The Expansive Worlds of Queer Hip Hop

A portfolio developed by Katherine Crowe for Dr. Carmen Kynard's 2024 Hip Hop Rhetorics Graduate Seminar

Dear Hip Hop,

I came to know you in one of the most desperate and lonely times of my life, homeschooled in a town of less than 3000 people in nowhere Texas. Beyond my immediate family, my contact with the world was bottlenecked through the screen of my phone, reduced to the sensation of a user interface. Yet still, you found me.

  My dear internet friend told me to listen to this new song called Bodak Yellow, that this rapper Cardi B went so incredibly hard, and that I had to listen. We had bonded over k-pop groups that incorporated elements of hip hop, but this was different.  It summoned up images of a throng of bodies, pulsating to the beat and moving not quite as one, but as a collective,  feeling and interpreting the energy of the song. Over the course of the next year, I would listen to Invasion of Privacy over and over again as I moved to the rdge of a metroplex and started public high school. With this change, suddenly, you were everywhere, but I learned very quickly to be quite critical of the way people treat you. I got my moment of dancing in a throng of bodies at prom, but the censored version of the song was filled in far too enthusiastically for a majority white student population, misappropriating the words of a Black artist reclaiming the term to be just another group of racist white kids screaming the n word in the South. It became clear, then, that my relationship with you would never be as simple as that fantasy in my bedroom. 

I had known you through the zeitgeist before my teenage years, of course. My mom frequently recounts how my aunt taught my toddler self to “shake it like a polaroid picture” to Hey Ya by Outkast, and shake it I did. Though she remembers this moment fondly now, my mom was quite irate about the whole situation at the time. Accordingly, she didn’t introduce me to all that much hip-hop while I was growing up. Your introduction into my consciousness, or really the beginning of my active choice to seek you out, feels not like it was an act of teenage rebellion as it is so often portrayed in media, but as something that helped develop my critical consciousness and challenged my preconceived notions growing up as a white kid in various rural settings and various degrees of isolation. You pushed me to think harder, particularly about the experiences of Black folks across this country, you pushed my abilities of textual analysis with your proclivity for rhetorical complexity, and eventually, you filled my soul with sounds that ring out through my most treasured memories (what a beautiful thing it is to find communion in shaking ass with beloved friends).

My love for you is complicated. I don’t want to collapse your complexities, or to pretend I’ve never had problems with your dalliances with misogyny, misogynoir, and homophobia, and to do so would be to the detriment of our relationship. When you love someone, you call them on their bullshit. I know you know all too well how white people’s participation in and interaction with hip hop culture has frequently been marked by appropriation, exploitation, and the alienation of Black history, music, aesthetics, and linguistic forms from the actual Black artists creating these things. My intention is not to come into your space and tell you how you ought to be doing things or to take what I like and denigrate everything I don’t, especially because there are nuances to you that I will never grasp as a white person that has not been brought up in hip hop culture. But I want to ensure that my love for you is built upon a foundation of respect, not uncritical fetishization, and this requires an honest reckoning with all you have to offer. This is a love letter to your multitudes, to your contradictions, to your history and your future.

And I would be remiss not to mention that while detractors reduce you down to your worst moments, they overlook all of the ways in which you show up for women and Queer people. As I came to know my own Queerness,  I discovered yours. In you, I discovered the expansiveness that Shanté Paradigm Smalls describes. The Lisa Frank-ified fantasy world of Tia Tamera by Doja Cat and Rico Nasty had an inestimable impact on both my psyche and home decor, and served as a testament to your world-making capabilities. I remember watching this video and singing along with friends from the GSA at the back of the bus on a UIL trip— you were there, creating this pocket of queerness amidst the horrors of a rural high school reckoning with a suburban future. 

Though I have focused largely on your involvement in my teenage years, you’ve never fully disappeared from my life. To reconnect with and learn from you  in a time where I am once again working to gain my bearings in a new environment reminds me of that adage of history not repeating itself, but rhyming. In this portfolio dedicated to the multitudes of hip hop, I ihae ncluded a collaborative presentation I created with my classmate, Renee Osborne, on Queer hip hop because the process of creating it brought me back to that joy I felt on the back of the bus listening to Tia Tamera, the rush of glimpsing into the queer worlds you create, of the expansiveness of queerness beyond my own experience.  I recognize that some of the content in this presentation would strike many as vulgar or gratuitous, but I am uninterested in censoring the artists I engage with, or overlooking the rhetorical significance of profanity.  I also finally got around to listening to Doechii’s new mixtape because of this presentation, and Doechii’s artistry, critical interventions, extensive citationality, and unapolagetic Queerness are a touchstone for both the soundtrack of my commute and the conference proposal I include in this portfolio. 

The first reflection I include from this semester addresses the assumed criminality of hip hop spaces and the surveillance that comes with this, but also the ways rappers subvert this surveillance and resist interpretation by the white mainstream. The second reflection I have included addresses the way Black women's bodies are surveilled and scrutinized within hip-hop discourses by focusing in on Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Shoop by Salt-n-Pepa, turning to Gwendolyn Pough's work in Check it While I Wreck it. These reflections brought me to the questions of  race, surveillance, authenticity, feminism, and queerness  that appear in my conference proposal "Moving Multitudes: Queer Counternarratives of Authenticity in Hip Hop" which has been accepted for the 45th National Women's Studies Annual Conference in Puerto Rico.  I have created digital collages to accompany and support the textual artifacts I present, including pictures of many (though not all) of the MCs that have informed this work, and more importantly inform my love for you. I hope this portfolio demonstrates critical engagement, but also creativity and fun— I don’t want this to be another heap of bullshit to add to the pile of dead academic texts nobody will ever read (or at least, want to read). I also want to write about you in a way that doesn’t alienate anyone else who loves you— because there is so much to love, and I am farrrrr from the first or the deepest love you have known.

But I know you get it.  

xo Katie