Define Your Line: Rapsody On Coexisting In Rap's Power Gap
In music and the culture it reflects, 2017 was predictably unpredictable: idols fell, empires shook, consensus was scarce. All this week, NPR Music is talking with artists, makers and thinkers whose work captured something unique about a chaotic year, and hinted at bigger revelations around the bend.
On the morning I call Rapsody, two weeks before her album Laila's Wisdom is to be nominated for a best rap album Grammy, she's still in bed after a late night putting in work at the recording studio in Raleigh, N.C. "I usually get a little tea and honey to start my day," she says. It doesn't strike me as the makings of a typical power breakfast. Then again, Rapsody has become quite adept at challenging how power is perceived in 2017.
With — her sophomore album and first since partnering with Jay-Z's Roc Nation, named for a grandmother who insisted on getting her flowers while she was alive to smell them — Rapsody conveys a dimensionality that's rare in a genre where flat characters abound. She rhymes tough but tender, philosophical and flirtatious, vulnerable yet aggressive, both in and out of love, while remaining lyrical at every turn. "Power," the lead single featuring Kendrick Lamar, is propelled by a grinding bass line, over which Rapsody deconstructs the conceit of power from a feminine perspective: "The power of the dussy make a grown man cry / The day I came up out my
