Tag Archives: Hip-Hop Scene

Does Queer Rap Actually Exist?

Queer rap is amazing. From Young M.A to MicahTron to HYM to Dio Ganhdih, the genre is bursting with incredible young lesbian rappers. In the past five years, the queer rap genre has exploded.

So what’s the problem?

“Queer rap” doesn’t exist.

Queer rap isn’t a genre. “Rap” is a genre, “hip-hop” is a genre, “R&B” is a genre, but according to Pitchfork, “queer rap” is a label that homogenizes, stigmatizes and marginalizes rappers who happen to be LGBT.

Popular music website Pitchfork wrote about NYC’s queer rap scene a few years ago. They popularized the term “queer rap.” However, they recently retracted their own article.

The label “queer rap” turns musicians into spectacles.

Queer rappers like Dio Ganhdih and Mykki Blanco aren’t evaluated based on the quality of their work; with songs that are lyrically nuanced and sonically stimulating, their work is obviously stellar. But when people write about queer rap, they don’t write about the structure of the lyrics, the narrative thread of the album or the power of a particular instrumental riff. They write about how crazy it is that someone would rap about two girls kissing. They write about how fascinating it is that Young M.A dresses like a man or that Mykki Blanco defies gender. They turn talented musicians into queer freakshows.

“Queer rap” lumps all gay hip-hop artists into one category.

Labeling someone’s art as “queer rap” invites people to lump together two artists creating completely different types of work just because both artists happen to by LGBT. “Queer rappers” Le1f and Mykki Blanco complain that this happens to them quite frequently. I mean, would you assume that Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin were similar just because they both happened to be queer?

“Queer rap” says that sexuality is the most important thing about a musician.

Labeling someone’s work as “queer rap” also broadcast’s the rapper’s sexuality to world, turning off potential listeners before they even play the song. If someone is straight, he or she will probably not give queer rap a chance. This destroys chances for thousands of artists.

Case in point, the biggest queer rapper of our time is Frank Ocean. But he achieved fame because he stayed in the closet until after his first album became a hit. If his music had been labeled “queer rap” from the beginning, few people would have given him a chance.

So what’s the solution? Should we hide that a rapper is queer? Of course not.

But should we lump all rappers together under the “queer rap” umbrella? No. Let’s learn to evaluate them based on their musical merits first.

Check Out A New Album from Swedish Lesbian Rapper Silvana

Silvana Imam is a fiery lesbian Swedish rapper who rhymes about feminism, immigration and sexuality. Her motto? “I just write the truth of me.”

Rap helped her define her identity. Half-Lithuanian and half-Syrian, she often felt like an outsider as a child even though she looked white. Because her parents spoke only Lithuanian and Arabic at home, Silvana’s Swedish suffered.

She turned, surprisingly, to American rap music. Perhaps Silvana connected with it because these artists rapped about being colored outsiders on the fringe of mainstream society, just as Silvana was. Perhaps she connected with it because African-American rap was the furthest thing from her mostly-white Swedish community and Silvana needed an escape. Or perhaps she just liked the way it sounded. She started with Xzibit, the Fugees and Nas, and only later added Swedish rappers such as Petter.

The Fugees’ music taught her about the transformative power of socially conscious rap. Silvana finally had a framework for understanding and expressing the problems of the world, which influences her work to this day.

If you think it’s too late to start your own rap career, take heart – Silvana didn’t start rapping professionally until she was in her twenties. She had to fit in rap around her difficult psychology coursework in university. Despite the scheduling difficulties, she soon finished her first mixtape, Requiem. Her first album, IMAM, followed to widespread acclaim. Her second album, Naturkraft, debuted in 2016.

Her lyrics include incendiary lines such as, “Go kiss your f—ing Swaztikas,” and “We are the new Stonewall Revolution.”

In a recent VICE interview, she discussed her relationship with rap, what it’s like to win Sweden’s Artist of the Year 2016, and the widespread success of her latest album, Naturkraft.

She told VICE,

Everything I do is political. Society made me political – I’m a lesbian, a feminist, and an immigrant. We have a saying in Sweden: once you see political structures, you can’t un-see them.”

Sweden has responded well to her political music. She’s won several Swedish Grammies, including Lyricist of the Year, Best Live Act of the Year and Artist of the Year 2016. She was the first Swedish rapper to ever win Artist of the Year.

Listen to one of her most popular songs, Tänd Alla Ljus, which discusses capitalism and depression, below.

Then read more about Silvana and pick up your own copy of Naturkraft.

Queer Feminist Rapper Silvana Imam Is A Progressive Voice In Sweden’s Hip-Hop Scene

Originally born out of spoken word poetry where its performers would recite their words to a beat, it’s fitting that rap music is often used for far more than people rapping about how many houses they’ve got, how many bottles they ordered at the club or how many chains they have swinging around their neck. Very often it’s used to speak up and speak out about the oppression and hardships that people face.

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Wise to this use of rap music, is queer feminist rapper, Silvana Imam, who is incredibly outspoken about the mistreatment of people in her home country of Sweden.

Take, for instance, her performance at a protest that called out a neo-Nazi group who had recently attacked an anti-racist demonstration. At the rally she performed her track Tystas Ner and with lyrics like “Nazis sitting in parliament” that were pointed barbs towards to the political party the Swedish Democrats, Imam says that she received…

“a lot of threats from people affiliated with SD.That shit scared me … I still receive hate on the Internet for being a feminist and anti-racist. I’m like, this is what you have to put up with for being a freedom fighter?”

Not that a few hundred hateful comments on Twitter are going to shut Imam up because as a lesbian, a feminist and as someone who regularly speaks out against racism, there’s lots on her mind that she needs to get out there. Take her EP När Du Ser Mig • Se Dig for example, where she calls out the gender binary (“gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original”), notes racial discrimination in the workplace (“15 million people in the world are called Mohammed but whose name do they want to see on the CV?”) and cries out for change like the unapologetic feminist that she so proudly is (“the patriarchy must be overthrown”).

More: ‘Sisterhood of Hip Hop’ is Back, And So Will Out Rapper Siya

Other lyrics like “take the cake and throw it back at him, Anna-Mae” where she calls out her fellow rappers (this lyric is in reference to footage of Ike Turner aggressively shoving cake into the face of Tina Turner, Anna Mae being her real name) may cause offense but Imam never treads lightly in her music and that’s part of her appeal.

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On the social commentary of her lyrics, Imam also explains that:

“I’m a conscious rapper, I write songs about my life, and since I write through a lesbian-immigrant-woman’s perspective, it’s labeled as “political.” I’m letting people know how fucked up the world is through my art. This is about my life and my own survival in this patriarchal and anti-democratic world. A woman who writes love songs to other women causes immediate chaos in most peoples’ minds? That is something you should question. and not whether I’m political or not.”

We can’t argue that, as Imam’s words are more important than the question of her political leanings and we look forward to hearing more music from her when her second EP, Jag Dör För Dig, drops sometime this Spring.