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Originally Posted by Onani Nic
The Beatsie Boys were highly sexist in their early days, maybe even homophobic too. Maybe it should be a vote between J5 and black eyed peas.
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obviously they have moved on since this so maybe its not fair to bring it up but I believe the reason that Kate from luscious jackson left (or fell out with) the Beasties way back was down to their serious consideration of calling one of their first records "don't be a fag". There's no question that thats not anything they'd consider now but it does illustrate the point about hip hop that always seems to crop up about sexism/homophobia/etc.
I always think that at its best Rap is a pretty spontaneous mode of expression and as such can inevitably come off pretty unedited and ugly but that this is the same quality which allows for the capture of a thought process (if the artist gets the opportunity to release a few records) like you see with the beasties, ghostface, ice-t, public enemy, where they initially come out conforming to stereotypical and received notions of what it is to be a rapper and the attitudes which that supposedly engenders, but that over time, and when confronted by a world and culture outside that of the trying to get ahead musician, those opinions change and mature away from being flipant and offensive into something smarter.
that said, those examples are depressingly few and far between and in particular the rap worlds record for homophobia is almost uniformly retarded, which is bizarre in a genre so over-the-top macho it might as well be a village people audition.
(sorry for the rant, there's work i'm trying to avoid doing.)
oh, my favourite mc's are ODB, Chuck D, MF Doom, Ghostface, Gonzalez, Clipse, Q Tip, Mos Def, Nosaj from New Kingdom, Both mc's from Company Flow and Umar Bin Hassan.