Farai Chideya spoke at Harvard last Saturday at the NextLevel. She talked about how she made it, and made it she has. She's ABC News' youngest correspondent, a two-time author and quite a success story. Hip hop's oldest magazine, The Source, sent its deputy editor, Dimitry Leger, to talk about breaking into hip hop journalism. (He gave great tips, the majority of which included having people you want to meet and speak to on speed dial, calling them until they talk to you, and a willingness to suffer). Kevin Shand, National Marketing Director at Rawkus records, the independent label that could, talked about starting a record company during his turn at the conference's power sessions. The theme I see here is agency. That's what I want to talk about, instead of rehashing what they said, because if you'd wanted to know you'd have joined the 300 people at the conference. Your loss, but anyway, allow me a minute to speak on agency in hip hop, as it relates to women.

Hip hop. The 20-year-old phenomenon can be defined, under the ancient definition, as a social movement that was started by the black and Puerto Rican underclass in the Bronx during the late '70s, or by the '90s version of the term, as a culture that includes a type of spoken-word-over-beats music with a collection of dance videos that are now seeping into the houses of the world's elite. The definitions are part of a continuum; what started as the cries of a disadvantaged group has become a billion dollar industry, one where the investors need the black face (not just any black face, but the beleaguered black face) to see their maximum profit potential. It follows that the industry has become a vehicle by which youth can leave their current situation. It's a way in which young boys can both exploit and be exploited by the capitalist system in a manner that doesn't include their need to buy into the Protestant work ethic. And its participants get the chance to become famous. Can women get a piece?

Where do women fit in a world where the music of social unrest is the grounds for American-style success stories? The only space that I see for women is one that makes room for subversion, because if women are going to argue for room at all, it needs to be new room. Let me restate: Honey, we gotta make a change. In fact, if we are to look at hip hop from a progressive-evolutionist stand point, we'd have to say that the boys can never go back to the way they were, go back to speaking because they didn't really have a voice. The existence of ice rocking, megalo-maniacal, comic book/mob-movie obsessed opportunists is going to keep men that aren't like this from being heard. But women's slate, since they have historically been on the margins of hip hop, is much closer to clean. And we of the domestic workers-cum-welfare royalty ilk have other ways of making money. Stupid social programs have been supporting our endeavors for a while. We have time between neglecting our children and watching our soap operas to make art. (I pray that people realize that I've been facetious for the past couple of sentences and I'm about to switch back to truth starting now). A friend of mine recently said that art leads the majority, but follows the margins. The boys messed around and got caught; hip hop is now mainstream. Guess whose turn it is at bat.

And now that I've prophesied the rise and triumph of the hourglass-emcee, I have some things I think that the female rapper has to do. We have to convince America that we struggle too, to form the master narratives of people who don't look like us. Now some of our older sisters have paved the way for us. In fact, since the release of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who've considered suicide when the rainbow is enough, Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Michelle Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, there's been an explosion of literature telling the world about black women's problems. I know about it. I'll assume that you know about it. But who's going to bring it to the world's walkmans.

Making child care glamorous is tough, so I propose that we get confrontational. Men's insistence that we can't raise our children bugs me. Let's take it to the stage. The constant mantra in male hip hop is about the absense of a father, while mentioning the mother only because she was there, like a stand in. Boo! Okay, the woman's place in the family is extremely important, and women emcees should speak to the world about this. The best way is to not even engage men in debate about whether or not the role of the mother is important, but to get out there and speak about it. Let the suckers realize all that women have done for their sorry behinds. The emotion behind this will take the music beyond the people we are addressing. In fact, the hard life issue that's so necessary to the culture of spectacle and voyeurism that supports hip hop lives within this debate. If people believe that the struggle of the woman is equal or better than the struggle of the man, female hip hop will sell.

Another issue that this music can address deals with issues of sexuality. When a female rapper says that she loves sex, she's chastised. When it's our music, it won't go like that. We need "be happy with your body" lyrics, "love yourself wholly and truly and you'll never be alone waiting for Tyrone to call you" lyrics. Oh and we must address this cult of "chickenhead envy," a phrase coined by the "hip hop feminist" Joan Morgan, the bandit that dogs sisters who work hard and feel that they deserve a salaried member of the male population only to feel that they often lose him to girls who make it their life goal to catch this type of man. There needs to be several songs about that, cause we are going to have to come to a compromise on issues that surround that debate.

But Shatema, why can't we use this hip hop that you swear is yet to come attack the existing canon of hip hop's objectification and hatred of women, the males' insistence that we look half-black and Filipino or we won't see them? It should and will (I have thousands of things to say on that subject). We have to keep the problems straight in our mind and not attack sexism like it's a new thing, created by hip hop. True, women are most likely to be killed by someone they know, but why? Femme-hop has an even bigger fight than the fight against what black men think of us, and how they treat us, because someone else is writing the pedagogy that informs this frame of mind. Intellectual rap-diva Tricia Rose has this to say: "The second example I want to draw on to illuminate the tension between aesthetics and sociohistorical contexts of rap's sexism and misogyny. Sherley Anne Williams's talk about rap grossly misunderstood the context within which rap develops and, unintentionally perhaps, located sexism in rap as an anticommunity symptom of a postindustrial urban nightmare rather than a manifestation of a long-standing set of gender relations." See, there you go, subversion. We have the privilege of having a new and different way of attacking the system.

But let me make something clear. Girl rappers should definitely party with dudes. I'm not advocating separation from men, because we can't live without them. I'm just saying that we should think about them less and bring our issues into focus. Stop thinking about what they've done to us and start telling everybody about what we can do for ourselves. Hey, if this little movement creates a male version of a chickenhead, I won't be happy. I mean, I want girls to do their own thing and not what the men do. But notice, I didn't say that I'd be too upset either.