Sa-Roc drops 'Queen's Philosophy,' explains why she's mad at Nicki Minaj

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Last night, Atlanta-based god-hop emcee Sa-Roc dropped homemade visuals for "Queen's Philosophy," a song from her stellar Sol Messiah-produced LP Ether Warz, which has been garnering serious word-of-web traction - including 3,000 Facebook likes on her Bandcamp page - since the album's mid-December release. In fact, it's no longer available for free streaming on Bandcamp. To hear Ether Warz in its entirety, you'll have to grab a late pass and purchase it via her website now.

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Here's why you should cop that if you haven't already: Sa-Roc is arguably, no, easily one of the best lyricists out right now. No modifiers needed - not best Atlanta lyricist, or best female lyricist, or best conscious lyricist. Despite the fact that conscious rap has taken a huge hit over the last decade or so thanks to well-intentioned novice emcees who'd be of better service preaching behind a pulpit, Sa-Roc's method is straight-up microphone madness. With a message steeped in Five Percenter teachings, ancient kemetic wisdom, and metaphysical enlightenment, she can spit with the Gods. Yet she does so without coming off holier than thou. When she sat in on our female MCs roundtable last year, Sa-Roc, panel moderator Ms. Dia, and rest of the artists (Boog Brown, StaHHr, Lyric Jones, Khalilah Ali, Adrift Da Belle) talked about the need for lady emcees to carve out a space where they can be feminine without succumbing to rap's narrowly proscribed gender roles - i.e., the promiscuous ho or the manly dyke.

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In the essay, Beats, Rhymes and Rap's Gender Gap, that resulted from that conversation, I used Nicki Minaj as the premise to talk about the need for an alternative to the hypersexualized industry standard. But in a recent essay of her own, titled "Why I'm Mad at Nicki Minaj," Sa-Roc breaks it down further, calling Minaj part of a self-hating racist agenda: