Mine is not a not a feminist love story, with me writing about hip hop
-Raquel Cepeda
If you ask a hip hop fan about the most important piece of music history, they will likely bring up the male rappers of the early 90s. If you dig deeper, however, you’ll find that one of the most crucial pieces of the genre’s golden era are the women journalists who covered it.
As a woman, a woman of color, and moreover as a woman of color who covers mainly hip hop music in her journalistic practice, I find myself feeling like an outsider sometimes. I don’t rap, nor do I make beats, and I certainly can’t breakdance. After conducting an interview and getting a remarkable quote from a dope emcee or seeing that lightbulb moment with an introverted producer, the passion that fills my gut reminds me why I’m there in the first place; however, it doesn’t stop me from questioning myself: What do I have to offer to the subject, and what makes women in hip hop journalism so unique?
These questions have always in the back of my mind, but in a recent interview I did with the hosts of So Many Shrimp, Charne Graham and David Drake, I was inspired to explore them further. Their podcast is set in Drake’s living room, where they throw a party in honor of the interviewee, who is usually a DJ and provides music for the day. Intrigued by their dynamic and Charne’s background as a print journalist in the arts, I asked her for advice for any aspiring journalists, specifically for women of color: “You just have to get in where you fit in. Find a good mentor. It seems like there's not that many of us.”
I thought, “Mentors…” I wasn’t able to name any female hip hop journalists off the top of my head. This was a problem. I could think of all the names on the covers of books and on the inside covers of my favorite hip hop publications, but no women came to mind. Why didn’t these names stand out more? Why don’t I know any by heart? I wanted to dig into women’s relationship with hip hop, and how women journalists have contributed to the world of hip hop music throughout the years. Pioneers like bell hooks, Dream Hampton, Danyel Smith, and Raquel Cepeda have all paved the way for someone like me, and I wanted to understand when, why, and how.
I was able to score an interview with Raquel Cepeda. I explained that I was doing an assignment about women in hip hop journalism for school, and she replied swiftly via e-mail. I was grateful to have been able to speak with her on the phone.
Raquel Cepeda is best known not only for her work as an editor for Russell Simmons’ OneWorld Magazine from 2001-2004, but for being Editor of And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip Hop Journalists of the Last 25 Years. In addition to her print work, Raquel has gone on to make documentaries such as “Bling: A Planet Rock” about the diamonds that come from Sierra Leonne, which was co-produced by The United Nations and VH1. She is Dominican-American and born in the early 70s in Harlem, New York. She currently has two children, a 20-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, and is married to fellow hip hop chronicler Sascha Jenkins.
It was a Saturday morning when I called her. I had my recording ready to go and dialed her number. “Hello? Yea, hi.” Her New York accent and terse speech were unmistakable, and at first I thought she was annoyed. She then apologized if she was speaking weirdly because she was getting over a cold. After acclimating to her style, I took it as an effective way to get me to the point of the interview a lot sooner, rather than sticking with my laid back California chill. I appreciated her candor.
Her and I ended up spending more than forty minutes talking: from her relationship with hip hop to lessons that she’s passed down to her daughter. In speaking about how much hip hop journalism has changed since she started her career over twenty years ago, she says that it’s changed in many ways. One of which is the role of journalism: Cepeda likened it to its own character in the story of hip hop and that the journalists were growing and discovering the genre along with the artists themselves, creating an urgency to reading and writing pieces. Hip hop stories were “hard to pitch and to get saved a place,” because it was such a niche genre. Today, she says that, “if you don’t write about hip hop, you risk becoming irrelevant, and now it’s just about the music” rather than about the story surrounding it. “Back in the day, in the late 80s to early 90s, you had different access to the artists, and you’d spend a lot of time with them. Now, you’re lucky to get a ‘phoner’.”
In the early nineties, Cepeda’s bible when it came to journalism was The Village Voice, which she says had the best writing about the hip hop culture. “I didn’t even have to read the name of the writer, I could tell by the voice.”
Another big difference between “back in the day” (a phrase Cepeda used often) and now is how gentrified the coverage of hip hop has become: “It’s more buttoned up. It’s white and male, right?”. She then offered to challenge her own statement and gave credit to reviewers like Steven Hagar and Bob Christgau for keeping it down-to-earth.
With the ice broken and my interview jitters subsided, I asked her my burning question: “What do women’s voices bring to the field of hip hop journalism?” She cited the old school greats like Joan Morgan and Dream Hampton before saying that the priorities are different.
Men tend to confront each other with such bravado and machismo. The male rappers are more open [with female journalists] because you get more access: women are at the center of the universe and the head of the household. Our stories go beneath the surface. Like, we don’t care what kind of papers you’re rolling your blunts with.
I replied, “I also think that women are so used to being told that we can’t do something, and that many times it pushes us forward to do those things even more.” She agreed and said, “I approach my work with integrity. And many times, I’d be writing with a newborn baby on my lap.”
