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Dope Female MCs Bubbling Below……

Forty-two tracks by women rappers who can genuinely rap, assembled as a corrective to the very short list the industry was willing to promote.

dopemcs

Dope Female MCs Bubbling Below

For most of hip-hop's commercial history the industry has been willing to support roughly two women at a time, which produced the entirely false impression that there were only ever two worth supporting. This playlist is the rebuttal, and it is a substantial one: forty-two tracks, almost none of them by anyone the average listener could name.

The range within it matters too. There is battle rap, spoken word, conscious hip-hop, club music, drill-adjacent material and Filipina-American and Zambian-Australian rap, which makes the point that the category was never narrow to begin with.

What to listen for

Sa-Roc appears six times, which is the correct emphasis. A Washington DC rapper who later signed to Rhymesayers, she has a technical command — breath control, internal rhyme, sheer density of syllables — that puts her among the best rappers of her generation regardless of gender. "Forever" and "The Who?" with David Banner are the picks.

Bahamadia appears twice and is the elder here: a Philadelphia rapper whose 1996 album Kollage is one of the great overlooked records of that decade.

Jean Grae's "Excuse Me Sir" is the most technically dazzling verse on the list — she is a rapper's rapper in the most literal sense.

Ursula Rucker opens the set, which is a statement: a Philadelphia poet who worked with The Roots and whose pieces are closer to literature than to song.

Lady Leshurr's "Juice" and Ms. Dynamite's "Danger" are the British entries, and Ms. Dynamite won the Mercury Prize, which is worth remembering.

Ruby Ibarra's "Brown Out" is the Filipina-American record and one of the most striking things here, and Sampa the Great's "Blessings" is the Zambian-Australian one.

Rapsody's "OooWee" with Anderson .Paak, Young M.A's "Bonnie", Tink's "Ratchet Commandments" and Kamaiyah's "I'm On" are the ones that came closest to breaking through.

Nitty Scott appears four times, and "Flower Child" with Kendrick Lamar is early enough to be a genuine find.

Go deeper

Sa-Roc's The Sharecropper's Daughter (2020) and Rapsody's Eve (2019) are the two essential modern albums here.

Bahamadia's Kollage and Jean Grae's This Week are the back catalogue to correct, and Ursula Rucker's spoken-word albums are worth hearing in full.

Why the list is long: the industry's willingness to support roughly two women at a time produced a false impression that only two were worth supporting. Forty-two tracks, across battle rap, spoken word, drill, club music and three continents, is the most efficient possible rebuttal — and the technical standard across it is the part that should end the argument.

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