Jill Scott

oh jilly from philly

The following was presented at the Neither Model nor Muse Symposium at Duke University a few weeks ago. The panel was Women Engage Hip Hop and featured Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mark Anthony Neale, and Rachel Ramist. Take a look at the video post after you read this, it is indeed relevant.


I Speak Your Name


Queen Latifah, Jean Grae, Roxanne Shante, Mystic, Madusa, Bahamadia, Sha-Rock, Mecca, MC Lyte, Lauren Hill, Erykah Badu, Salt, Peppa, Juana Burns, Dania Birks, Michelle Franklin (JJ Fad), Deidra “Spindarella” Roper, Cheryl “Salt” Wray, Sandra “Pepa” Denton, Da Brat, Mia X, Lady of Rage, Yo-Yo, The Ghetto Twins, Foxy Brown,
Lil Kim, Missy Elliot, Left Eye, T-Boz, Chilli, Godessa, Cuba, Chi, Sistamatic, Trina, Smirk, Kasumba, D-Unik, Kato, Jill Scott

Unearthing the Up-rock: Space, Body, and the Black Woman’s Voice in Hip Hop

I recently viewed Counting Headz at the Black Lily festival. Counting Headz is a film about politics surrounding women emcees in South Africa. I left the film energized, enriched, and enlivened by their ability to articulate the modes by which black women are evolving this cultural practice while refusing to deny their womaness. I was excited about experiencing these sistas in stero, on the big screen, rhyming, breaking, tagging, visibly with a degree of hyper-visibility in a space that truly belonged to them. With the audience’s gaze fixated on them. I was excited about voices filled the space. How their voices their beats reverberated around the room. The voices as multi-dimensional expressive dimensions that took up space. That had not been flattened out to breasts, and asses, and hollow/one-sided images or performances of male-manufactured black womaness.

Hortense Spillers speaks about space in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe specifically when she talks about being trapped in “oceanic time and space”. Spillers is talking about how the body, during the Middle Passage, was literally moving through time, as in chronologically, and space, as in from the west coast of Africa to the Americas, but being bound and restricted from physical movement. In a lot of ways I see the suppression of black women’s voices as a similar means of looking at how hip hop is moving, how black women are moving on the margins of hip hop culture in a space of restriction.

In the span of time it took to watch the film, I felt like black women had not only been freed from the bound-movement Spillers talks about, but also that we had travelled maybe just a little further toward society where black women’s voices would be could be allowed to resound freely.

Jill Scott’s Hate on Me helps me to further think about the black female body in relationship to the marginalization of the black female hip hop expressive culture. “Jilly from Philly” deserves time and space in this conversation because of 1. her stature as being a thick sista, and dynamic voice which oscillates between spoken word, funk, rock, “what eva it be” literally taking up space and 2. because of her how her career has been framed at times by the co-signing of black men: DJ Jazzy Jeff, The Roots, and even recently Cornell West and Tavis Smiley in the video for “Hate on Me”. So her expressive movement being bordered by black male co-signers. Most of us who are familiar with Scott’s work know that a majority of it explores her relationships to or with men. What they do to her, what she does to them, pleasure, lust, desire and so forth. But there is a larger meta-narrative happening in the positioning of men in her work that we should think about.

The lyrics to “Hate on Me” reveal the manner in which hegemonic structures remind black women that we are not enough. No matter how we bend nature to the whims of society we will never be enough. No matter how black women over extended ourselves how we have positively influenced every aspect of this world, we still are not enough and these super-woman performances do not seem to change the large degree of “hateration” inflicted on black women.

The marginalization of black women in hip hop is away in which we can think about a larger narrative of the hegemonic control of public and reproductive space, women’s space, artistic space, imaginative space that has a long standing tradition in this country.

So black women hip-hop artists are doing an immense about of cultural work in asserting their expressiveness. They are challenging the heteronormative and phallocentric space which privileges what Paula Giddings refers to as the Cult of True Womanhood which relegates women to the private sphere, which relegates women’s expressiveness/productiveness/performances to that of domesticity.

What we are talking about here is the female presence as voice, as body, as an articulation of self-actualization outside the control and sphere of male dominated and narrated spaces. So black women hip-hop artists are shifting the narrative, the narrated space, the script of experience, turning it on its head. This is about a reclaiming of voice, a reclaiming of space, and a change in the landscape of folk expressive culture.