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

African American Review, Summer, 1994 by Robin Roberts

By employing the strategies of postmodernism inherent in the music video form, Queen Latifah forces viewers to question the assignation of complexity and linguistic play to highart productions by white men. Her video exemplifies Houston Baker's description of rap as "the form of audition in our present era that utterly refuses to sing anthems of, say, whitemale hegemony" (182). By using Afrocentric images and style in a postmodern art form, "Ladies First" requires its viewers to accept the overlap between two apparently distinct cultural phenomena. While Afrocentricity emphasizes Africa as a source of unity and historical continuity, postmodernism emphasizes fragmentation and contradiction. In "Ladies First," however, the two are linked together in the service of Queen Latifah's trenchant critique of racism and sexism. Both Afrocentrism and postmodernism are implicated in sexism, her text implies, but both can be redeemed if used carefully. Through the video images and the words of her rap, Queen Latifah creates a unified, but far from seamless, sense of the intersection of the perspectives of Afrocentrism, postmodernism, and feminism. Examining her music video in detail allows us to see magnified the relationships between South Africa and the United States, between performance and resistance, and between history and contemporary politics.

Latifah's use of Afrocentricity draws her work into debates about postmodernism and its relation to African American culture. African American culture creates and draws upon postmodernism, just as modernism involved an appropriation of earlier African American culture--jazz and sculpture, to name just two examples. I agree with Cornel West that, "for too long, the postmodernism debate has remained inscribed within narrow disciplinary boundaries, insulated artistic practices, and vague formulations of men and women of letters" (90). Rap music videos provide a site to explore the postmodernism of African American culture. Rap itself draws on qualities of non-Western music that overlap with postmodernism. For example, scratching demonstrates one of the postmodern qualities of rap because it involves the appropriation of another record. While appropriation is postmodern when it appears in conjunction with music video's other postmodern qualities--such as fragmentation, pastiche, and self-reflexivity--it is also African American, Afro-Caribbean, or "versioning." As described by Hebdige, versioning is "an invocation of someone else's voice to help you say what you want to say." Hebdige positions this characteristic as explicitly African American and Afro-Caribbean, and complains that the quality "is often cited by critics in a spirit of censure" (14). This method of producing music, and the frequent use of snatches of melody from other songs as part of a rap record or "dub" or sampling, emphasizes pastiche and fragmentation, two fundamental aspects of postmodernism. Like Angela Davis and David Toop, Hebdige connects adaptation and emphasis on rhythm to the use of music by African slaves to "express their resentment, anger and frustration" (26).