetic tools for the hip hop ethnographer. Texture exceeds reporting. It requires aesthetic choices and discursive strategies to juxtapose ideas, practices, and disruptions into the form of ethnographic writing, whereas flow can mean cadence and timing or signifying on what is overly familiar.

Suspicion and concern about white women studying predominately Black communities may never be ameliorated, but we can’t stop and won’t stop trying to create an ethical, politically conscious strategy for ethnographic practice. This project engages and works to lift up the stories and cultural production of women and the men who support them. Women Rapping Revolution documents a significant collective that opened space for women in Detroit’s hip hop underground to shine, showcasing their aesthetics, practices, and musical genius. Artists who come through and participate in Foundation events offer cultural production plus; that is, aesthetics and politics are difficult to disentangle in the work. One cannot listen to music in the underground without learning about Detroit—its history, politics, uneven urban development, and environmental conditions. What is more, the city’s racial footprints are like semiotic musical indexes: the material is enmeshed into the symbolic forms of cultural production.

This study is a different kind of collaborative ethnography, one that departs from the current literature that is shaping duoethnography.⁸ Duoethnographers insist that the researcher’s life and reflections are sites of knowledge production. The approach presupposes that two people ought to push themselves into reflection that then leads to changes in research strategy, underlying assumptions, blind spots, and acknowledging when productive practices work. We agree that this type of work is important and necessary, and yet, it does not constitute the spectrum of our methodological practice. Indeed, we take our reflections seriously, but the