To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb

High and Rising which took rhyme to new degrees of abstraction, running extended, elusive metaphors like “Potholes in My Lawn” for the length of an entire song.

      The thematic boundaries of what constituted hip hop were not the only thing expanding. Hip hop's relationship to female practitioners of the microphone craft had always been ambivalent at best. And unlike blues, which is literally incomprehensible minus its female articulators; or soul, in which women artists are arguably more aesthetically influential than males; or gospel, where women absolutely are more influential, hip hop's boundary-stretching visionaries were overwhelmingly male. Hip hop's early development had no female artists who were as proportionately influential as Bessie Smith or Aretha Franklin in their respective genres (though, ironically, Sylvia Robinson of Sugar Hill Records was arguably the most important industry executive in the early history of the form). The Golden Era witnessed the ascent of female artists like MC Lyte and Queen Latifah as both artistically and commercially significant, Roxanne Shante as a lyrical assassin with no adjectival modifiers preceding her name, and a regiment of second-tier female MCs like Antoinette, Monie Love, Ice Cream T, and Sparky D. At its core, hip hop was still about a cornered black masculinity using verbs and nouns as a means of defending itself—but the Golden Era brought with it a (grudging) respect for a small collection of women MCs.