Joan Morgan’s book When Chicken Heads Come Home to Roost (1999) was a landmark in thinking about hip-hop from a feminist point of view, to the point of crystallizing around it the promises and paradoxes of the phrase « hip-hop feminism ». Taking a perspective that is both contextual and speculative, this paper aims to replace Morgan’s work in its original context while investigating the potential paths it opens for future reflection. The emergence of a voice presented as generational, which pursues yet reformulates the claims of the African American « mothers » of the seventies, deserves to be analyzed in the specificity of its US context ; but we also see what can be drawn from a more exploratory reading of this essay, which leads us to consider with Morgan the possible role of so-called « urban » culture as a welcome heuristic counterpoint to the elitist bias which threatens the intellectual field.