"Ladies first": Queen Latifah's Afrocentric feminist music video - Black Women's Culture Issue

African American Review, Summer, 1994 by Robin Roberts

rapper, a toast to herself that is part of the rap tradition.(3)

Significantly, Queen Latifah's Afrocentricity occurs in the music as well as in her use of names and images. The rhythms of rap are those of Africa. As Hebdige describes it, there is a substantial difference between European and African music: African, Afro-American and Caribbean music is based on quite different principles from the European classical tradition.... Rhythm and percussion play a much more central role. In the end there is a link in these non-European musics with public life, with speech, with textures and grains of the living human voice. (12) Drawing on African and African American traditions of music as resistance,(4) Queen Latifah transforms these qualities into rap to criticize racism. Like many male rappers, Latifah subscribes to the belief that black North Americans must look to Africa in order to create their identities and culture. As Latifah herself says, "To me Afrocentricity is a way of living.... It's about being into yourself and into your people and being proud of your origins." She attributes her interest and her knowledge to her "very cultured family," who were "very aware" of African culture (qtd. in Dafoe D8). (Latifah's mother is a high school history teacher.) Through her use of beat and language, Queen Latifah promotes women and attacks apartheid.

Significantly, she does so by using the very forms that are used (by many male rappers) to denigrate women, thus reclaiming those forms for women. At the same time, by using rap and Afrocentricity, she asserts the centrality of women to an Afrocentric outlook. Being feminist does not mean abandoning her African heritage; instead, it becomes an additional source of strength and power. Her attire, in particular, reveals the way in which an African-based clothing style can assert an eroticism that resists the nakedness and exposure of Western styles for women (such as the dresses and high heels worn by Tina Turner).

Queen Latifah's Afrocentricity is most prominent in "Ladies First" when she uses footage from South Africa and attacks apartheid.(5) Furthermore, Queen Latifah's style and dress and rap itself are Afrocentric; through them she looks to Africa for inspiration. Queen Latifah's Afrocentricity operates both culturally and politically. Her regal bearing, her name, and her self-promotion associate her with a tradition of African royalty. Through her attire, she draws attention to styles and colors that are African in their ethos. Her military dress and the colors that she wears (red, black, and green) evoke the African National Congress. Scenes in the video depict armed struggle in South Africa, emphasizing that, in her case, style is used to underscore a political message. In the video, Queen Latifah's Afrocentricity is also apparent in her neo-nationalistic positioning of herself as a leader of African American male and female rappers. Through her appropriation of rap, Queen Latifah politicizes it and uses the genre to promote herself and other African American women.