Rapsody may not be a household name, but she’s rapped with many hip hop greats who are.
She’s gone toe-to-toe with Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, Queen Latifah, Big Daddy Kane, and provided a top-shelf verse on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly — considered one of the greatest albums of the 21st century.
Rap is a genre historically defined by its competitive spirit, so has an MC ever made Rapsody nervous?
“Nobody,” she tells Hau Latukefu on Double J’s Sky High.
“With everybody, it’s just ‘do the best me’. I can’t think of anybody where I got on a joint [and thought] ‘I’mma out-rap you today!’
“For me, I respected them so much but also, I respected myself. I knew I had the talent and skill. It was all about making a great record… It was always exciting. ‘Man, I get to create with somebody that I’m inspired by!'”
That confidence and candour has defined Rapsody’s career.
Not simply a ‘female rapper’
A two-time Grammy nominee and the first female artist to sign to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, Rapsody has thrived in a scene dominated by men. But she dislikes being labelled as merely a “female rapper”.
Her deft, thoughtful rhymes often tackle complex subject matter and are presented in conceptually rich albums, like 2019’s Eve, where each song was named after an influential Black woman.
However, she refuses to be pigeonholed as “conscious rap”, a broad subgenre that rejects the often violent, misogynistic elements rife in commercial hip hop.
Please Don’t Cry, her therapeutic fourth album, sets about dismantling those perceptions while simultaneously showcasing why she’s considered one of the best to ever handle a mic.
“First name Marlanna, last name Evans / Under appreciated but I’m still the most respected” she raps on early highlight ‘Asteroids’. “If I had a dick, I’d be in the greatest debates.”
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Across 22 tracks, Rapsody interrogates her reputation, career, and more private matters.
‘Loose Rocks’ is a heartfelt response to her aunt’s dementia diagnosis. ‘Back On My Bag’ is a muscular dose of bragging swagger, and ‘Stand Tall’ addresses rumours about her sexual preferences:
“Judgements on me, they wondering if I’m a ‘eat the coochie’ fan / All because I choose to style in sneakers and some baggy pants.”
Most revealingly, ‘That One Time’ waxes on love’s complexities, Rapsody confessing she had an affair with a married individual and sexually experimented with a woman after not feeling wanted by men.
“Recording the songs was easy but making the decision, ‘Yo, I’m going to put this out, and my parents are going to hear it!?’ That’s probably where I had unease or fear,” she admits.
“I just had to sit and carry it and walk through with it. I honestly can say the night before [the album] came out, I was so at peace and grounded.
“Even my awareness and consciousness too, to see things with new eyes and to unplug and unlearn a lot of things that I had been programmed with my whole life.”
Even for an artist well-known for their skilful wordplay and insightful storytelling, Please Don’t Cry achieves an even deeper level of honesty and vulnerability.
The 41-year-old doesn’t believe “age has something to do with it.” It’s all about experiences, and she was prepared to openly reflect on her own.
“It was the season I did that for me, so I was able and ready to share those things with the world and be more personal, be fearless.”
Connecting with her music idols
Born Marlanna Evans in North Carolina, Rapsody got her start as part of rap groups H20 and Kooley High in the early 2000s. She went solo in 2008, embarking on a solo run of celebrated mixtapes, EPs and albums with revered producer 9th Wonder.
But none of that would be possible without the pioneering presence of the “legendary, iconic” MC Lyte.
“She showed me that there was a space for me. That was the reason I wanted to be a rapper, because I saw MC Lyte.”
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“The first time I met her in person, we were in [Washington] D.C. at the Black Girls Rock festival. MC Lyte and Lauryn Hill were both on the same show, I was opening up for both of them.”
The way Rapsody spins bars over an effortlessly evolving backing of tough beats, R&B, reggae, gospel, soul and more on Please Don’t Cry recalls The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill — the titular singer-rapper’s classic 1998 debut album that, to this day, Hill has yet to officially release a follow-up to.
Those comparisons are enhanced by Rapsody’s recurring references to her idol across Please Don’t Cry, revealing that she, too, considered walking away from the industry. (“Almost went M.I.A. on n****s like Lauryn Hill.”)
