By Janell Hobson for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration

Fifty years ago, a new sound was born. On Aug. 11, 1973, hip-hop emerged from a party in the recreation room of a Bronx building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. From that first party on, women-despite their marginalization in much of the music-have had a significant role to play.

"Women were there from the beginning," said Dee Barnes, a hip-hop journalist and emcee who was part of the rap duo Body and Soul and a host of Fox's late-night show Pump It Up! in the late '80s and early '90s. "Everybody talks about Kool Herc, but not enough people talk about his sister, Cindy. She was the catalyst for the party. She was part of the culture too."

Ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt concured, adding: "We've always been there. Because there are no parties in a heteronormative culture without women."

This is how hip-hop's "origin story" is told: Cindy Campbell, a Jamaican American Bronx resident, hosted a back-to-school jam for the young people on her neighborhood block. Her brother, Clive Campbell-better known on the streets as DJ Kool Herc-provided the musical entertainment.

During the final days of summer, Herc migrated the sound system culture popular in Jamaica's dance halls to New York City, while he emulated the two-turntable technique of DJs at the popular discos of Manhattan. Out of this mixing style, he created a continuous looping of the musical breaks of a James Brown funk record with Black and brown underground music-the kind not yet played on the radio.

This style caught fire, and as the youth drifted from house party to block party and from neighborhood to neighborhood, other innovators-from break-dancers to emcees who "rapped" to these new records to graffiti artists tagging their signature and affiliations on walls and subway cars-fleshed out a distinct underground culture that would soon dominate the world.

As hip-hop feminist studies pioneer Gwendolyn Pough explained, this new sound was also intergenerational, since "hip-hop has always borrowed from the musical past [through sampling]. It's always been old and young at the same time."

Gaunt, the ethnomusicologist, is willing to challenge the origin story, however.

"Some say it started in Brooklyn long before 1973," she contended. "People were popping and locking in L.A. before then. Graffiti was at least 10 years old, and rapping dates back to African forms of griot performances from the Niger delta region."

Nonetheless, she asserts that a feminist history of the past five decades of hip-hop ought to be told. Far from being secondary players, women and girls have been integral to this cultural phenomenon. Gaunt's award-winning book, The Games Black Girls Play, makes the argument that much of hip-hop is shaped by the sounds and beats of Black girlhood: their handclaps, rhyming songs and double Dutch jump rope games. These were easily sampled since they were in the public domain and, as Gaunt put it, these beats could "sound novel" to someone who was outside the culture.

Apart from providing the domestic and sonic spaces for hip-hop, women also participated as rappers, DJs, breakdancers (or B-girls) and graffiti artists. Earlier this year, MC Sha-Rock (née Sharon Green) was featured in an Instagram post and podcast highlighting women emcees from the early years of hip-hop and reclaiming her own history as the first female rapper, part of the group Funky 4 + 1.

"You gotta fight and fight and fight for your legacy," she insisted.

A coed rap group signed by the early hip-hop label Sugar Hill, Funky 4 + 1 premiered in 1979 alongside the first commercially successful rap song, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, whose producer, Sylvia Robinson, was a key player behind the scenes.

Journalist Barnes, who claims Sha-Rock as an influence, along with several early women rappers-including Mercedes Ladies, Lady B, Sparky D and Roxanne Shanté-also counts Robinson in the hip-hop "herstory," even though Robinson was an executive, not an artist.

"I know there's a lot of controversy as far as record companies, [exploitative] contracts and things that didn't go well in the beginning," Barnes said. "Nevertheless, what Robinson has done in creating this label and having hip-hop brought into the mainstream, that was historical. 'Rapper's Delight' was the introduction to hip-hop for many people."

Drew Dixon, a former executive at Def Jam Recordings, a record label that launched the careers of many prominent artists, said this was the case for her.

"The New York kids dropped 'Rapper's Delight' on me," she recalled. "I'm like, What is that? This is crazy!"

A Washington, D.C., native whose mother, Sharon Pratt, served as D.C. mayor from 1991 to 1995, Dixon admitted that she was able to access hip-hop music through summer vacations at Martha's Vineyard, a staple of her Black middle-class childhood.

"I loved going to Martha's Vineyard because I met the New York kids," Dixon said. "I got out of D.C., and the New York kids were bumping this hip-hop. The music was so rebellious, so in-your-face and lyrically dense. I fell in love with it!"

This is how hip-hop would cross the country and, indeed, the globe. It followed along with Black and Latinx youth who were listening to the music via bootleg cassettes, mixtapes and guerrilla radio. The music began to permeate the airwaves. Over the decades, hip-hop would eventually remix and mutate across diasporic communities in the U.S., and from Jamaican dancehall to Nigerian Afrobeats to Ghanaian Hiplife, from Latin reggaeton to Punjabi bhangra to K-pop and J-pop.

Southern hip-hop scholar Regina Bradley gets impatient when hip-hop fans focus on one place.

"Hip-hop started in New York, but it didn't end there," she argued. "It got stamped. It's a passport full of stamps."

She highlights the significance of the Atlanta-based rap duo Outkast and other Southern artists who gave us trap and bounce, subgenres with distinctive beats and lyrical themes. These artists emerged not long after the controver- sy surrounding another Southern rapper, Luke Campbell, whose Miami-based 2 Live Crew fought a high-profile court battle over censorship of their music and videos.

This regional representation matters. No longer was hip-hop relegated to the cold climate of the Northeast-a region where most hip-hop videos featured fully clothed residents from the neighborhood, and where women rappers like Queens-based Salt-N-Pepa, Brooklyn-based MC Lyte and Newark, N.J.-based Shanté and Queen Latifah proved their rap skills or defended women against the sexism in rap lyrics and the community at large.

Of course the history of women in hip-hop would be incomplete without the case against 2 Live Crew's 1989 album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, which a Florida court found to be obscene under state law. As legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw has written, most of what was viewed as "obscene" were the hypersexualized images of Black women's bodies, both lyrically and visually in the album art and music videos. When 2 Live Crew ultimately won their case in the U.S. Court of Appeals, an explosion of fetishized depictions of Black and brown women's bodies took off, including the birth of the booty-centric music video.

Enter the video vixen from the "dirty South," her scantily clad body on display in the hot climate of the region: on a Miami beach, or a Freaknic (later spelled Freaknik) gathering in Atlanta among Black college students, and especially in the strip clubs, a ubiquitous spectacle in millennial rap and trap music. Her objectified presence in lyrics, on album covers and in music videos ignited public conversations over obscenity, including from Black feminists and elder members of the community-most notably C. Delores Tucker, the late politician and civil rights activist who vocally denounced hip-hop as morally detrimental to Black women and Black communities.

Despite these debates, hip-hop was often dismissed as "party music," not to be taken seriously, even though its political potential could be heard in "conscious rap" by groups like Public Enemy, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, the Fugees and L.A.-based groups like N.W.A, who caught national attention (including from the FBI) with their 1988 anti-police-brutality record. The international hip-hop scene is also filled with politically conscious and feminist rappers in places like Cuba, Gaza, Brazil and South Africa.

Tricia Rose, whose 1994 book Black Noise helped launch hip-hop studies in academia, recognizes the balance need- ed in criticisms of the culture, one that resists racially profiling the music while also calling out the rampant misogyny inherent in the culture.

"In my work, I tried to distinguish between affirmational and transformational love," Rose explained. "Affirmational love is critical-people need to know that they're loved no matter what. But transformational love, which is 'This is off-limits and let me tell you why,' is also critical for our growth."

This has been a constant dilemma for women in the culture: How do we love hip-hop when hip-hop doesn't always love us back?

In the 1990 Ms. article "Women Rap Back," author Michele Wallace highlighted how women rappers have created necessary space for love, critique and feminist resistance, citing Queen Latifah's "Ladies First" (1989), featuring U.K. rapper Monie Love, and also complicated sexual politics (think Salt-N-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex" [1990] or TLC's "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" [1992]), made space for body positivity (as Missy Elliott did with her Afrofuturistic queer-adjacent videos), gave the video vixen her voice back (through the sexually explicit lyrics and videos of Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown) or protested gender-based violence.

This includes street harassment-Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." (1993)-and intimate-partner violence- Eve's "Love Is Blind" (1999), featuring Faith Evans, the latter of whom opened up about the turbulence during her marriage to slain rapper Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls ("the Notorious B.I.G.").

Dixon, a music lover who came from a political family, immediately recognized the potential for activism through hip-hop. She wanted to carve out a career path that bridged her twin interests in Black political empowerment and music.

Dixon eventually landed what she called her "dream job" as an A&R (artists and repertoire) representative at Def Jam, responsible for recruit- ing, signing and nurturing new talent to the label. In this capacity, she signed artists like Capleton and Kali Ranks during the golden age of hip-hop in the 1990s, which Dixon argues reached its "apex" with Lauryn Hill's critically acclaimed mega-success album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)-for which Hill was the first hip-hop artist and last Black woman to receive a Grammy Award in the coveted Album of the Year category.

Dixon worked with promising talent like Hill, Kanye West and John Legend, and she sparked the idea behind the hit I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By (1995), featuring rapper Method Man and hip-hop soul singer Mary J. Blige. But her success was violently disrupted, she said, when Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons sexually assaulted her, a story that she shares in the HBO Max documentary On the Record, which features interviews with 20 survivors of sexual assault and harassment speaking out against the hip-hop mogul.

"I'm really proud of the role that I played in hip-hop," Dixon said. "It's very painful to me, though, that I have very little to show for it because it was untenable for me as a woman to remain in the industry. And to find myself again and again having to navigate around sexual harassment, sexual assault and the constant 3D chess game that I had to do again and again in interactions with men after the trauma of the rape. It's just very hard to do your job."

By speaking out, Dixon resists her cultural erasure, as does Dee Barnes, who is also a survivor of violence. The same year (1991) that the nation was horrified by the release of the Rodney King video (which gave visual evidence supporting N.W.A's anti-police-brutality song), Barnes was brutally beaten by then-N.W.A member Dr. Dre over a perceived "diss" by former N.W.A bandmate Ice Cube that Barnes aired on Pump It Up!

"I still suffer from migraines," Barnes said. "That's the physical pain that I get, right on the side where my head was smashed repeatedly against a brick wall. It's hard when you're living paycheck to paycheck and you don't have the proper insurance, so I can't go to the doctor and get my head fully scanned."

The fallout from these violent acts pushed Barnes and Dixon from the culture, while both Simmons and Dr. Dre have become multimillionaires. Such major disparities have caused scholar Elaine Richardson, founder of the Hiphop Literacies Conference, to question "racial capitalism," she said, "[when] we really have to be thinking about collective empowerment."

While Simmons has denied allegations of sexual assault, Dr. Dre has tried to minimize his violent past (including reports by Barnes and his ex-girlfriend, R&B singer Michel'le, among others) in a bid to secure a respectable legacy exalting his commercial and artistic success.

However, Barnes also has her own legacy to protect.

"I really want people to go back to the focus of the show Pump It Up!" Barnes said. "I was the first young Black woman to host a hip-hop show, the first hip-hop journalist on television on a major network on a show that lasted three years."

Dixon is likewise breaking the silence about her place in hip-hop history.

"It's gratifying to me that people remember me," Dixon said. "Five years ago, I was totally invisible and erased from the story of hip-hop-in some ways buried by me because it was tied to so much trauma and pain. But what I've been most encouraged by since I came forward and participated in On the Record has been the scholars, the thinkers who love hip-hop but who are really smart, grounded and clear. Those are the voices that have stood up for Meg Thee Stallion, called out the misogynoir regarding Russell Simmons, R. Kelly, across the board. It's really this generation ... this squad that I believe is going to keep this conversation going in a way that I hope starts to trickle back into the music, into the art, into the blood- stream of the culture."

This is the collective voice of what Joan Morgan, author of the seminal text When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, has coined "hip-hop feminism"-whose throughline can be traced from hip-hop artists to writers and scholars.

Hip-hop scholar Aisha Durham, an original member of the Crunk Feminist Collective, which popularized terms like intersectionality and misogynoir on social media, remains optimistic about women's future in hip-hop, despite the intersecting inequalities of race, class and gender.

"I'm always going to have this push-pull reaction to hip-hop," Durham admitted. "We can celebrate the success of contemporary rappers like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, but we can't really think about hip-hop's radical potential within a capitalist, heteropatriarchal, white supremacist system. We can, however, talk about moments of rupture, so I'm always invested in those moments of rupture."

Those moments are at the core of the survival and subversions of hip-hop, as well as women's participation in it.

"Hip-hop is still here when everyone thought it was a fad that would fade away," Barnes mused. "Well, I'm OG now. It's up to me to uplift women and make sure that younger generations know about them. That's my job."

To reiterate Sha-Rock, this is a legacy worth fighting for.


Janell Hobson wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.

The Wind River Water and Buffalo Alliance is looking for a graphic artist to develop a logo.

Before Europeans arrived, some 60 million buffalo roamed North America.

After the animal was slaughtered, in part to extinguish tribes that lived alongside buffalo for centuries, just 23 remained by 1900.

Wes Martel - senior conservation associate with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition - said the new logo should convey a message of hope and power, as the alliance works to restore buffalo and other key elements of indigenous culture.

"So now we're seeing a revival," said Martel, "we're seeing a new energy, we're seeing our young people now becoming educated in the modern technological ways and scientific ways that we need to protect what we have. And that's all we're trying to do, protect a way of life."

Artists are encouraged to submit logo designs by email to media@greateryellowstone.org by May 15. The top entry will be awarded $2,500, second place will receive $1,00, and third place gets $500.

Details on how to apply and the design specifications are online at greateryellowstone.org.

The alliance - based on the Wind River Indian Reservation at Fort Washakie, Wyoming - uses a community-centered approach to support food sovereignty, river restoration, buffalo restoration, advocacy, and education.

Martel said the reservation's landscapes are ideal for protecting the Indigenous way of life.

"We have everything at Wind River that Yellowstone has, except Old Faithful," said Martel. "All of the buffalo, and grizzlies, and wolves, and bighorn sheep, and elk, and deer, and antelope - and all these other relatives that we have on this earth, are with us at Wind River."

The project is an Indigenous-centered organization of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes working with elders, young people and tribal leaders.

Martel said he hopes the new logo can capture the sentiments and energy felt when tribes are blessed with buffalo, their spiritual connection, and the power they bring to lodges, ceremonies, and overall well-being.

"This whole movement that we're seeing now, of restoring buffalo and restoring our heritage and restoring our energy, our spiritual strength," said Martel, "that's really powerful."




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By Kate Mothes for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration

In Norway, the hardingfele, or the Hardanger fiddle, is deeply woven into the nation's cultural tapestry. From the earliest known iteration made in 1651 by Ole Jonsen Jaastad, the instrument originates from its namesake region, the western district of Hardanger, where it was traditionally used to play wedding music, dances, and other songs.

A Hardanger fiddle looks at first glance like an intricately ornamented violin, with a fingerboard and tailpiece often inlaid with mother-of-pearl, ebony, or bone. It is more lightweight, however, with four slimmer strings, ink decorations on the wooden body, and the scroll at the end often carved into the likeness of a dragon or wild animal.

Another key element of a Hardanger fiddle is the addition of sympathetic strings, which sit in a layer below those that the bow touches, vibrating when the instrument is played and adding a richness to the sound. "You are playing, generally, two notes at once whenever you play a Hardanger fiddle," says luthier Robert "Bud" Larsen, a side effect of the instrument's flat bridge.

Larsen, who is based in Brainerd, Minnesota, was introduced to the art of fiddle-making and restoration with the help of local violin-maker Gunnar Helland. Helland had emigrated to the U.S. from Norway in 1901. After stints in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, he established a shop in Fargo, North Dakota, to carry on his family's craft tradition.

"Our family moved into the same building where Gunnar had his shop," Larsen says. "We hung out a lot, and I was very interested in what he was building. When I was in the seventh grade, he gave me an old violin and helped me through the process of restoring it."

Larsen's lifelong love for the instrument was born. Over the next several decades, he would build at least 40 Hardanger fiddles and restore more than twice that many.

Preserving, and Evolving, Tradition

Troyd Geist, state folklorist of North Dakota, is a big fan of traditional culture and history. He focuses not only on the heritage of traditional arts but also sees the potential for craft to contribute to health and a sense of wellbeing. He heads an apprenticeship program where a master artist is paired with a younger person in order to pass along knowledge.

Geist is fascinated by how U.S. makers have gradually evolved the Hardanger fiddle over time. Though the instruments have maintained many of their recognizable features, their designs have become distinctly American.

"For instance, the fiddles in Norway would have different rosemaling designs and different flowers that they really focus on," Geist says. "And the head above the fret is often carved, in Norway, like a lion or a dragon. They do that here, too, but they also carve, instead of a lion or a dog head on the end of it, a buffalo head."

Larsen and others in the community who are passionate about the Hardanger fiddle liken the craft to being similar to language.

"We know that a language that is not willing to change will soon die," says Larsen, who was a linguist in Papua New Guinea for more than 20 years before turning to fiddle making. "If people say a language should be prescriptive and you should write it the way the dictionary tells you to, and speak it that way, then the language will die out because it can't change. And that's the same with Hardanger fiddle music. Because new music is being written, and it's being used in different genres as well, it will stay with us for a long time because the music has learned to adapt to people's interests and cultures."

Both Geist and Larsen agree that it's important to continue to teach others how to make the fiddles, which can sometimes take a novice apprentice up to two years to complete. Some makers seek to protect their secrets, but "if you're not willing to share broadly and freely, the tradition is going to die," Geist says.

A Generational History

First comes the making of a fiddle and then, of course, comes the playing. Arts Midwest's GIG Fund recently supported an event at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County (HCS) where more than 220 people attended a concert performed by the Fargo Spelemannslag.

A spelemannslag is a group of folk musicians, often dominated by fiddles.

The wintertime concert featured a song written two centuries ago by Eirik Medås. "Eirik's direct descendant, a high school student named Elsa Ruth Pryor, played a new song that she wrote herself, on a Hardanger Fiddle that she made herself," says Markus Krueger, programming director of HCS.

"Minnesota and North Dakota are the two most Norwegian states in America. For a lot of people in our community, this is the music of their childhood that they remember their parents and grandparents playing," Krueger says, reflecting on the significance of the event. "It's a symbol of Norwegian culture and heritage, and even more than that, it's a symbol of Midwest culture."

The concert featured performances by Bud Larsen and Loretta Kelley, the president of the Hardanger Fiddle Association of America. It was a meaningful showcase of a living tradition, passed down through generations.

"The immigrants brought their fiddles with them, and they kept playing them in America, says Krueger. "They kept making them in America. We still make them and play them today."


Kate Mothes wrote this story for Arts Midwest.

By Ann Thomas for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration

Natural light floods through large windows lining nearly every wall of the Trappist Caskets production facility in northeast Iowa, wrapping it in view of New Melleray Abbey's 3,400 acres, 1,200 of which are abundant in timber.

The storage racks at Trappist Caskets, designed and fabricated by master welder Brother Dennis, stretch six caskets tall between the concrete floor and the rafters that span the length of the shipping bay. This area manages the ebb and flow of production and shipping. The goal is to keep them full at all times. Today, there are several vacancies-demand has been very high.

At first glance, the racks are overwhelming for their enormity, and the realization that each space represents an individual awaiting preparation for burial adds more gravity.

A wealth of midwestern natural resources, combined with the Trappist monks of New Melleray's need to financially support themselves through their own labor and maintain a life steeped in prayer, inspired its entry into casket manufacturing in 1999.

Each casket crafted by monks and employees at this facility in Peosta, Iowa, captures unrepeatable characteristics in walnut, oak, cherry or pine grain. But one casket on the shipping bay's floor this Tuesday stands out. Its design and far deeper red draw the eye quicker than all other cherry caskets in the shelving.

The lone casket served its owner first as a coffee table, its cherry wood aging in open air for 20 years. Rings left by glasses mark the lid's finish. With upholstering completed this morning, and its lid newly reinforced, this old cherry casket is on its way to the funeral home so as to serve the priest in death who purchased it. He will be buried in it within the next few days. Paul Pankowski, Production Manager for Trappist Caskets, notes it isn't uncommon for caskets to be purchased and turned into bookshelves, wine racks, and coffee tables, then for owners to eventually be buried in them.

The design for these have evolved since the cherry wood one was built. Recent interest in green burials necessitates biodegradable joinery and alternate handles, meaning designs continue to evolve.

Pankowski oversees all aspects of production on the circuitous workshop floor, and can identify by eye where boards moving their way through originated. He points out lighter tones that range through black walnut of Wisconsin and Missouri. Iowa's distinguishes itself from all others by richness of its depth, and the incomparable hardness of central Iowa's oak dulls blades quicker than any other wood. The whiteness and clarity of pine harvested from the monks' own land is easily recognizable in contrast to pine sourced from other areas.

For Brother Joseph, it's hard to believe the growth of this work. From the production facility's modest beginnings in the monks' barns to the far reaching ties maintained through prayer and memorial tree plantings for those buried in Trappist Caskets and their families-the span is remarkable.

Brother Joseph, who began in those barns in 2006 and continues to work in varied roles from woodworking to upholstering in the new facility completed in 2007, recalls how cramped and dusty the barns were. He stresses how critical the employment of nearby community members is now - to meet the high demand for their caskets and to ensure the monks' freedom to maintain the rhythm of monastic life.

The monks' concern for land stewardship led Brother Joseph to pursue the hire of their full-time forester, John Schroeder, six years ago. Schroeder is initiating large scale prairie restoration and reforestation projects which prioritize the needs of New Melleray Abbey's land and creeks lying on the cusp of Iowa's Driftless region. It is an area spared by the grinding weight of glaciers moving out of the midwest around 12,000 years ago. This land's delicate ecological balance and exceptionally rich soil are responsible for traits found in the trees that grow here.

Among the most grateful customers Trappist Caskets serves are parents who must bury their children. The monks offer these caskets free of charge. Funeral homes and hospitals are quick to connect families in these tragic circumstances to the monks. The Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule ensures that consumers are not limited to caskets offered by funeral homes for purchase and use, and anyone is free to contact Trappist Caskets, whose staff is always ready to guide families through meeting needs.

Trappist Caskets' employees can relate to this devastating experience. Production Manager Paul Pankowski and his wife lost a premature baby, and his first-hand knowledge infuses compassion in every step of the production process. His three-decade long experience within strict quality parameters of the custom kitchen cabinetry business prior to working at Trappist Caskets also informs his approach to all he does.

While the end goal of both industries is perfection, his purpose, as well as all who work at Trappist Caskets, is not to turn a profit, but rather offer an encounter with beauty and consolation during a time of grief.


Ann Thomas wrote this story for Arts Midwest.


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