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"  Watching clips of Lil&amp;#039; Kim and Foxy Brown exiting courthouses looking grimly sex kittenish can make a girl long for Queen Latifah&amp;#039;s kente cloth and Salt-N-Pepa&amp;#039;s baggy Fila wear. Fans and artists seem fatigued by deadly serious club anthems too and are looking back at the &amp;#039;80s and &amp;#039;90s for a more playful, less misogynistic antidote. Numero Group has been releasing disco-influenced rap singles from a lost-now-found producer&amp;#039;s archive; the latest, recorded in 1982, is from Missy Dee and the Melody Crew, four teenage girls from Harlem who represent the whistle-and-hand-clap era when soul and funk still played a part in hip-hop\u2014which was first and foremost party music. Stones Throw, an L.A.-based label, recently issued Ladies First, a collection of old tracks from stars such as Monie Love and lesser-known acts like Undercover Lovers that&amp;#039;s affectionately ironic and mind-blowing. One, because it&amp;#039;s hard to believe that L.A. Gear was ever &amp;quot;fresh,&amp;quot; but two, you&amp;#039;re reminded that, once upon a time, female MCs didn&amp;#039;t exploit their sexuality but defended it against those who didn&amp;#039;t deserve to experience it\u2014and could be as goofy as they were queenly. Yo Majesty, a duo releasing their first album in September, bring to mind all of the above\u2014imagine Salt-N-Pepa as lesbians from Tampa rapping at the speed of light about integrity and responsibility, and, maybe even more shockingly than their sexually graphic come-ons, being broke. In &amp;quot;Blame It on the Change,&amp;quot; they meditate on dead-end jobs and unparented kids, and on &amp;quot;Party Hearty,&amp;quot; they want to go to the club but they &amp;quot;have a flat tire and the gas is low&amp;quot;\u2014with no Bentley on the way.  On Kid Sister&amp;#039;s July debut, Koko B. Ware, she too refuses to fetishize cash. She&amp;#039;d rather mug it up in videos that send up nail salon madness (&amp;quot;Got her toes done up and her fingernails matching&amp;quot;) and boast about scoring deals at Target, then lugging it all home on the bus (though with fellow Chicagoan Kanye West rapping on her songs, she&amp;#039;s probably done with the bus). While Kid Sister has a little more crunk in her than vintage R&amp;amp;amp;B, her MySpace page is a bulletin board on which she&amp;#039;s tacked retro R&amp;amp;amp;B record jackets and video clips. Wasn&amp;#039;t it funny, she&amp;#039;s saying, the Jheri curls and boxy suits? But don&amp;#039;t you miss it too? Not as much as we might, thanks to these releases. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/music/a9277/their-mic-sounded-nice-19726/>