SHE WAS FIRST
A product of the projects, Roxanne Shante originated the rap beef and now gets her due on Netflix
THE secret to becoming a hip-hop legend, according to Roxanne Shante, is clean clothes. She’s joking. But only half. In 1984, Shante was a 14-yearold amateur rapper living in Long Island City’s Queensbridge housing projects. She started rhyming at age 10 and quickly became known around the neighborhood. MCs would travel from other projects to battle her.
That year, while walking to the laundromat, she was approached by neighbor and record producer Marley Marl. He asked her to rhyme over a beat. Shante recorded a track in his living room.
“Then I went and finished my laundry,” Shante, now 48, tells The Post. She had no idea she’d just made hip-hop history.
Shante’s story is dramatized in “Roxanne Roxanne,” a biopic debuting Friday on Netflix.
The song she recorded that day became known as “Roxanne’s Revenge,” and it would launch what is perhaps the first hip-hop beef, a now-venerable genre.
The song served as a response to “Roxanne, Roxanne,” a wildly popular track from Brooklyn-based rappers UTFO. The song was about a girl who’s “all stuck up” and refuses the members’ advances.
The sentiment —“The fact that being a female in the industry and knowing about how [men] heckle you and try to talk to you when you walk past,” Shante says — rubbed her the wrong way.
“When Marley Marl asked me to do something on top of [the beat from] ‘Roxanne, Roxanne,’ I just jumped into the character,” Shante says. (She was born Lolita Shante Gooden but changed her name to Roxanne Shante after the song.)
She freestyled the whole thing in a single take — more than four minutes of rhymes eviscerating UTFO and explaining why Roxanne would never date them.
“He ain’t really cute, and he ain’t great/He don’t even know how to operate,” she rapped about one of the group’s members.
The song blew up, and made Shante one of rap’s first female stars.
UTFO, stung from being so publicly dissed by a teenaged girl, decided to fire back at Shante with another answer track, called “The Real Roxanne.”
Shante had them right where she wanted them.
“I knew they were not ready for me,” she says. “I felt like, ‘OK, now they’ve been lured in.’ That’s what you have to do to have a great battle. You have to get them so angry. Some MCs would battle me and they would mess up their rhymes because they weren’t composed.”
From there, the so-called Roxanne Wars ignited. Other artists soon piled on. When it was done, some 87 “Roxanne” tracks had been released, according to Shante.
The artist — a mother of two grown children who now lives in Newark, NJ, runs an education nonprofit for girls and still performs — says she has no problem being the mother of the beef.
“That’s what hip-hop was,” she says. “It was competitive from crew to crew and borough to borough. People were always trying to be better than the next person. There was nothing wrong with that.”