Today, it has over a million views, more than any other upload on Grime Blog's channel. I haven't even got enough money to get out of Birmingham yet. When I track her down six years later, she's still as gassed over the freestyle as she was when she wrote it. Yes, they may be sexual, but the way it's constructed is just sick. And there's not a lot of people who could construct a song like that to this day; no one from the UK.
She's answering my questions through voice notes, and I can hear her become excited, girlish, when she talks about her freestyle. It's clear that she's serious about it. Rapping is an art form to her, and despite how her freestyle was received, it was never a joke for OG Niki. And the bars were so smooth, when I listened back to what I was saying, I thought: 'This sounds sick! At the time it was first uploaded, OG Niki was only seventeen years old.
She started rapping because that's what her friends, mostly boys, were also doing at the time. But as Lil' Kim once rapped: "If a guy have three girls, then he's the man This double standard was something OG found out the hard way.
Being born in the mid-nineties, the women rappers of OG Niki's childhood didn't hold their tongues. In the early s, rappers like Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown and Missy Elliott were at their height and all of them stood with the men, not shying away from overtly sexual and explicit lyrics. By , the landscape of female rappers had gotten smaller. Nicki Minaj had just released her debut album, Pink Friday , and was almost single-handedly vying for the crown of greatest female rapper with her often kid-friendly brand of bubblegum rap.
Listeners had become prudes. OG Niki was slut-shamed, chastised and dragged on social media. She was cancelled before the cancel culture which we know today even existed and was as a meme before the term had been coined. OG Niki disappeared as quickly as she appeared.
Disillusioned by the overwhelming popularity, backlash and sneers, she faded into the background. She was a year-old girl from Birmingham, with 0 guidance who simply just wanted to rap. In , she released a freestyle over Young M. But her rejection was also unsurprising purely due to the time in which she came out. In , the female rap scene had shrunk to only Nicki Minaj and despite her sexual image, her lyrical content seldom matched her appearance.
OG Niki crossed this line and for these reasons, her 3 minutes of unfiltered sex talk ruffled some feathers. There was greater allowance for women to be more expressive in this area. We saw this expression in television, films and on social media.
Whether consciously or not, these rappers began inserting these themes into their lyrics. We are now in a completely different era. Today, her lyrics would have been greeted with Ayes and twerks. OG Niki was light years ahead of her time and the industry and listeners simply lacked the foresight. OG Niki was the first of her kind and there seems to not have been another in the UK since.
People feel hypocritical for rejecting her but accepting the current wave of female rappers. OG Niki was a pioneer, and a pioneer who is owed an over-due apology. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.
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