I asked her about an interview with Vibe magazine in 2012, in which she was asked about how she dealt with the misogyny she experienced at OneWorld magazine:
I’ve always been a tomboy. I’m from New York. I’m informed by where I’m from. I had a very rough upbringing and I approach people the way they approach me. I’ve gotten threatened by rappers, but I haven’t had issues with them. Oh, ‘Fuck me?’ Well fuck you.
Some years ago, Cepeda wrote a review for Rap Pages and her editor left in some of her notes about what the rapper she was writing about was wearing and certain mannerisms that he had. She received a call from someone who said that the rapper read her story and was mad and wanted to “step to her.” She replied, “Fine, step to me.” Nothing came of it, but Cepeda has had to stand her ground.
I’m a writer, I’m rough around the edges. I didn’t have that ivy league background, and I was always felt like I was being miseducated. But I was also ambivalent about school and what it did to my voice.
She visited a class at DePaul University in Chicago a few years back, and she was asked about the cursing at the beginning of her book, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina. Although not shocked, she challenged the student to question why male writers are given passes with their vulgarities and still win Pulitzer Prizes.
I asked Cepeda how she's instilled her years of wisdom with her daughter, Djali Brown-Cepeda. “It’s not about falling down, it’s about getting up, not sounding like someone else and about being true to who you are.” Lessons proved effective by the imprint Brown-Cepeda has left so far. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she's using her unique identity as influence, having been profiled by Urban Outfitters, Ebony, and most recently Latina Magazine in their latest segment of “Woman Crush(ing the Patriarchy) Wednesday” for co-founding the organization Students Decolonizing Academia at The New School where she is studying film and ethnicity & race.
She’s prepared her daughter for rejection by also reminding her to take that rejection and criticism, to not take it personal, to keep working on her craft, and when it comes to being in charge: “be comfortable with being the bad guy,” and very frankly, “If you can’t take the weight of being a leader, don’t lead.”
“Conversations are very binary,” Cepeda said. “We’re told we fit into these boxes, and we don’t. We fit into a gray area.” Her words rung true to me. As an Filipino-American woman whose place in hip hop was not always the intentional audience, that feeling of displacement sometimes makes me question my place in hip hop journalism. But she went on:
With hip hop and race, it wasn’t just a black and latino thing. You look at the graffiti or dance for instance, it was white, it was black, it was latino, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. It didn’t belong in the mainstream. We had our own lingua franca. Everyone was going through their shit. Teenagers came together to use it as a common language, to come together as a point of departure, a multi-cultural form of youth movement.
As the years have gone on, however, hip hop music has become more corporate, ascribed to race, and put into a box. When it was emerging in the mainstream in the early 90s, the ability to cover the music was new, and publications were starting to figure out that hip hop was something that was OK to cover, mostly because it was something that was starting to generate revenue.
Back in the day, getting hip hop music to air on Music Television (MTV) was a struggle, as for a while it was only white faces that you’d see on the channel, especially after the second British New Wave invasion. A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Run DMC were all initially marketed as more friendly versions of the more “aggressive” acts like N.W.A. and Public Enemy. As Notorious B.I.G.’s East Coast and 2Pac’s West Coast feud started to heat up, however, the powers-that-be noticed that these conflicts meant higher sales and bigger audiences. Since then, different elements of the genre have been taken advantage of and capitalized on: corporate endorsements, the objectification of women, and rapper feuds (also known as “beef”).
Today, hip hop music could be considered as pop. It’s more digestible, accessible, and reaches greater audiences. This carries over to musician endorsements and products. According to Forbes Magazine, producer and rapper Dr. Dre sold his Beats headphones to Apple for $3 billion in 2014, making hip hop as a genre the most profitable that year by far. In 2016, a total $250 million was earned by five different rappers. Moreover, hip hop continues to be the most streamed genre in the world, according to Spotify.
Cepeda and I spoke about the genre’s current state, and she says that with exception to Run the Jewels, Kendrick Lamar, and international hip hop, she doesn’t see the space or feel the interest for her to write about it, that she doesn’t “feel the fire.” The tactile experience of going into a record shop, sifting through the vinyl covers, or hearing from a kid down the block about an underground DJ party in an abandoned Bronx building are somewhat memories of days gone by. It is no longer about discovering new things together, as it is alone, in the comfort of your own home. Although there has been a revival in the nostalgia of buying and playing vinyl records, it isn’t as convenient for most as it is to discover artists through Soundcloud or curated Spotify playlists. “It’s very sexy, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s accessible.”
I wonder what’s in the future for people who want to be publicists in that space. Back then, you had to have a relationship with the artists. I mean, what are you able to get out of a piece that the artist themselves can’t Tweet?
Hip hop dystopia, it might seem, however Cepeda’s relationship with hip hop can be described as such: “If it wasn’t for hip hop, I wouldn’t have seen the world or had the exposure I had. Being in the hip hop world has informed my decisions and given me strength.”
That strength has led Cepeda to do some incredible work. After leaving OneWorld, she went on to make her transition to documentary filmmaking and writing. “I’m always aiming high, and whatever happens, happens.”
This article was originally written in the Spring semester of 2017 for Susan Snodgrass’s Interviewing and Investigative Reporting class.