InvincibleWho: Invincible, Good Sista Bad Sista, Cristina Orbe, DJ B-GirlWhere: Hidmo Eritrean CuisineWhen: Saturday, November 1My friends and I walked into Hidmo a little after 9, right at the very end of the Open Mic portion of the evening. I should mention that last night was my first Hidmo experience– I’d been meaning to make it out there for months– and I immediately dug the space and the atmosphere. Everyone sat down on the floor in front of a straw-roof hut, under which DJ B-Girl and the performers were set up. Meanwhile, a very cute toddler ran around the performance space and basically stole the show with his mini b-boy antics, while an older girl that looked maybe 6 or 7 (maybe his sister?) dealt with his pushing and harassment with patience that was downright saintlike. Normally, I’m not a big fan of the Open Mic night thing, mainly because the vast majority of my Open Mic night experiences have ranged from cliche to downright painful. Not here. I actually caught the end of it, which conluded with an appearance from Canary Sing, two of Seattle’s most promising emcees with XX or XY chromosomes.If you’re somehow not familiar with Ladies First yet, it’s an evening of all-female hip hop and spoken word performance. Fortunately, the organizers aren’t that strict about genre, though, and they switch it up sometimes, like last night’s opener, songwriter Cristina Orbe. She’s been doing her thing in Seattle for a while now (notably, she performed with Common Market at Bumbershoot), but any soul fan who hasn’t seen her, should. Orbe has an incredibly creamy, rich voice, and she accompanies herself with guitar work that fluctuates from smooth, folky fingerpicking to more staccato, blues numbers. She recently “broke up with” (her words) Forgotten Soul, her old acoustic duo, and was testing out some of the new songs that rose out of that project, which will be on her upcoming album. After Cristina Orbe, Portland’s Good Sista/Bad Sista took the stage. They are a spoken word duet who do a great job of switching off and playing off of each other when reciting their poems, which are overtly political and are overflowing with fury and venom. But we live in serious times, as they said, and far too few people seem to recognize that. And yet, these ladies managed to retain some humor; they had the whole audience howling on and off throughout the performance. My favorite part of the night, though, came last: Detroit emcee Invincible. She’s been part of Anomalies, an all-female crew out of Detroit, for years, and is finally about to put out her first solo album, Shape Shifters. Invincible is fierce. You have to be to call yourself Invincible and go out on the battle circuit. But for me, it’s nice to finally see more and more female emcees getting the credit they deserve; from what we were told last night, she’s had all kinds of offers from major labels and refused them all in order to do her own shit without any interference. I could talk about the tight beats, about the insane freestyle she kicked as a grand finale, but you can hear her skills for yourself on Invincible’s record, and all I have to say is that this woman’s wordplay is unmatched by most all the jokers on the Top 40. The most moving part of the night: when, before going into a track from the new record, “Keep Moving,” she asked the crowd what keeps them going when they want to give up. Nobody said it last night (we got “faith,” “children,” “love,” and “Ladies First,” among other things) but for me, that answer, in a lot of dark times, has been music. But it’s been an uphill battle for women in music– especially women in hip hop– to make themselves heard, and that’s changing, but not fast enough. Especially for women who don’t look like the whitewashed mainstream media’s nasty, emaciated cover girls. See, like a lot of women, I grew up being told to behave, to keep my mouth shut, to be “nice,” which actually meant, “Don’t rock the boat and talk about uncomfortable subjects.” It meant, “Don’t be so opinionated. It’s not becoming. Boys won’t like you.” And for me, that just pissed me off even more, because not only was there injustice in the world, but people who could’ve done something about it would rather pretend that ugly things like, say, domestic violence, or glass ceilings, or institutional racism, don’t exist. So it’s really amazing to see proud, strong women pick up the mic and tell the world that we’re damn tired of keeping quiet about, yes, domestic violence. About rape. About the increasing numbers of women in prison. About that persistent glass ceiling. About homophobia. About the double-discrimination bullshit that women of color have to deal with. I get so frustrated when I hear people who don’t know better pigeonholing hip hop as violent, materialistic and misogynistic because they heard some 50 Cent bullshit. Because while there are a lot of terrible, violent, hateful rappers out there, there are just as many emcees who are trying to raise awareness and make a change with their music. And Ladies First is a great place to see some of those emcees. Now that I’ve expressed myself ad nauseum, I should tell you that I’m definitely going back next month, and so should you, because the project is supported by an organization, CARA (Communities Against Rape and Abuse) that is transitioning away from receiving government funding in order to have more freedom in their activities and their politics. The next one happens on December 6, and the Open Mic portion starts at 8 p.m. If you were like me, and have been meaning to go check it out but were procrastinating, next month is a good time to start.