Sha-Rock

• 1. Introduction

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  Sha-Rock, born Sharon Green on the 25th of October 1962, holds a title no one else can claim: the first female rapper. She did not grow up with hip hop already formed around her. She helped form it, in the South Bronx, during the years when the culture was still finding its shape. How does a girl from Wilmington, North Carolina end up at the center of a musical revolution? What did it take to step up to the microphone when almost no women had done it before? And what did the hip-hop community do when it finally stopped to honor what she started?

• 2. Roots in the South Bronx

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  Sharon Green came to the South Bronx when hip hop was just a local street culture, not yet a genre with a name most people recognized. In the late 1970s she started as a b-girl, a breakdancer working the same block parties and community events where rap was still finding its voice. The South Bronx in those years was a place of genuine creative ferment, where DJs, dancers, graffiti writers, and would-be emcees shared the same spaces. Green's entry point was the dance floor, not the microphone, but the two were never far apart in that world. Her affiliation with the Zulu Nation, the organization that treated hip hop as a vehicle for peace and community purpose, grounded her in values she would later articulate publicly: that the culture is really not just about rap and profit, but about peace, unity, and having fun.

• 3. The Funky 4 Plus One

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  "Rapping and Rocking the House," released on Sugarhill Records in 1979, was the record that put Green's crew on the map. As the plus one in the Funky 4 + 1, she was the sole woman in a group that would go on to make history. The follow-up, "That's the Joint" in 1980, earned serious critical attention. Pop critic Robert Christgau, reviewing "That's the Joint," observed that the record featured quick tradeoffs and clamorous breaks varying the steady-flow rhyming of the individual MCs, and asked of Sha-Rock specifically: "who needs variation?" That sentence was effectively a public declaration that Green was the standout. Getting onto Sugarhill was no small achievement. The label was among the first to distribute hip-hop records to a wide audience, and its releases carried hip hop beyond the Bronx to listeners who had never heard anything like it.

• 4. Valentine's Day on National Television

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  On the 14th of February 1981, the Funky 4 + 1 walked onto the Saturday Night Live stage, introduced as New York City street rappers from the Bronx. The headlining musical guests that night were Blondie, whose lead singer Debbie Harry had been an active bridge between downtown New York's rock scene and the uptown hip-hop world. Placing the Bronx's newest art form beside a nationally known rock act, on prime-time television, put rap in front of an audience that had no prior frame for it. That same creative collision between uptown hip hop and the downtown Lower East Side scenes surfaced again in the 1983 film Wild Style, directed by Charlie Ahearn, in which original hip-hop artists played themselves. Connecting those two worlds were figures like Fab Five Freddy and Ruza Blue, nicknamed Kool Lady Blue, who curated early hip-hop DJs and breakdancers at the Roxy NYC nightclub.

• 5. Influence and the Echo Chamber

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  The style of rapping that Green pioneered, through her affiliation with the Zulu Nation, became a template that traveled far beyond her own recordings. The technique she helped originate became known as the echo chamber style, later made famous by Run-DMC. Both MC Lyte and Darryl McDaniels, known as DMC of Run-DMC, are among the notable rappers who trace an influence back to Sha-Rock. That a stylistic signature could travel from South Bronx block parties in the late 1970s to the arenas Run-DMC filled in the mid-1980s is a measure of how quickly hip hop moved and how durable Green's contribution proved to be.

• 6. Recognition and Record

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  On the 4th of August 2009, the Hip Hop Cultural Center of Harlem presented Sha-Rock with the Women in Hip Hop All Female Rapathon and All Pioneer Luminary MC Award. At the ceremony, she said: "that everyone please embrace the culture and make sure that you really understand that Hip Hop is really not just about rap and profit, it's about peace, unity and having fun. Listening to music, enjoying one another and being safe." In 2010 she published a full account of her journey, its title a plain statement of historical fact: The Story of the Beginning and End of the First Hip Hop Female MC: Luminary Icon Sha-Rock. Green has also received an honorary award from the Council of the City of New York, a civic recognition that places her alongside the formal record of a city she helped define culturally. Within the community that gave her the microphone, the title they settled on decades ago still holds: Mother of the Mic.