The Noisey Guide to Queer Rap

Hey, Mykki, you're so fine!

Rappers can be pretty unimaginative sometimes. If you took the word "faggot" out of hip-hop’s lexicon, you could reduce every rap battle, Twitter beef, and diss track to a violent stutter—as if South Park’s Jimmy just got hold of the mic.

So, when it transpired that there’s a ghetto-fab collective of gay rappers, producers, and DJs living in an underground closet somewhere in New York, the blogosphere blew up. Desperate to prove how open-minded they were, the liberal music press launched a campaign of phony tolerance, celebrating this effeminate shift from the hyper-hetero sausage-fest that is modern hip-hop. One of the biggest problems with the self-congratulatory media coverage was that their equality love-in ignored every single thing that didn’t have something to do with buttsex or crossdressing.

Something's amiss, right? Luckily, I got to knock heads with nearly every major player in the NY scene this summer, from Zebra Katz to Venus X. So, I've trimmed the bullshit and compiled a crash course just for you on "queer rap."

The first rule of “queer rap” is…
You DO NOT call it queer rap. I made this mistake and got a proverbial backhander from Venus X for my ignorance. Somehow, she couldn’t see that I was making quotation marks with my fingers on the other end of the phone and she dispensed a swift dress-down that made my wang cower like a turtle. Gay is not a genre. And, c'mon, there’s much more to these guys than hazy, popper-fueled nights down at The Eagle. Secondly, they rap, but it’s not hip-hop. They constantly reference the ballroom scene, but it’s not vogue; shit’s confusing. No matter how much you try to fence them in, they’ll always find a way to squirm out. But Le1f called himself a "gayngsta" on his Dark York mixtape, so I guess gayngsta rap is a safe bet.

Read the rest at Noisey.