Boston’s hip-hop queens Oompa and Dutch ReBelle will take over the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Thursday, Oct. 25. Their joint concert, a part of the RISE Concert Series showcasing contemporary voices, will celebrate women in hip-hop. Philadelphia based soul and indie singer Res and DJ L’Duke will also perform. Tickets for the 7 p.m. concert start at $15 online or in person.
Oompa is self-described as “a Boston-born poet, rapper and educator, who is forever representing the queer, black, orphaned, hood kids.” In 2017 she won the Women of the World Poetry Slam and she was a finalist in the 2016 National Poetry Slam. Words are at the core of her work, sliding rhythmically and rapid-fire in her poems and songs.
Hip-hop artist Dutch ReBelle.
photo: Courtesy of the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum
In one of her 2017 slam performances her poem rang, “Black dyke girl is an apology/for being on the wrong side of whiteness/of bed, of the poverty line/for taking up too much space/having too much waist.” She describes the catch-22 of representing as masculine or feminine in a black body. There are risks at both ends. Oompa currently lives in Cambridge and is working on a highly anticipated second album. Her music can be found on Spotify and YouTube.
Dutch ReBelle, a Mattapan native, released her newest album “Bang Bang” this month, just in time for the Gardner concert. She won one of The Boston Foundation’s 2018 Live Arts Boston Grants, which has facilitated the new release. “Bang Bang” her first full album since 2014, grapples with her identity as an artist, where she’s often pigeon-holed into just the rap or hip-hop categories, and as an African-American, drawing from her Haitian heritage. The new sound in “Bang Bang” fuses Afrobeats and strains of rock with rap for more dynamic composition than her earlier hip-hop album “ReBelle Diaries.”
On her website she writes that this desire to push boundaries began in her childhood. “While most young girls were into boys and beauty, ReBelle was intrigued by the hip-hop magazines that would come for her male cousins … ReBelle never felt she fit in to the normal standards surrounding her.” Her music is available on Spotify, iTunes and SoundCloud.
The RISE series and the Oompa and ReBelle concert is one of many ongoing efforts by the Gardner to incorporate more contemporary, multicultural voices in the museum’s artistic conversation. It’s also an important step in celebrating Boston’s hip-hop industry, which so often faces resistance from mainstream institutions.
