From hip-hop’s earliest days, feminine rappers have needed to battle for consideration, not to mention respect. Because the rap music class debuted in 2004, the award has been given to exactly one feminine rapper: Megan Thee Stallion, for her “Savage” remix, which acquired an help (and a few important Grammy familiarity) from featured artist Beyoncé in 2021. Though 9 female-led albums have been nominated for that rap class because it was launched in 1996, Cardi B grew to become the primary solo feminine artist to win, with “Invasion of Privateness,” in 2018. Elsewhere, Eve grew to become the primary — and solely — one to take finest melodic rap efficiency when that class was launched in 2002; the identical goes for Megan Thee Stallion with the “Savage” remix in the most effective rap efficiency class in 2021.
Voting for Academy members only in the near past opened on Oct. 11, and labels and artists are already forecasting that the 2024 Grammy Awards will course-correct. Over the previous 12 months, girls have undeniably ushered in a brand new hip-hop renaissance, one with the identical fervor that artists like Lil’ Kim and Cunning Brown introduced across the flip of the millennium — and there’s exponentially extra of them. The present crop of newcomers — amongst them Ice Spice, Kaliii, Doechii, Sexyy Crimson and Coi Leray, to call just a few — has parlayed viral tracks on social media into tangible radio hits. In the meantime, extra established MCs (and prior Grammy nominees) together with Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat have continued to pour gasoline on their unflappable runs as hip-hop titans.
So why ought to the Recording Academy have a change of coronary heart? Many predict that the ubiquity is an excessive amount of to disregard. “I believe the ladies acquired it — the Academy goes to assist,” says Leray. Earlier this 12 months, her nostalgia-nodding “Gamers” slingshotted from TikTok viral earworm to No. 9 on the Billboard Sizzling 100, spending 26 weeks on the chart. “All people is supporting the ladies proper now,” she provides. “How are you going to not? You thought I used to be taking part in after I mentioned women are gamers too?”
Kaliii enthusiastically concurs. “We’re taking on — whenever you take heed to a music that’s lit proper now, it’s a feminine music,” she says.
No stranger to viral success, the Atlanta native equally mined TikTok gold with “Space Codes,” which grew to become a prime 40 hit and spawned a collection of female-featuring remixes, together with Sexyy Crimson and Kenzo B. “I really feel like when there’s a feminine artist, it’s [usually] not plenty of us at one time,” she continues. “Folks solely deal with that one artist or that one individual, they usually get type of scared. It’s like, ‘That is what we’re used to.’ However now, the ladies are placing themselves in folks’s faces, and you haven’t any selection however to hear and see us.”
Some credit score the latest dominance of ladies in hip-hop to the flexibility they’re bringing to the artwork type. Ice Spice, for example, cornered the drill market and simply as shortly lent her signature deadpan circulate to collabs with Taylor Swift and PinkPantheress, whereas Doechii chased the gooey R&B smash “What It Is (Block Boy)” with hard-nosed rap data like “Booty Drop” and “Pacer.”
But it surely’s additionally a testomony to their work ethic and the mentality that extra is extra. “This 12 months, and up to now few years, girls have completely, completely outworked the boys,” says Leray’s supervisor Amina Diop, CEO of the Diop Company and a senior VP at Republic Data. “A music listener can discover considered one of these females they’ll hook up with as a result of there’s so many differentiations they usually’re so numerous. It hasn’t been like that for a really very long time in hip-hop.”
With that, in fact, the competitors on the 2024 Grammys shall be fierce. If the Grammys are a recognition contest, then potential rap class nominees must take care of main data from Gunna, Travis Scott and DJ Khaled. Even then, says Kaliii, it’s not nearly awards — it’s about sustaining the momentum that she and her friends have constructed up.
“It’s undoubtedly a feminine takeover,” she says. “Not simply this 12 months, not simply the subsequent 12 months, however the years after that. We’re right here to remain.”
