The Rise of The White Female Rapper

There was a time where even black female rappers were barely taken seriously, let alone white ones. 2005 saw the first truly mainstream instance of this trend in music with British MC Lady Sovereign. Her lyrics addressed the typical everyday problems of your average white girl: jealousy, having to work and an insecure body image. This set the tone for subsequent rappers like White Girl Mob (featuring Kreayshawn, Lil’ Debbie and V-Nasty), Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord, Uffie, K.Flay, Iggy Azalea and even Kesha.

After Lady Sovereign fell off the map, Die Antwoord and Kreayshawn rose out of the ether to take her place (though the Visser had already been around since 2001). The continued evolution of the white girl rapper style vacillated between upbeat anger and a general listing of material desires. K.Flay, who emerged onto the scene in 2004 with her mixtape, Suburban Rap Queen, was a prime example of the complaining approach that many white girls opt for when rapping. One of her most recognized singles, “We Hate Everyone,” lists the rigmarole of white girl problems as she acknowledges, “I hate my job, I hate my dad, I hate my friends/I hate everyone and nobody can help.”

And then, of course, there’s Uffie, the Parisian by way of Miami, whose first album, Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans, came out in 2010. Her most well-known single, “Pop the Glock,” was heavily produced, a common sound among white girl rappers. She also had one of her songs, “Robot Oeuf” featured in the Pedro Almodóvar movie, Broken Embraces, proving that white girl rap can swerve in and out of sophistication just like Jay-Z and Kanye.

Even the pop stylings of Kesha possessed a white girl rapper slant as this music pattern persisted in the mid and late 00s. In songs like “Tik Tok” and “We R Who We R,” Kesha could easily pass portions of her lyrics off as rapping. And so, with pop and rap happily merged in the white girl singer world, we now have the final product of it all: Iggy Azalea, an amalgam of pastiches. Her success has even attracted the ire of Nicki Minaj, proving that white girl rap is a threat that isn’t likely to go away.