Thirty years after her debut, the singer recalls how hip-hop broke the mould for
British women - and we chart the rappers that followed in her path, from Cookie Crew to Cassie Rytz
One of
BBC Four’s recent Top of the Pops reruns from the late 1980s features a performance that many of us who were young girls at the time vividly remember. It was the debut in 1988 of an exhilarating, in-your-face artist, slotted between the soft seasonal balms of Freiheit’s Keeping the Dream Alive and Kylie and Jason’s Especially for You. She was 24, visibly pregnant, dancing in a gold bra, gold jacket and huge medallion, and doing something else that felt revolutionary: rapping.
The next day, our school playground filled with little girls delivering words into one another’s faces that they didn’t quite understand, trying to get the rhythms right. It didn’t matter: Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance, and its attitude, had entered our world. Cherry was by no means the first female rapper with a distinctly British style – there had been several female duos and groups before her – but that uncompromising, joyous, performance can be seen now as the moment mainstream pop opened up to artists like her, and laid the groundwork for the next three decades of solo female MCs.