Cindy Wonderful (left) and Sarah Adorable of Scream Club are among the acts performing at the queer hip hop show at eyedrum on April 1. (Photo courtesy Scream Club)
Rappers' delight Queer artists turnout Eyedrum for offbeat hip hop show
THOSE ATTENDING AN UPCOMING hip hop show at eyedrum art & music gallery may at first think someone’s playing an April Fool’s Day prank on them. That’s because the lineup for the April 1 Queer Hip Hop event primarily consists of artists who are exceptionally outside the mold of rappers like T.I., Tupac or Kanye West.
But the white lesbian and transgender rappers who will perform at eyedrum say their connection to hip hop is as deep and authentic as anyone’s. And the genre often demonized as homophobic isn’t that bad for gay artists, they say.
“I feel like we’ve been really lucky, especially being outwardly queer, we haven’t really encountered that much resistance,” says Sarah Adorable, one-half of the Olympia, Wash. based act known as Scream Club.
“To our face,” chimes in her music partner, Cindy Wonderful.
“Yeah, to our face,” Sarah agrees.
The Athens-based artist known as BadKat expects to be called a dyke or lesbo during what is her favorite, most thrilling part of hip hop, freestyle battling with another rapper.
“It’s being fully aware that that’s going to be the cheapest shot they can take at you,” says BadKat, another scheduled performer at the eyedrum show. “But if they’re going to be like, ‘You’re a big fat lesbian,’ I’m probably going to throw something out like, ‘Well, I was with your girl last night.’”
BadKat says her sexual orientation isn’t the highest hurdle she has to clear while establishing herself among other hip-hop artists and fans.
“I always felt like it’s been harder to be a female in hip hop — that is totally the first barrier people are seeing,” BadKat says. “That’s a common perception — ‘She’s obviously not going to be as good as a man.’”
With its punk-infused hip hop sound, the Scream Club duo was once mistakenly accused of making fun of the genre, and lesbian rapper Anaturale, another performer set for the eyedrum show, knows her skin color can be a sensitive issue for some hip hop fans.
“I know a lot of people have a lot of issues with white folks doing hip hop, but that was my medium that I was able to express myself in,” Anaturale, of Asheville, N.C., says. “That’s what’s in my gut and in my heart, and it’s how I express myself. I just can’t believe that’s wrong or bad.”
THEY MAY TAKE THEIR ART FORM seriously now, but the girls of Scream Club got an admittedly corny start in hip hop about six years ago. Guided by routines they learned from a “Darrin’s Dance Grooves” video, Cindy Wonderful and Sarah Adorable made their debut at a skating rink benefit for the Radical Fatties, an Olympia group that promotes positive body image issues for people of size.
“We performed in the center of the rink, and everyone skated around us, which was really cool,” Cindy recalls.
Their playlist that night consisted primarily raps set to electronic music, and the members of Scream Club describe their sound as evolving into an electro-punk-hip-hop hybrid. Their musical influences include such variant artists as the Notorious B.I.G., Morrissey, LL Cool J, Tracy & the Plastics, Boy George, and lots of pure pop artists.
Cindy and Sarah rap about everything from politics to potty training, but they aim to avoid delving into the sexism and materialism often associated with hip hop. The duo started their own record label, Crunks Not Dead, which features about a dozen artists, including synth artist Joey Casio, lesbian rap duo Team Gina, and Sandman, a rapping cowboy.
Also under the Crunks Not Dead umbrella are a plus-sized trashy glamster known as MC Glammer, an X-rated rapper named Johnny Dangerous and a hip-hop group of alien-fighting scientists called the Microscope Dragons.
“We’re just trying to put together really positive music,” Cindy says. “And we want to be an example that you can live the way you want to live.”
JOINING BADKAT, SCREAM CLUB AND ANATURALE for the April 1 eyedrum show are the Athens Boys Choir, Feminist Outlawz and DJ VaJayJay. With the event falling on April Fool’s Day, organizers say no one is safe from “pranks and queer fun.”
Although still on the margins of the industry, the queer hip-hop scene continues to grow thanks to the internet and beat-making technologies.
“I think it’s exploding — you see more and more artists coming out of things like MySpace,” Anaturale says. “We’re creating this underground culture that’s starting to connect.”
The April 1 show marks the third eyedrum performance in the last year for Anaturale, who cites A Tribe Called Quest, the Roots and Talib Kweli as her music idols. As a youngster, Anaturale recalls watching artists like KRS-One, 3rd Base and Nice & Smooth on television and falling in love with the new music genre.
“Since I was a little kid, and ‘Yo! MTV Raps’ was on TV, that’s what I was drawn to,” says Anaturale, who evolved from a spoken word artist, to a drag performer to an emo rapper.
Like Anaturale, BadKat gravitated toward hip hop’s beats, but believes it’s important to also have lyrics that move people.
“About 70 percent of my rhymes are something I care about enough to write about and make a change,” BadKat says. “I talk about a lot of controversial stuff, and I’m very deeply rooted in the writing style of writing for change.”
Despite the gap that exists between the mainstream hip-hop world and the queer rap scene, BadKat sees parallels between the two.
“I think we’re going down the same road in a lot of ways,” she says. “In both worlds, there’s some very good hip hop out there, and there’s some pop rap out there.”
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