In January of 2020 I made a commitment to myself to change my listening habits. I didn’t stop listening to male artists all together, I just resolved that in the year ahead I would make it my priority to seek out and listen to primarily female musicians. This wasn’t an off-the-cuff resolution, it held weight. Behind that singular decision lay seven years’ worth of internal resolve. You see, just like everyone else I know, my tastes changed over time, my teenage years were filled with dancefloor indie beats and seeking out bands on twitter before they got a feature in the back pages of NME. But while 15-year-old me would have probably termed herself a feminist in some sense of word, I remember firmly believing that female indie artists were just not quite as good. It wasn’t so much female musicians in general that I rejected, but in the 2014 daze of Future Islands Singles and Bombay Bicycle Clubs’ So Long, See you Tomorrow it felt like nothing of the same calibre could ever be created by a girl group. A year prior to this Haim had achieved commercial success in the UK with their single ‘The Wire’ and my personal dislike of this one sound led me to cancel the concept female indie bands as a whole. At 15 I rejcted an entire sub-genre of artistry when really all I had to do was admit that I just didn’t like Haim. 

Seven years on and my music taste became much broader than the Reading & Leeds line-up. I began to appreciate artists from all sections of Spotify’s seemingly endless catalogue of genres and soprano voices stopped being at odds to the kind of sounds I enjoyed. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill became a guiding hand to lead me down the corridors of 90’s RnB and Hip Hop where the major female players like Missy Elliot and Mary J. Blige held their own in the face of a male dominated music scene. But despite the respect that these big titles harboured amongst their fellow artists, Hip Hop will never fall under the category of gender inclusive. Rap and Hip Hop culture as we know it today, tower above a solid foundation that projects women as objects of ownership. Misogyny runs so deep within the discourse of these genres that even in the wake of real social change, rap music remains an untouchable means with which to openly discuss violence against women. I think about the recent cancelling of Octavian after his ex-girlfriend Hana exposed him for years of physical, verbal and psychological abuse towards her and I feel reassured by the fact that this caused him to be dropped by his record label (Black Butter), then I remember that the lyrics on ‘My Head’ told us of his intentions long before Hana’s story ever went public. We rap about violence loudly until we realise that the words hold some truth. I saw a tweet a while back that summed up the sentiment well ‘Hip Hop would not survive a me too moment’. 

But regardless of the fact that Rap and misogyny go hand in hand this isn’t the primary reason I decided to give my time to female artists in 2020. In actuality I enjoy Hip Hop without thinking too much about the lyrics, and I continue to listen to Drake despite him saying he brought Afro-Beats to the UK, I guess in small ways we’re all guilty of separating art from the artists. My listening habits really started to change when I was introduced to a world of female rappers that were creating a new discourse within a style I already loved. When I tell you that Noname revolutionised my music taste, I mean it. Hearing the Chicago born spoken word poet turned rapper make soulful beats about being a sexually liberated black female activist was everything and then some, it was literally music to my ears, she was Lauryn Hills 21st century love child. But Noname wasn’t a stand-alone phenomenon, she was a gateway into a seemingly never-ending discovery of other female artists who were not only making good beats, but using word play to talk about important topics. Of course, this is not to label the entire lyrical catalogue of male rappers as trivial, but rather it felt like Hip Hop was being turned on its head.

Activism is certainly not exclusive to female rappers, 2020 saw more socially important content within Hip Hop as a whole than most years prior, but there’s something to be said about the obvious burden that remains on women, especially black women to lead the way. We only need to look briefly at the J Cole and Noname diss track saga to see how men within Hip Hip look to black women to create accessible gateways into effective activism. Even noname’s subsequent public apology over releasing Song 33, feeling ‘that her behaviour fuelled shifting attention from the issues into her and Cole’s beef’ demonstrated that ‘women always bear the burden of being virtuous to the point of being stifled.’ Coles lapse in judgement is certainly not the reason I made the choice to give space to female artists in 2020, but it does support the fact that black women’s narratives deserve to be shouted about just as loudly within the music industry to prevent things like this happening. 

In this new year we have up and coming female rappers emerging from every direction, with names like Tems fronting a new wave of alt-RNB coming out of Nigeria, to South London’s very own Enny and Amia Brave, who are using their music to address representation in the industry. The decision I made in January of last year came mainly out of a desire to find more artists that I genuinely enjoyed, to find women who made great beats with new narratives. If I hadn’t actively decided to do this there are so many names I know now that I would have probably never discovered, that’s in some part reflective of my own inability to seek out new music and in some part due to the fact that female rappers are still largely slept on. I didn’t stop listening to men, I just opened up some time and space for women of the same calibre.