Queen Latifah will be the first female rapper inducted into the National Recording Registry

Legendary out hip-hop artist Queen Latifah has earned a new honor: She’s the first female rapper to be inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Her 1989 album All Hail the Queen will be inducted this year alongside albums like Madonna’s Like a Virgin and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You and over a dozen others. All Hail the Queen is the album where she released her iconic feminist anthem with Monie Love, “Ladies First.” The album also addresses struggles Black women often face, including street harassment, sexism, and domestic violence.

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“Perhaps what makes All Hail the Queen one of the greatest albums in rap music history is how it models the marriage between the DJ and the MC,” Lynnée Denise wrote at Wax Poetic. “It’s a journey through the afterlife of samples. It highlights the trust we owe the DJs and selectors who used ’80s technology to repurpose the music they found in their parents’ record collections.”

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“The National Recording Registry preserves our history through recorded sound and reflects our nation’s diverse culture,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in announcing the new additions. “The national library is proud to help ensure these recordings are preserved for generations to come, and we welcome the public’s input on what songs, speeches, podcasts or recorded sounds we should preserve next. We received more than 1,100 public nominations this year for recordings to add to the registry.”

“It’s crazy,” Queen Latifah told Entertainment Tonight about her induction into the National Recording Registry. “I don’t know if I’ve had a chance to wrap my mind around a lot of things lately. My mind has been in so many places, but when the plaque came to my house, I looked at it and was like, ‘Wow…this is history. This is literally history.'”

She added that she didn’t think she’d be the first female rapper to earn the honor.

“But I’m surprised that I’m the first woman to be honest with you,” she said. “Hip hop is just too big, and so many came before me. So thank you to them for inspiring me, to put me in a position to do this.”

Earlier this year, Queen Latifah was announced as the first female rapper to be named a Kennedy Center honoree.

“It will allow us a moment to be part of the fabric of America, which is really what we are,” Latifah told the New York Times of the ceremony at the time. The president usually attends the ceremony. “It will be one night where the people who are in the highest offices in the most powerful nation in the world will honor hip-hop music and one of its daughters.”

Latifah is only the second hip-hop artist ever to be honored by the Kennedy Center, after LL Cool J in 2017.

Long the subject of rumors about her sexuality, Latifah acknowledged her longtime partner Eboni Nichols publicly for the first time in 2021, thanking her and their son Rebel in her acceptance speech for the BET Lifetime Achievement Award. She ended the speech by wishing viewers a “Happy Pride!”