The biggest hit from the album was also the Queen’s first popular anthem, “Ladies First.” “Ladies First” set the tone for a music career that first was organized around the concerns and experiences of black women. Marked on its cover with the colors of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist flag (red, black, and green) and a silhouette of Africa, her first solo album, All Hail the Queen (1990), mixes elements of house, Afrobeat and reggae into a diasporic sampler plate served at the end of a two-term Reagan administration that executed a deadly domestic War on Drugs and treated the apartheid government of South Africa as an ally. This famed one-liner from the shape-shifting emcee Queen Latifah, from her 1993 anthem “U.N.I.TY.,” remains a benchmark for the entertainer who, at various moments in her career, used hip-hop to confront popular rap caricatures of black women as bitches and hos.ĭuring the 1990s, the rapper born Dane Elaine Owens was one of two female emcees affiliated with the Native Tongues, a collective of hip-hop musicians who shared a distinctly and unapologetically Afrocentric style.
Confrontational rather than diplomatic, it identifies a gross injury and refuses it, casting scorn back from whence it came. In the pantheon of feminist provocations, the question “Who you callin’ a bitch?” ranks high.
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