Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Angel Haze, Lady Leshurr and Little Simz
Girls trip ... (left to right) Angel Haze, Lady Leshurr and Little Simz. Photograph: Guardian design
Girls trip ... (left to right) Angel Haze, Lady Leshurr and Little Simz. Photograph: Guardian design

Rap and the gender gap: why are female MCs still not being heard?

This article is more than 6 years old

The genre is riding high, with artists such as Stormzy, Drake and J Cole scoring No 1 albums or headlining festivals, yet female rappers are struggling to catch a break

Since the age of nine, Simbi Ajikawo had been recording raps in her school classrooms and performing at her youth centre. She idolised Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott, the hip-hop icons of her youth. As she got older she tried everything to get noticed, appearing on E4 show Youngers and releasing a string of impressive freestyles. Her idols started to take notice. Lauryn Hill took her on tour with her. Kendrick Lamar had called her “the illest doing it right now”. Throughout, Ajikawo, who’d come to be known as Little Simz, always hated being a “female rapper”. She wrote the song Persons – with the line “Women can be kings” – about how her gender would never affect her desire to dominate her field.

A few years ago we had a long, messy conversation in a burger bar and she bristled at the mere mention of the word “female”. “Why does it always have to be about my gender?” she asked. “Why can’t I just do what I want to do freely without feeling like people are trying to put me in a box all the time? Do you know how annoying that is? When you feel like you’re doing something greater than life, but you’re always just a female rapper?” Last year she released Stillness in Wonderland, a record of intricacies and world-building that wrestled with issues of race, toxic relationships, anxiety and introversion; it was as ambitious as you could ever hope a rap album could be. It seemed certain that Simz would be the next UK success story.

But she was not. The album didn’t even chart within the top 100. There were no Mercury or Brit nominations. Apart from her hardcore fanbase, the record was greeted with little more than a shrug.

Stillness in Wonderland: The Film by Little Simz.

No one is guaranteed a free pass to success, of course, and there are plenty of reasons why an album might not land with the public. But what rankled about mainstream indifference towards Simz was that it came at a time when rap music in the UK had never been more popular. Grime and UK rap has been on a near unstoppable rise. From Stormzy’s No 1 album to Giggs, an artist who previously had all his shows cancelled by the police, bringing Drake out on to the main stage at Reading, barely a month goes past without another groundbreaking moment.

The success of homegrown rap has happened in tandem with a renewed fervour for international artists: Kendrick Lamar, Dr Dre and Drake have all had No 1 albums and the likes of Chance the Rapper and J Cole have headlined major UK festivals. Those artists are all men, but it has also been an incredible period for female MCs. Much of the most intricate and fully realised music in this new wave is by artists such as Princess Nokia, an Afrofuturist art rapper from the Bronx who assumes multiple identities and has a radio show where she deals with race and womanhood in between Placebo records. Or Lady Leshurr, whose sick pop culture-infused humour and ongoing discourse with the listener is reminiscent of early Eminem. There are so many more to speak of: Nadia Rose, Paigey Cakey, Junglepussy. All women who, like Simz, would probably hate to be grouped together, in this way, based purely on their gender (Little Simz declined to be interviewed for this piece).

Yet it’s worth talking about women MCs, because the commercial gap between male and female artists is a chasm. In the same way that rising gender equality in the workplace overall doesn’t negate the fact that fewer than 5% of Britain’s top companies have a female CEO, or that so few of the BBC’s top earners are women, so it’s true that while there a huge number of female MCs out there, almost none are breaking through to the top tier of the music industry. Apart from Nicki Minaj, who is undoubtedly a global superstar and the exception to the rule (although even her last album only charted at 22 in the UK) it’s been a long time since a female MC broke the Top 10 or played near the head of the bill at a UK festival.

Missing persons ... Little Simz performs at Field Day festival in London, June 2016. Photograph: Richard Isaac/Rex/Shutterstock

For Little Simz, the muted reaction to Stillness left her faced with a question she had always tried to avoid: would things have been different if she were a man? “She did everything perfectly,” says Caroline SM, the founder of the UK rap collective New Gen and an A&R at XL Recordings. “I think she was just ahead of her time. Four years ago, grime, rap, whatever it is, was not getting a look-in at all – men or women. It’s taken so long even to get to this point. Our scene is so slow.”

It’s true that many of the British men who are currently on top, artists such as Giggs and Skepta, have been releasing music for well over a decade. But even among relatively new artists like Stormzy, J Hus, Nines and Section Boyz, it seems as if the path to success has been fairly straightforward.

Lady Leshurr has asked similar questions about her own career and says that one of the reasons male artists do better is that they look out for each other. “In grime, there’s a circle of people that all support each other and, guess what, they’re all male: Stormzy, Skepta, Wretch 32. They’re people that will always support another person’s music. When you look at the females, there’s not really that collective of people who will show love. If more female rappers in the UK were more supportive of each other it would be completely different.”

She says the picture is further complicated by race. “In my opinion [the issues are about] gender but it’s also the colour of your skin. It can be harder if you’re a dark-skinned girl trying to make it in this industry because it’s always been hard.”

