There’s a group of women who call themselves the matriarchs of hip-hop, though you wouldn’t know it from the history books. Too-often-forgotten MCs like MC Sha-Rock, Debbie D, Wanda Dee and Lisa Lee were among the genre’s earliest architects before there was such a thing as “rap artists” or even rap, and long before hip-hop evolved into pop. These were cultural engineers—so original that, in fact, they predate the genre’s arrival onto physical records; their music exists primarily in an ether beyond streaming. They tell their own stories to preserve their legacies. But such is the work of the matriarch, the often underappreciated creator of life. The heart and source of liberation. The constant in every Black household. In music, they’re the trailblazers, trendsetters and backbones of entire genres. How many have tried to imitate Diana Ross’ unique flamboyance, or the radical futurism of Missy Elliott, or the suaveness of Sade? There’s Etta James, an incomparable vessel for molten soul; Big Freedia, the boisterous spokesperson for New Orleans bounce; and Jackie Shane, a trans singer and quiet storm of the ’60s who once said, “Most people are planted in someone else’s soil, which means they’re a carbon copy.” Matriarchs defy duplication and become blueprints; they create and command titles like the Queen of Soul (Aretha Franklin), the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul (Mary J. Blige) or the Queen Bee (Lil’ Kim). Whitney Houston is simply The Voice. In the heat of the early ’80s, Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah spoke for women by simply speaking up for themselves and spawned a generation of feminists. Sister Rosetta Tharpe made spiritual history with every shout. While celebrated as leaders, matriarchs become cultural symbols—not just for their shows of strength but for being ready and vulnerable shape-shifters whose aesthetic reinventions reconstruct the DNA of pop. Their influence is in the air, however soundless or unseen, existing everywhere all the time. —Clover Hope, author of The Motherlode, an anthology of more than 100 women in rap who have helped shape the genre, available 2 February on Apple Books.