Hip hop’s big takeover, four decades deep, has gone hand-in-hand with the age of digital globalization. Charts and numbers, playlists and soundscan tallies cannot fully measure the influence and mobility of hip hop’s emerging digitalities, which move swiftly across the global media landscape and bring global fans and practitioners into their collaborative folds. After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the long-standing field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these communities fall across the digital divide that makes professional production hard to reach.

I want to raise up both the musical work that women, girl, and feminized subjects—particularly those of the Global South—do, but also engage practices that have been cast as feminine—backup singing, stage dancing, improvising, reversioning, inspiring—by conventional discourses on popular music. In doing so, I argue that the figure of a hidden field of work—one largely authored by women practitioners—will come to light. By opening up the feminine as a primary space of musical creativity that precedes and resists the patriarchal system of musical valuation, commodification, representation and classification, I hope to also enrich the vocabulary by which we can recognize the work of the rarely recognized—but deeply influential—work of popular music’s Others.