World Hip Hop Women: From The Sound Up is the latest mixtape project from Nomadic Wax and World Hip Hop Market. Unlike most main stream male dominated hip hop releases, this mixtape focuses solely on female emcees from around the world and their powerful messages through their music.

It features artists from 15 countries ranging from Iranian MCS to Zimbabwean artists and is combined with insane beats such as Spanish dancehall and new dub step from South Africa. This formidable collaboration makes this mixtape both unique and compelling. To complete the album, it is expertly mixed together by Detroit’s Dj LaJedi.

The World Hip Hop Women are fierce emcees creating music that transcends language barriers, cultural differences, and gender bias while at the same time many of these women are stepping into a realm of music that has not been entered into before by female musicians. This is truly captured by Dj LaJedi who stated:

“I salute every artist who contributed to the mixtape for their courage and commitment to the spirit of creativity. Many of these women are carving paths where there are none. They embody ‘firsts’ of all kinds: MC Black Bird – first female to
release a hip hop record in Zimbabwe; Soultana – member of Tigress Flow,
first all-female hip hop crew in Morocco; Masia One – first female to be
nominated for Canada’s Much Music Award; Shadia Mansour – The First Lady
of Arab Hip Hop; MC Melodee – Holland’s leading Lady in Hip Hop; DJ Naida
- Zimbabwe’s #1 female DJ, EmpresS *1 is Egypt’s First Female Egyptian
Rapper and on and on. They are assuming leadership roles in their native communities and beyond through endeavors that prove their conscious attitudes regarding love, truth, peace, freedom of expression and social justice.

This small but significant wave of activism around women’s rights receded later in the decade. The music industry got bigger, but it also got passed into fewer hands; hegemony 101. Queen Latifah let her rapping fall to the wayside as Afrocentrism was pushed back out of the mainstream for a time. Salt-N-Pepa called it quits in 2002 while Lauryn Hill consciously retreated from the business. As the political climate seemed shift back to the right, it left a lot less room for female-centric acts of all stripes.

So why bring all of this up now? Why on International Women’s Day must we discuss hip-hop in particular? Mustn’t we also talk about punk, dance music and folk? And why just music?

The fact is that we need to talk about all of these. We need to talk about the cultural and political in the same breath. We absolutely need to recognize how very much the myriad struggles of the oppressed -- and the artforms that spring from them -- share in common. “Intersectionality” isn’t just some academic term for gender studies programs (invaluable as those programs are), it’s an actual living reality that leaves our struggle hollow if we fail to recognize it.

Hip-hop, probably more than any other style or genre out there, has the attention of the world’s young and exploited. Any struggle for women’s liberation will at one time or another have to reckon with it. And in fact, hip-hop may be uniquely equipped in some ways to put that struggle at center stage. A passage at the Hip-Hop Archive reminds us:
In a world that consistently undervalues women in general and black women in particular, women in hip-hop often offered an inspiring alternative, be it through boast and braggadocio like the simple yet grave lyrics of [MC] Lyte... or be it through astute and direct criticisms of inequality and abuse... Many of the songs of strength and raps of reason from our powerful soul sisters served as the survival mantra for many girls and women battling the blues and blows that life brings.