“Music to me is poetry with great emotion. It’s all about feeling and how you say these words, and how you use words to express yourself. That’s what I want people to know me for, and that’s why I call myself RAPSODY.” -Rapsody
I watched an episode from the Netflix series “Rapture” centering around the rap artist Rapsody not too long ago, and I found it very interesting. At the start of the episode, Rapsody said how she wanted to be an inspiration to young girls that you can be a female rapper and still be fully clothed, and still have a message in your music. Rapsody was born and raised in Snow Hill, NC, where she said there “wasn’t a lot of culture,” but she said that she was able to find culture in the hip-hop music that she grew up listening to. After high school, she attended NC State University in Raleigh, NC, where she played basketball and eventually graduated with a degree in accounting. It was also at NC State where she formed a rap group with some friends that they called Kooley High, and they got introduced to the record producer 9th Wonder after he heard Rapsody on one of Kooley High’s songs on their mixtape.
Upon graduating high school, Rapsody then decided that she wanted to become a rapper full-time, which her parents initially discouraged because they wanted her to pursue a career with a more reliable income. However, she decided to pursue her rap career anyways, which worked out in her favor in the long run. The first rapper to officially recognize her work was Big Daddy Kane, and the second to recognize her was Rah Digga. However, Rapsody really began to see that her work was being recognized when Jay-Z walked up to her in public and rapped her verse from “Complexion” by Kendrick Lamar back to her. This eventually led to Rapsody being signed to Roc Nation.
What 9th Wonder mentioned in the episode was that back in 2011, Rapsody wrote a song called “Destiny” where she raps a line about wanting to spit a rhyme for Jay-Z, and then as he described it, the Roc Nation deal came into fruition a few years later. I really liked how he said that the deal came into fruition, and I think that it shows how important it is to speak things into existence. Rapsody has been confident in her rapping skills and throughout the episode, you can see her always being receptive to criticism and constantly working on perfecting her raps. Her rap album “Laila’s Wisdom” was released in 2017, although it was in the works for years, to the point that she was stressed out that it was never gonna come out. However, taking that time to really perfect her raps and working with her production is what likely led to the album being such a success. The album gave her 2 Grammy nominations and it was a commercial success. That being said, it shows that dedication and hard work leads to results.
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