As an assortment of strong, powerful Black women in music inluding Queen Latifah, Lil’ Kim and Missy Elliott were honored at this year’s highly-anticipated VH1 Hip Hop Honors, singer Angie Stone is not impressed with her exclusion from the list of honorees.
Before Missy or Foxy or Kim or Salt-N-Pepa, there was The Squence, an all-female hip hop group, which included Angie Stone, that existed before any of today’s leading ladies in the business. And Stone wants to know why VH1 didn’t think it was necessary to recognize a group of women that were doing “it” before “it” was being done.
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According to BET, “Angie Stone is fed up with the hip-hop community’s disregard of her place within the culture’s history,” and “furious that VH1 credited Salt-N-Pepa as ‘the first true female hip-hop group.’”
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To VH1’s defense, The Sequence wasn’t nearly as known as other Honors recipients, but they did release “Funk You Up” in 1979, which served as the group’s biggest single and has been sampled by Dr. Dre among others.
Angie and her team released an official statement, saying, “Although they made no fuss of previous shows, trusting and believing that their time would come; this time the trio Angie B., Blondy Chisolm, and Cheryl ‘The Pearl’ Cook feels undermined and disrespected and want their voice to be heard. ‘They’re honoring ‘female’ Hip Hop legends, said Stone. ‘We definitely should have been included in the celebration this year for sure!’”
