This summer must be a particularly frustrating time to be an unsigned hip-hop artist. The southern rap offensive continues with wave after wave of purp-sipping, leaning, rocking and snapping singles which, although from time to time laudable, tend to wear thin (though they do make for some amusing YouTube fodder). So while Young Joc is telling us where it’s going down (apparently the mall, though I was recently at Pentagon City and the place was dead), countless unsigned artists might go by the wayside because they don’t hail from the ATL. To be both an independent artist and a woman only confounds the problem, as for the most part, women in mainstream hip-hop are relegated to either singing hooks or prosaic sexual crowing, a la Lil’ Kim. But the women of the B-Girl Manifesto, an all-female, DC-based artist collective have founded the Can A Sista Rock A Mic? Festival (now in its second year) to eschew the mainstream archetypes and strive to show off who they are and what they do, Billboard expectations be damned.