The secret to b𒉰ecoming a hip-hop legend, according to Rox🤡anne Shante, is clean clothes.
She’s joking. But only half.
In 1984, Shante was a 14-year-old amateur rapper living in the Queensbridge housing projects. She started rhyming at age 10 and quickly became known around the neighborhood. MCs woul⛎d 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-h🧔op history.
Shante’s story is dramatized in “Roxanne Roxanne,”💛 a biopic .
The song she recorded that day became known as “,” and it would launch what is perꩵhaps the first hip-hop beef, a now-venerable genre.
The song served as a response to “,” a wildly popular track from Brꦗooklyn-based rappers UTFO. The song was about a girl who’s “all stuck up” and refuses the members’ advances.
The sentiment — “the fac🐷t 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 Lo🎶lita Shante Gooden but changed her name to Roxanne Shante after the song.)
She free🍬styled the whole thing in a sing▨le take — more than four minutes of rhymes eviscerating UTFO and explaining why Roxanne would never date them.
“He a𝕴in’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, a💞nd made Shante one of rap’s first female stars.
UTFO, stung at being so publicly dissed by a teen girl, decided to fire bಞack at Shante wi🅺th another answer track, called “The Real Roxanne.”
‘You have to get them so angry. Some MCs would battle me and they would mess up their rhymes because they weren’t composed.’
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 beꦑef.
“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.”
Other hip-hop beefs
N.W.A vs. Ice Cube
Year: 1991
Reason: Cube left the group
Best diss: “I𒐪 started off with too much cargo/Dropped four 💮[N-word] now I’m making all the dough” — Ice Cube
Nas vs. Jay-Z
Year: 1996
Reason: Jay-Z sampled a Nas line
Best diss: “Is he H to the izzo, M to the izzo/For shizzle, you phony, ⛦the rapping version of Sisqo” — Nas
Meek Mill vs. Drake
Year: 2015
Reason: Meek tweeted that Drake doesn’t write his own lyrics
Best diss: “Yeah, t🐻rigger fingers turn to Twitter fingers/Yeah, you getting bod🐻ied by a singing [N-word]” — Drake