Leshurr has found that while in some ways the situation for women has improved, the double-standard about physical appearance, and skin colour in particular, has gotten worse. “For men it doesn’t really matter what you look like. Ed Sheeran, for example; I’m not saying he’s ugly, but you’d never think he’d be the biggest pop star in the world. Whereas for women, it’s still based on image, and men will always think about what the female looks like before they hear what she’s gonna say. It’s always going to be ‘She’s ugly’ or ‘Look at her hair’. Whereas guys can just put a hoodie and a snapback on and record something and everyone will be like ‘Yeah they’re sick’.”

Connecting people ... Princess Nokia. Photograph: Alberto Vargas

Both Leshurr and Caroline SM believe that these problems are particular to the scene in the UK at the moment, and that the recent success of male artists will eventually open the door for female MCs too. But discrepancy in fortunes between men and women stretches back a lot further than that. Ms Dynamite, probably Britain’s most famous female MC, managed to combine critical acclaim with chart success on her debut record A Little Deeper, which went on to win the Mercury prize in 2002. She was unable to turn that initial success into a sustained career as an album artist – her second record didn’t chart in the top 40 and eventually she went back to her first calling: singing verses on club tracks. Seven years later another female MC, Speech Debelle, won the Mercury prize, but she was even less able to build a career from the exposure. She’s now working behind the scenes, as a music relations manager for Arts Council England.

“Somebody needs to change the formula. The way people approach music,” says Angel Haze, an artist from Detroit. A few years ago, Haze was the belle of the music press: an incredible MCing talent with a horrendous story, overcoming sexual abuse and life in a religious cult. She was interviewed by everyone, reliving her awful childhood experiences over and over again. Then she released her debut album, Dirty Gold, which charted at 196 in the UK.

“You don’t get the recognition based on what your music sounds like, it’s all about the hype around you, who said what about you. But it’s this reality TV generation, everyone has a 30-second attention span and on to the new shit, and only the craziest of people survive.” What’s strange is that it’s a cycle that no one can seem to get out of, artists and press playing their dutiful roles, unable to stop history repeating itself. Just last year, Young MA had a Billboard Top 20 hit with her track OOOUUU. The record, a brilliantly blue ode to cunnilingus, was one of the most open celebrations of same-sex relationships in mainstream hip-hop. Talking to the Fader in August last year, she said that the song’s success motivated her to do more. “Let’s keep it moving now. Let’s keep giving ’em this fire and let’s not stop this,” she said. But one year on, she has released an EP to little fanfare. It charted at No 166 in the US and another hit has not emerged.

One of a kind ... Stefflon Don performs at Wireless festival in July 2017. Photograph: Burak Cingi/Redferns

It would perhaps look foolish now to suggest that this could all be about to change, considering how often that prediction has been made in the past and been proven to be wrong. Yet everyone I speak to seems to believe the first superstar female MC of the 2010s is just around the corner. There’s Ray BLK, who won the BBC’s Sound of 2017 poll and combines R&B singing with MCing. Cardi B, who found fame on the American reality show Love & Hip-Hop, but whose brazen personality and track Bodak Yellow have meant that, unlike every other person on that show, she is now being taken seriously as a star.

“I feel like there was a glass ceiling before, but this new generation of people coming out are changing things,” says BLK. “We can more easily connect with our fanbase – things are spreading a lot further because of that.” Among this new wave, though, there is one name that everyone is saying is going to be the person to finally shatter the ceiling: Stefflon Don. “We haven’t seen someone like her before. Not in my lifetime. Not in the UK,” says Caroline SM. “We really haven’t seen someone like that. She’s a gangster. Boys are scared of her and she’s sexy. She came through on the Section Boyz remix, she rolls with rappers. She’s one of a kind.”

Don’s X-rated, Jamaican-influenced flow owes more to dancehall stars such as Spice and Cham, but she combines that with hard-hitting Atlanta-style production and British slang that gives her a global appeal. It is telling that when I talk to Don, she sees industry sexism as something of a relic. “I remember watching interviews with female artists on MTV and they would always say, ‘It’s harder for us,’ or, ‘We don’t get as much opportunity as men.’ I believe that. I don’t think female artists would come out and keep saying it if wasn’t true. But I haven’t really experienced it, not yet anyway.” Judging by her initial success, it’s not surprising Don hasn’t experienced the same pressures as other MCs. She’s been working with Drake, and has just signed a huge record deal with Polydor for a reported £1.2m. Whether this new generation will be the stars of 2018, or just follow an established rise and fall, can’t really be predicted.

For Haze, though, the ability to use social media to reach fans should just be seen as a way to get to the top faster. She says there needs to be a rethink of who the winners and the losers are in this story. Yes, she concedes, women have a harder time in music than men, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they suffer worse outcomes. “I live in a house in the middle of the woods and I make music 24/7. It’s like hibernating for a good cause and when I do resurface it’s going to be at a different level. I’m so much happier than if I was releasing something new every six months.”

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed