These female emcees’ relationships with men form the emotional nub of their music. Goldee’s raps are a way of revisiting, acting out, and taking revenge for the abuses she’s received from men in her life: Goldee’s sister was murdered in at the culmination of an abusive relationship. Goldee is also a single mom, and her daughter’s father is currently in prison. Conscious Daughters use their lyrics to reverse or appropriate gender roles (as in the song “Kill My Nigga”). Jamaica, who plans to call her debut album Both Sides of The Game –to acknowledge the duality of hard/tender, singing/rapping, masculine/feminine forces in her personality- is struggling to open up a space for femininity within the medium of gangsta rap. She seeks equality with the men who populate her world, and when she doesn’t see it, she’ll impose it –usually by denigrating other women.

In other words, they are all using hip hop to go toe-to-toe with the men who alternately hurt and affirm them -rather than merely accepting male authority- but in the course of trying to make their music, they always come up against the limitations of misogyny, which define the core of gangsta rap. The question is whether gangsta rap itself is the problem –whether they’re so structurally limited by the medium that they can’t ever escape the problem of unequal gender relations, or whether they’re limited by they’re own consciousness, and are merely trying to ape the men who control them, either by shooting back, (the “Kill My Nigga” strategy) or by defiling other women. On that note, are they accepting or changing the rules of the game?

The glaring problem for most female emcees is that, even though they’re invited to perform many shows, they have a paucity of recorded material. A lot of that has to do with the fact that most females are dependent on male “enablers” (For example, when Paris’s former label, Scarface Records, folded, Conscious Daughters fell off the scene. They eventually took day jobs and started raising families.), because the people who fund labels are usually more skeptical of a female act than a male act. Moreover, few females have their own studios –production requires technical skills and access to equipment that isn’t available to most females, and females aren’t often “given a pass” to hangout in studios the way dudes are. Even with the rise of more female producers and engineers, the culture of hip hop is still very male-oriented.

Aside from these logistical difficulties, the culture of gangsta rap hasn’t fundamentally changed: In writing songs, women constantly come up against the limits of a genre that still hates women, at its core. They’re burdened either with becoming torchbearers, or accepting the rules of the game.

All three rappers use the word “bitch” in their raps, to describe, and sometimes defile other women. While reclaiming this term can seem enabling and liberating, it’s still important to note that all of them have been treated like bitches over the course of their rap careers. Goldee went to the studio to hang out and record after the female emcee showcase at the Black Box in March. A guy slammed her against the wall, ran his hand up the whole front of her body, and said “You a beautiful bitch, aren’t you?” She turned around and kicked him.