While making the documentary My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women in Hip Hop, which premieres on BET tonight at 10pm, what surprised director Ava DuVernay most was "the vulnerability of the women," citing one in particular, the Lady of Rage. "You think of emcees as invincible on the mic and my view of Lady of Rage is always in "Afro Puffs" [video below] and she's got her leather jacket, and she's grabbing the mic, and she's killing it, and Snoop's to the right and Dre's to the left," said the LA based director, who herself started out as an emcee. "But then when you sit down with her [Lady of Rage] she's just, she's a woman. She's a sweet, kind of vulnerable artist who talks about her journey in a really transparent, beautiful way. And I found that again and again and again, whether it was Salt n Pepa or [MC] Lyte or YoYo or Rah Digga, that they are emcees but they are also women. So it was really just sitting down woman to woman and having some really great conversations and I think I was surprised by that. I was more prepared for the emcee side but I saw more of the sister side."

As a filmmaker, DuVernay came to critical acclaim with her 2008 feature debut, the documentary about the Good Life cafe in LA where coincidentally she began her own hip-hop career on the mic. Titled This is the Life, the excellent documentary won a slew of awards at various film festivals, was released theatrically, played on Showtime, and was one of the featured films in last year's Amoeba Music Monday Movies series at Space 15Twenty near the LA Amoeba store. The success of This is the Life led to many things for DuVernay, including her two-hour concert documentary on New Orleans' Essence Music Festival that aired on TV One over the weekend, and tonight's BET documentary, which includes interviews with such artists as Missy Elliott, MC Lyte, Trina, The Poetess, Roxanne Shante, Salt n Pepa, Eve, YoYo, Lady of Rage, Jean Grae, and Rah Digga.

HIp-hop's four elements (b-boying, graffiti, DJ'ing, & MC'ing) have each traditionally been rooted in non-violent forms of battle between rivals, from graff crews challenging one another in their street art, to turntablists battling one another in DJ battles, to b-boy crews breakin' in dance battles against one another, and of course MC's battling one another in freestyle rhyme, whether on the street corner in a cipher, on stage, or on record.

And of all the MC battles in the history of recorded hip-hop, the most notoriously ubiquitous remains the battle of the Roxannes that began innocently enough in 1984 in New York City when UTFO released their single “Roxanne Roxanne” on Select Records. 

The track, which got its initial airplay on the late Mr Magic’s WBLS rap radio show, triggered one of rap’s most involved battles, much to the surprise of its makers. Soon after Mr Magic gave "Roxanne Roxanne" exposure on his influential show, the record became a hit single and had everyone repeating such memorable rhymes as: “She thought my name was Larry/ I told her it was Gary. She said she didn’t like it/So she chose to call me Barry.”




The whole battle of the Roxannes started after UTFO reportedly failed to live up to their promise to do a Christmas benefit for the radio show crew as a thank-you in exchange for making their song a hit. What followed was a direct dissing response entitled “Roxanne’s Revenge” under the moniker of The East 42nd Street Crew, which was really (the Marley Marl founded) The Juice Crew with Roxanne Shante rapping (they named themselves as such because of the radio station’s address on E 42nd St.). When this response, which was really Shante rapping over the UTFO instrumental, started to create a buzz, everyone involved figured that they should release it properly, so Marley Marl laid down some new beats and the first (commercially available) Roxanne response was born.