Review: Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit, by Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay

Abstract

“In each move we make, problematizing power differences is at stake, whether they exist between us as co-ethnographers, between us and our research partners, or whether they are those that beset all of us involved in this study,” write Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay, both white, describing their research project on Black women’s culture production and community-building work through hip hop in Detroit (xxii). Readers are thus introduced to an immersive research/academic experience and story about a community that needs to be told. Unique to this project are the authors’ immersion in, and intentional relationship-building with, the community members they chose to study. Using a feminist reflexive approach, Farrugia and Hay took seriously the practice of collaborating and being with members of The Foundation, a group dedicated to supporting and making space for women and non-binary people in Detroit’s hip hop community. Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit is a welcome collaborative study, contributing to research on women, hip hop, feminism and community organizing.Drawing on seven years of fieldwork, Women Rapping Revolution offers new ways to consider Black women’s cultural performance through hip hop, not only as art but also as political work, community activism, and self-care. In this, readers get a project that is artist-focused and -supported and most concerned with artists’ contributions to speaking back, resisting, and living with contemporary neoliberal issues affecting Detroit’s working class and marginalized groups, including the privatization of land and city resources. The authors present Detroit as a character in a novel. As the artists witness and testify to structural and community issues in Detroit, readers get to know the many personalities of the city and its relationship to people who love it.In the first chapters of the book, the authors detail a history of a poorly documented underground, grassroots hip hop community, which led to the birth of The Foundation, and the need to support women and queer artists who use their art to respond to urban removal. In chapter one, Farrugia and Hay expound on Detroit’s deep but understudied hip hop history, one that was often brutal to women and queer artists. Although there had been spaces made for local hip hop artists to build community and showcase their art, there was no space for women to be apart. This led Piper, a visionary of The Foundation, to begin organizing, building relationships with artists and cultural workers to make space for women in hip hop in Detroit. Chapter two then locates the particular ways that women emcees are making claims on the city of Detroit, combating neoliberalism and shedding light on the city’s exploitative practices through anthems that critique urban renewal and highlight ways women emcees survive. In particular, Invincible/Ill Weaver, a well-known rapper and activist from Detroit uses their practice to create songs such as “Locust” that challenge the state’s redevelopment processes and practices that have affected the city for more than a decade.The middle of the book delves deeper into The Foundation. Chapter three considers how Foundation artists and the men who support them navigate gender politics through queerness and complex subjectivities. This chapter was very interesting to me as it took a queer studies approach to complicating assumptions around straight, cis-identified men’s participation in a women- and queer-focused hip hop space. In a book about women and hip hop, I wonder if a chapter focusing so much on supportive men and their negotiation of genderqueer identity formation was productive, but I do appreciate a fresh take on locating the contradictions of male participation in hip hop where gender and sexuality form. Whether we notice it or not, men’s participation in hip hop also belongs in the conversation around gender and sexuality formation and is just as complex.Chapter four examines beats, rhymes, and processes of production to explore a concept the authors call the Vulnerable Maverick, which stretches the restrictive discourse that relies on narrow scripts for Black women’s experience in order to consider complex subjectivities, particularly as artists in hip hop. The Vulnerable Maverick is a concept the authors created to better understand the complexities of Black female subjectivity, women-centered art, and how women create spaces for themselves in hip hop. Farrugia and Hay focus on their conversations with artists and samples of cultural production by four emcees and two producers from Detroit and a part of The Foundation. Through them, we see the way women hip hop artists take critical stances in their music against what is happening in Detroit. We also see the layers that complicate their identities, such as religion and love, offering readers context for how women artists value and use relationship-building to suggest alternative subject positions that rely on vulnerability and complex narratives.Chapter five is the book’s most original in expanding ethnographic research methodologies involving relationships with communities. The authors delve deeper into their collaborative production of the track and video of “Legendary” with The Foundation as a way to situate Black female subjectivity and hip hop at the core of environmental justice and ecomusicology. Environmental justice, Black women, and hip hop are not terms you often hear together, yet Farrugia and Hay not only put them together but also reveal how Black women artists in Detroit use hip hop as a strategic tool for building environmental awareness and advocacy (110). As a collaborative cultural production, song, and video created among researchers and community, “Legendary” shows us how important critical connections are to reimagining a space in a place that has been defined by neoliberal anti-Black racism, de-industrialization, and displacement.Chapter six gets readers to consider hip hop as activism and its knowledge element as deeply a part of the local work of Detroit’s cultural organizers and artists in The Foundation. Farrugia and Hay focus on three key community events—Dilla Youth Day, Denim Day, and The Foundation’s Women in Hip Hop Conference—which showcase the cultural work that artists accomplished. As an attendee and young scholar at The Foundation’s Women in Hip Hop Conference, it was a joy for me to read about the authors’ involvement and participation. The conference, which consisted of scholar-artist talks, panels, and concerts, brought many artists, activists, and others to Detroit during the Annual Allied Media conference to experience the community-building and strength of The Foundation and all of the work they have done to support Black women artists in Detroit and across the globe.Overall, Women Rapping Revolution is a story that we all need about Detroit's hip hop community and cultural production during neoliberal times. Its focus on Black women and queer subjectivity and a long history of Detroit cultural organizing and music make for a foundational and crucial text that will be studied for years to come. What struck me as important about the researchers' reflections in this book is their transparency about the difficulties, organizational splits/competition, time, exhaustion, and chronic lack of resources that were also a part of the story of joy, success, and community. Even when The Foundation ended, the authors did what most researchers are not able to do, which is to stay and help. They were able to think about the community they were with outside of the completion of this academic text. They continue to be a part of the community and maintain relationships with collaborators. I hope that after reading, readers make a point to build and organize in their own locales and make connections with artists and activists like those brought to light in Women Rapping Revolution.