It was nearly a decade ago that the hip-hop equivalent of a hippie commune know Vision Village held a Sunday exhibition of photographs, graffiti-inspired paintings, multimedia art, mic-controlling, and poetry readings by a UN of B-girls in a Wicker Park basement apartment. The oh’s, aw’s, clapping, and back-patting between the Beat and New Beat generations over those offerings of “I Can’t Believe A Girl Did This” promised a new day of gender equality for Chicagoland’s underrated B-girls, but they quickly slipped back into the rafters as ornaments, sex objects, and novelties after that five hours of fame. The renaissance of that moment in Midwestern womanism touched down Wednesday, April 3, during the “Wombmen Weaving Wisdom Through Verses” extravaganza Def Soul Records and Haiku Entertainment sponsored at HotHouse in the South Loop.
B-girls of every shade from city to ‘burbs left a newer generation of male counterparts awestruck like a decade before by asserting their femininity with even less inhibition than their ‘90s foresisters with spoken word poetry, mic-controlling, soul vocalizing, and straight-up Break-girl dance moves. So in spoken word poetry, Kay Barrett matter-of-factly proclaimed herself a nonconformist “Filipina, dike, mestiza cunt” and hot-blooded Loly Reyes militantly declined to find shame in being a single, college educated latina with no man and children to wait on (compare with Taiwanese-American Kelly Tsai declaring that she’s music but no muse for her musician boyfriend). Euro-womanist Lucy Anderton took the persona of Mary of Nazareth, bitterly reflecting on how her virginal contributions to the Trinity were trivialized by the Gospel’s male authors.
On the biracial end of things, Tara Betts described rock and roll as a woman “creepin’ and sleepin’ like Mississippi mud” while the show’s lead organizer Rhea Robler got the guys hot and excited with her graphic foreplay verse about lavishing a blow job on male genius. Kuumba Lynx’s Afro-latina reading from their play “A Day In The Life Of Baby Boo” read like a B-girl version of Ntozke Shange’s classic 1970s psychodrama, or play in spoken word verse, “For Colored Girl Who Have Considered Suicide When Rainbow Is Not Enough.” Mic-controlling to DJ Crash’s male accompaniment ranged from the womanist circumspection of Anima and PMS (as in Perfecting My Soul) to the patriotic B-girl sassiness of trio Lyrisis that includes Ang-13.
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R&B Soul was decently represented by Steph Star’s non-ghetto fabulous parallels to Mary J. Blige and in Meek Mzteek’s tender B-girl sonnets. The straight-up B-girls were validated on the dance floor by a University of Hip-Hop co-ed who engaged her male colleague in a friendly battle and the Five Star Boogie trio of Czarina Mirani, Laurie Canning, and Boogie McClarin, who flexed “P-control” from their current stage production “Cinderella: A Hip-Hop Tale Of An Illegal Alien” all decked out in matching Adidas gear. A fter such groups as Black Dawn, Illumini, and Easa Star mixed soul and gospel with feminine Afro-nationalist verse, the women of Poetree brought down the house with their kinsman Phenom. Rhea says Haiku plans to throw more events that give a voice to other patches in hip-hop’s cultural quilt because she wants B-kid power to get your mack daddy.
