Roxanne, Roxanne is a feature film inspired by Roxanne Shante, a 14 year-old from Queens who broke into the hip hop scene with her one-take diss track titled ‘Roxanne’s Revenge.’

The movie begins with Shante as a very young girl, being led by her mother and best friend to a park where she is going to be engaging in a battle of MCs for money, and everyone around her knows she’s the best, even at such a young age. That begins a long spread reputation throughout her neighborhood as the best MC.

What was interesting about this movie was that the beginning was somewhat what I might’ve expected, considering all of the theory readings we’ve done so far (thinking in particular to the Rose and Foreman pieces). Shante lived in a cramped apartment in Queens with her three other sisters and mother, who had fallen to alcohol after the devastating betrayal of her partner. Hip hop and MCing was a lifeline for Shante, and she certainly never expected the effects of what recording her track between loads of laundry would do for her.

I think what threw me was the subsequent aftermath. I am still very new to the history of hip hop so I don’t have necessarily the cultural relevance to know Shante’s story firsthand, but very quickly she fell out of hip hop. She was a young woman who was manipulated by a man three times her age who physically abused her and it seemed like the story took a jarring turn from hip hop.

After some research, I realized that while Roxanne Shante had dropped out of the music industry for awhile, people wondered where she had gone but no one really had a clue. For the filmmakers, this is what turned their focus from this epic tale of such a young hip hop legend to documenting the realities of what she had to endure, of what had been forced upon her as a child. And I think that’s just as important to understanding the history of hip hop as the music is.