Hip-hop has long been a culture that honours single mothers and their many sacrifices. “She was barely even grown and became my momma!” rapped a tearful Cee-Lo Green over a wounded piano on Goodie Mob’s criminally underrated 1995 song Guess Who. “I never knew my dad, so even when the times got bad / I was glad, because I had my momma.”
On the powerful hood-gospel song, Dear Mama, 2Pac famously paid tribute to the persistence of his own family matriarch, the Black Panther political revolutionary Afeni Shakur. He rapped the empathetic line: “Even as a crack fiend, momma / You always was a Black queen.” It’s one of only a few rap songs selected for preservation at the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress.
