There is a lot of discussion and dispute over who the First Lady of Hip Hop is and I’m sure we could fill up articles just discussing that amongst ourselves. One thing that can’t be disputed though is that the first female rapper to ever win a prestigious Grammy Award was Queen Latifah!
In this weeks Throwback Thursday we are going to look at Dana Owens AKA Queen Latifah. Born in New Jersey in 1970, Queen Latifah has taken the world by storm to become a one woman multi-media conglomerate force to be reckoned with. Also as it is Gay Pride Week here in Dublin there is no better person in Hip Hop to discuss than Ms Dana Owens.
Latifah, which means “delicate” and “very kind” in Arabic, started off her career beatboxing for the rap group ‘Ladies Fresh’. She was noticed by Dante Ross of ‘Tommy Boy Records’ and subsequently signed a deal with them in 1988. Her debut album All Hail The Queen was released in 1989 to unusual success for a Hip Hop album. To this date,the feminist anthem Ladies First has remained one of Latifah’s signature tracks. The track Come Into My House made an unexpected appearance in the Hollywood movie Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. The success of All Hail The Queen led to Queen Latifah receiving her first Grammy Award nomination.
In 1993 Latifah released her third studio album Black Reign which to that point was her most successful album. The track U.N.I.T.Y earned Latifah her first and only Grammy Award, making her the first female rapper to ever win such an accolade. U.N.I.T.Y. also remains Latifah’s best selling single in the US to this day. After her fourth studio album, Order in the Court released in 1998, Latifah took a hiatus from the music scene to focus her attention on her acting career.
She returned to the music scene in 2004 with her fifth studio album The Dana Owens Collection, a cover album of Jazz, Soul and Blues classics. This album saw a change to Queen Latifah’s style which carried over into her second all-singing album Trav’lin’ Light. Then in 2009 she returned to the Hip Hop scene with her seventh studio album Persona.
Queen Latifah’s work in a variety of creative outlets has driven her career to many successes including a Golden Globe award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Image awards, a Grammy Award, six additional Grammy nominations, an Emmy Award nomination and an Academy Award nomination. She was also the first Hip Hop musician to have been awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This is one woman who is in fact “big, blonde and beautiful” and proud of who she is and what she’s accomplished.
