Despite the best efforts of Eminem, Jay-Z and Kanye West, for the casual music fan, rap has been in steady decline for the best part of a decade. Sales are down across the world as American hip-hop has stagnated under a torrent of self-aggrandising, sexist MCs, backed by regulation beats from producers eager to emulate the success of Dr Dre, Timbaland and the Neptunes.

British rap has been in better health. MIA has broken boundaries, but the genre’s refusal to escape to the mainstream has hindered the crossover appeal of its talented artists. A seismic shift in rap’s attitude is long overdue. And if a change is coming, it may well be a new generation of female MCs who lead the way.

Lesbians and committed Christians from Tampa, in Florida, Yo Majesty don’t sound like a traditional rap band on paper. Combining X-rated sapphic sex lyrics and electro-infused beats courtesy of a British producer, David Alexander of Hard Feelings UK, Jwl B (Windy Baynham) and Shunda K (Lashunda Flowers) don’t sound like a traditional rap band on CD, either.

“I didn’t like his beats at first,” Jwl admits. “None of us did. But we were poor and he was giving us his tracks for free. David said he was going to send us some hip-hop and R&B tracks. That’s what we were asking for. And every time he sent us a CD, it was this alternative European music. When we started getting on his tracks, we started to alter our sound and our delivery, and everything blew up from there.”

Leading the counterattack on hip-hop’s long-documented history of male chauvinism, the front cover of Yo Majesty’s debut album, Futuristically Speaking. . . Never Be Afraid, features the comic-book death of “Captain Misogyny”. Signed to Domino, home of Arctic Monkeys, in the UK, and lauded by the British music press, Yo Majesty are unsigned in America. For a band who refuse to conform to the accepted rules and sounds of hip-hop, convincing the purists at home could be tough.

On this side of the Atlantic, young female rappers are approaching music with the same eclectic mindset. The Mancunian Nicola Varley is better known as Envy, a lightning-fast MC whose debut single, the aptly named Tongue Twister, became a late-night music-television favourite and underground hit. “My music is hard to categorise,” she says. “I started as part of the grime scene, but the stuff I’m doing now you probably couldn’t call hip-hop. It’s all sorts of things. As long as people are feeling the music, I’ll just keep putting it out and they can call it what they want.”

According to Envy, her mission statement is based on Britain’s expanding musical tastes. “People that are into hip-hop, but it’s not all they’re listening to,” she insists. “I listen to everything and so does Medasyn, my producer. I’m not just being influenced by hip-hop or garage tunes. I’m listening to indie, pop music, rock and electro. That’s why the music is so eclectic nowadays.”

GoldieLocks, aka Sarah Akwisombe, started out as a producer, before the lack of suitable vocalists forced her to pick up the microphone. “In the last couple of months of music college, I started doing some joking-around vocals because I couldn’t find anyone else to do them,” she says. “Everyone thought it was funny and different. I put the tracks on MySpace and had good feedback, then one of my tutors booked me to do a gig at a local festival. I was between a jazz band and some kids playing recorders.”

She won’t be playing gigs like that again, but she will be staying true to her musical beliefs. “If I make a beat, even if it’s good, if someone says it sounds like Timbaland, it’s going in the bin,” she promises. “At first, I thought, if I’m going to do this, I want to be a pop star. Six months in, I didn’t want that at all. I work at a music management company, so I see what happens to artists that have done well. If you sign to a major, everything’s out of your hands.

I want to make my music and my album. If that’s not what the mainstream wants, f*** ’em. I work on every single aspect of my music, and I’m really proud of what I’ve built up. Why do people see success as being chart-friendly? People on the underground probably have a bigger profit margin than people in the charts.”

Lele \, real name Leanne Jackson, started her rapping career with GoldieLocks in a Croydon joke band called Sick Kids. They are still friends, but, musically, they have gone their separate ways. GoldieLocks is pushing the boundaries of the urban underground, while Lele’s MySpace page promises “hip-hop/punk/pop”.

“I began playing guitar before I became interested in rapping,” she says. “I can tell more of a story in a rap and get across what I want to say. I’d always written poetry. That’s how I got my feelings out. We were doing the joke stuff, I was doing my poetry, and I started rapping properly.”

Lele started posting tracks on MySpace and started getting noticed, being flown to Milan for a show on the strength of her online output. Like the rest of the new wave of female rappers, she is breaking out from the familiar patterns of hip-hop. “There’s a chance that people seriously into rap won’t like me, because maybe I’m not talking about the things a raw hip-hop artist would do,” she says. “I’ve done gigs with grime artists and I just felt out of place. I’m not doing this to fit into a scene. I’d rather be called pop music. I’m willing to try all types of stuff, as long as nobody is trying to write my lyrics for me. That’s the only thing I’m worried about. The music is my diary.”

For the new generation of female rappers, keeping it real doesn’t mean staying true to any notion of what is or isn’t hip-hop. It’s about exploring their art, musically and lyrically. In a genre that’s lost much of its bite, the time has arrived for their voices to be heard.

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