“For me, this stage of life I would call my Lauryn Hill Unplugged stage,” Rapsody says, referring to the 2002 live recording that was panned upon release for a pivot into lengthy, soul-flavoured folk music.
“I listen to that album a lot, that was probably the album I listened to most while I was making this one.
“She was in her 20s when she made that… and to have the awareness that she had? It just blows my mind. That’s why I think it’s not an age thing, it’s just experience.”
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Rapsody links up with another of her “biggest influences and inspirations” on album highlight ‘Raw’: Lil Wayne, one of the most commercially successful and influential rappers of his generation.
“I’ve been listening to Wayne since I was 13,” she says. “To finally get a chance to create [with] one of the greatest of all time? For him to see me? Wayne respects me on a different level [and] that means a lot.”
“I’m happy that we have an example in him to look to, for so many reasons. He’s still killing it, it’s unheard of.”
After hearing Lil Wayne’s verse, Rapsody rewrote her own before recording, “because his approach [and] how he got on the energy, I felt like I’ve got to match it. If I come at it more like how he came at it, it’ll make for an even better song.”
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Confronting hip hop stigmas
Mental health has long been a taboo subject in the traditionally macho, self-aggrandising world of rap music, but Rapsody is part of a newer school of artists comfortable with making soul-baring a central component of their music.
Please Don’t Cry uses therapy as a framing device, beginning with Rapsody visiting the hair salon to vent her troubles to her beautician, voiced by Phylicia Rashad, the Tony-winning actress best known to an entire generation as Claire Huxtable, the wife and mother from The Cosby Show.
“She embodies that… the beauty and soul of who she is really comes through,” says Rapsody, who conceived of her spoken exchanges with Rashad mirroring the dynamic between Neo and The Oracle in sci-fi classic The Matrix.
Rapsody opens up further in a series of conversations with other pop culture queens: neo-soul royalty Erykah Badu (who also features on the sensual track ‘3:AM’) and acclaimed actor Sanaa Lathan.
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Rapsody speaks about love and relationships, her experiences with anxiety and being diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disease that attacks the thyroid. She also talks about challenging the sexualised expectations women continue to face in the music industry, a recurring theme of her work.
The multi-dimensional Please Don’t’ Cry “can’t be the only representation of what a woman in hip hop looks like. There are so many other pieces and parts of us,” she says.
“On a business level there’s not enough space being made for those stories. Culturally, there’s so many dope women. But on a mainstream level, what they sell and package hip hop for women as, it’s under-serving.”
Rapsody’s insightful lyricism shows femininity is a spectrum, not a reductive genre archetype, and she simply won’t accept backhanded compliments praising her only in competition with other women.
As she spits on ‘Look What You’ve Done’:
“Don’t lift me up throwin’ shade at my sisters that made it out wit’ ass and bass/Support what you like – you ain’t gotta show love usin’ hate.”
She’s biting back at gendered critiques of sexually empowered rappers like Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and the original ’90s pioneer for liberal expression, Lil’ Kim. (“Cause if we really talkin’, she the queen bitch of this shit” Rapsody notes elsewhere on the record.)
The MC offers up her entry into the masturbation song canon with the playful ‘Lonely Women’ and offers a frank perspective on two-timing boyfriends on ‘A Ballad For Homegirls’ opposite the lush vocals of Baby Tate.
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Rapsody is at her most ferociously direct on ‘Diary of a Mad Bitch’, snapping:
“When it comes to the music industry, bitch, I’m fed up/Y’all lazy with this shit – everything look cookie cutter.”
The track shows us the angrier side of a typically cool-headed, thoughtful musician.
“That’s a side of me that I hate when it comes out, and I don’t like to show it, even when it’s warranted,” she says. “But it was just me telling my truth, I’m human. I get my heart broken, and sometimes I get mad about it, and this is what it sounds like.”
Ultimately, Please Don’t Cry is rich in the quality that rap has aspired for ever since its inception: authenticity, or “realness” as its more colloquially known. Rapsody is all about realness.
“For me it was important because this album was showing all the layers of my human,” she concludes.
“It’s just being what hip hop and that microphone was intended for us to do: be honest and just share every part of us.”
Please Don’t Cry is out now.
Hear Hau Latukefu hosting Sky High on Double J on Sundays at 6pm, and Wednesday at 8pm.
