"Roxanne's Revenge" is released

Why it matters

Lolita Shanté Gooden was fourteen years old and lived in the Queensbridge Houses. Marley Marl lived in the same building. Marley needed a vocalist for an answer record he wanted to make to a song called "Roxanne, Roxanne" by UTFO. So he asked the fourteen-year-old. She wrote her verses on the spot, recorded the song in one take, and went home. The record came out in December 1984 on Pop Art Records. It was called "Roxanne's Revenge." It outsold the UTFO record. It made Shanté, as Roxanne Shanté, one of the first famous female MCs in commercial rap, and it set the model for the entire battle-rap answer-record format that would dominate hip-hop for the rest of the 80s. She was, as noted, fourteen. The cleanest line on the record ("if you tried to rate me you should not have / not even Frankie Crocker could compare to my class") is the one a fourteen-year-old wrote between school and dinner. You probably could not write that line. I know I couldn't.