As Beyonce gears up for the monumental world tour for the new album titled Renaissance, where she is expected to make "north of $500 million" from tickets sales alone, and Ticketmaster greedily anticipates the revenue from their "dynamic pricing" scheme, I want to share this post about a little known Hip Hop documentary about women, gender, and power in Hip Hop from Rachel Raimist released in 1999, Nobody Know's My Name.
Before immensely talented capitalist power couples started selling Hip Hop to the globe, there were (and still are) cadres of underground, community-based artists who informed and conditioned the possibility of the emergence of global feminist musical super-stars.
Nobody Knows My Name tells the story of women in Hip Hop that navigated the industry, relationships, and their artistic inclinations in unique and inspiring ways during the 1990s. Award-winning filmmaker Rachel Raimist's ground-breaking documentary offers a different genealogy of underground Hip Hop, Phat Beats, and political ethics based on equality and struggle rather than representation and market share.
The trailer on Vimeo is available here. The full documentary is available at Kanopy.
Dr. Raimist has written books and articles, produced films, and directed films, and was honored with a media center named after her by the university's Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies.
