Heather McCormack and Julia Sherratt see no need to waffle around. They’ll call they’re music feminist. However, they’re not so quick to call it hip-hop. Both of the lady lionesses will call their rhymes rap, but they don’t consider themselves part of the hip-hop scene.

For Solo Sexx, the hip-hop scene as it stands is “stale and male.” After playing hip-hop shows in Springfield, they left the metal detectors, see-through glares and elbows-up attitudes for an audience which could respect what they represent – female empowerment that will get you up and shaking.

The duo planted their musical roots into the same ground over two and a half years ago after meeting at the University of Massachusetts’ Cannabis Reform Coalition – an organization close to their hearts and the gust of inspiration that helped lift their musical ambitions. They started as a group called Inner Circle of Hate that split once some members started to do what Sherratt calls “their guitar thing.” Being a rap group and not so much a rock group, the ladies decided it was time for the female part of Inner Circle of Hate to go, well – Solo Sexx. The guitar guys became Anti-Tank Dog and the wordstress women became invested in making beats and raps.

After some time of collaboration and exploration, they were taken under the wing of DJ Megha, another local musician, after meeting at Amherst’s Extravaganja. DJ Megha has since become a mentor and more for Solo Sexx after hooking them up with a gig at Diva’s nightclub in Northampton. Their show, “dubwhut?!” is every other Thursday, including tonight.

It’s been a long journey. Before the ladies started hosting “dubwhut?!” and playing on radio shows, such as WMUA’s Sweet Baby Lou and the Reverends of Funk, they were ticking bombs waiting to be set off. McCormack remembers when Sherratt’s went off. She said, “The best experience was watching her explode as a musical genius.” She smiled with nostalgia as she described a CRC event  called “Cabin Trip” – the name is implicit to what they do there, according to McCormack. Sherratt was new to the group and community of the CRC and came on the trip because “she needed to be.”

She remembers it well and said, “I had a renaissance. I had unlocked a part of brain that I didn’t know existed before ­– total artist expression that I had suppressed for my whole life. After that, I started to become really involved with music. I started to think about writing songs and writing raps.”

McCormack laughed, clarifying that this explosion all happened “through an Optimus Prime vocoder mask.”

She said, “She put it on and started inhabiting this alternate persona of party music. She just started rapping and singing through this vocoder thing and it was great. We were all like, ‘where did this girl come from?’ It was intense.”

After the “rainbows oozed out of her orifices” as she lovingly puts it, Sherratt started on another resurgence – making beats. She taught herself how to make beats after downloading what she not-so-lovingly calls a “cracked, illegal version” of Adobe’s Audition. She watched Greg Gillis from Girl Talk as he mapped out his beat making skills on YouTube, where he uses the program Audition.

That “cracked, illegal version” of Audition became the bane of Solo Sexx’s act when it crashed. Since the tragic loss, Sherratt said, “I’ve just been wallowing – treading water. I’m not spending $400 dollars on a program!”

Audition or not – they’ve been making music, just not all with self-made beats. They’ve been emceeing with DJ Megha as a collaboration and rapping over her beats – which has given them a chance to practice their free-styling. For radio shows and other events, they simply hodgepodge different raps over beats they’ve cultivated either from their old self-made beats, DJ Megha’s beats, or simply beats they’ve borrowed from artists who inspire them.

Artists such as Yo Majesty, Ry Ry, Kid Sister, Santigold, and M.IA. have all sent sparks of inspirational power in Solo Sexx’s direction. However, the ladies feel their place in music is still a small fraction of the business. The bulk of their genre is male dominated. Their female counterparts are few and far between. Moreover, the females who are rapping are almost always women of color. Solo Sexx is breaking down not only gender barriers in the hip-hop scene – but also barriers of race. Aside from Lady Sovereign, Solo Sexx couldn’t think of another white, female rapper who has become mainstream. Although Lady Sovereign is definitely a craftswoman of words, she isn’t up on the social commentary level.

McCormack said, “The thing is – I don’t want to be typecast as political rappers. I like to have fun. Not to say that politics aren’t fun, but I have fun with my politics. I say things like, “get out the leather and pleasure me,” and “I want to sink my teeth into his rice and beans.” It’s about sexual agency. I’m going to sink my teeth into his rice and beans. You better get that out and pleasure me. It’s making fun of itself, but at the same time – that’s what the name Solo Sexx is about. It’s about our whole persona. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

They are serious about representing and voicing something, though. How they get their message across may not seem elevated, but their message is of their highest importance. The highest importance – as a musical being – is to be different. They want to present something that makes people stop and think, “Oh, wait a second. I don’t think I’ve heard that before.” From their identity to their product, Solo Sexx aims to single out female empowerment in a light that many have not been brought into.

They very much look up to the group Yo Majesty – a lesbian African-American Christian group from Tampa, Fla.

Sherratt said, “They were totally underground and really obscure, and then suddenly they’re stuff got leaked on the internet somehow in the upper echelons of the internet and now they’re getting remixed by European DJs. They blew up insane. That’s the level I would love to be on. I feel like we could so easily fill a niche for an awesome female group.”

They want to fill the slot that Yo Majesty opened up in terms of empowerment and then show that – hey, white girls can do it too. McCormack is the product of a love for old school rap and hip-hop, but noticed it was mainly women of color who were using rap as a vehicle to get their message out. She’s noticed that the glory days of female rap – the days of Queen Latifah, Salt-n-Peppa and TLC – are fading. There are fewer and fewer female rappers out there – women of color, or otherwise.

Although the genre has been dominated by women of color, McCormack explained that although women of color were heard in the genre through rap, she’s not using it as an appropriation of their experience.

“I’m not repping anything that isn’t intimate with my life. That’s why I mostly rap about gender and sexuality because it’s something that affects me and is imposed on me.”

Solo Sexx feels the mainstream idea of female hip-hop is objectified. When they started out, Sherratt found herself rapping about Prada and other things which she said, “doesn’t really make sense or have an actual grip on reality. But then, as I started to evolve, I saw it as a form of resistance. I didn’t need any of the other stuff.”

That resistance has become empowerment. After spitting raps at parties and proving girls can do it too, they’ve found this thing that they’re doing – this musical escapade – was more than that.

McCormack explains, “It’s not a completely alternate persona. It’s furthering the image of who I am. I get into this mode of complete delirious power. I can say whatever I want. I can do whatever I want and no matter what I do, it’s going to be the right thing, as long as I’m just going off what is flowing through my body and my system. To have that connection to your own synapses and your own trains of thoughts is a cool thing that doesn’t really happen that often and I don’t think I’ve found it in anything else besides singing, where you sort of lose yourself and lose your ego. With rap, it’s almost like you lose your ego to replace it with something more powerful than an ego. An ego is a defensive mechanism, like saying I don’t want to be hurt or I don’t want to be scared. But when you’re in that zone, you don’t have any of that.”

To see and feel that power and watch Solo Sexx lose their ego to the beat, be sure to check out “dubwhat?!” every other Thursday at Diva’s in Northampton to see some girl power without the sass of Spice Girl pop or at this year’s Extravaganja. To hear some first, go to www.myspace.com/solosexx.

Leigh Greaney can be reached at [email protected].