6 / 10
Three gobby white girls from uptown NY? Rapping?! Alright, not quite as scarily absurd as disgraced Tory Jonathan Aitken's daughter taking up the M-I-C.
And surely we've gotten over the white-girls-don't-rap thing. All that sexism stuff we've stewed over endlessly with Princess Superstar and... all those other 'feminems' (the scribe who coined that one must have imploded with vigorous self-glee).
Can't one just get on with appraising rap merits, gender aside? And Northern State are good. With their brattish Long Island manners, spiky wit and (middle-class) B-Girl 'tood, it mightn't be all that lazy to re-baptise them The Beastie Girls. Ladies have been bustin' ass in hip-hop since pubescent '80s boy-baiter Roxante Shante and the old school metre and give-a-fuckness of 'At The Party' serves her legacy well.
Mike Carhart-Harris
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