Rapsody
with 9th Wonder & Phonte Coleman
Wednesday, Aug. 19, 9 p.m.
Free for Duke first-year students
Duke Gardens 420 Anderson St., Durham
919-684-4444
dukeperformances.duke.edu Rapsody

with 9th Wonder, Petey Pablo, Terminator X & more
Packapalooza Hillsborough Street, Raleigh
Saturday, Aug. 22, 2 p.m.–10 p.m.
packapalooza.ncsu.edu

The student lounge was so full, hot and sticky that condensation streamed down the long windows.

In 2004, at N.C. State’s Bragaw Residence Hall, H2O—a crafty acronym for the “Hip-Hop Organization”—presented a series of cyphers, dance parties and charity events in a humdrum dormitory lounge. Rapsody, a young accounting major from a farm town in eastern North Carolina, and her friend, the rapper Charlie Smarts, formed the club to generate more hip-hop hubbub on campus.

When Rapsody arrived in Raleigh three years earlier, the place’s lack of rap discouraged her. Friends and relatives had told her the city was alive with beats and rhymes. It was there, she heard, but someone had to convince the rappers and producers to come back to campus. That night, they did.

At that debut battle, Median, a rising star from area collective The Justus League, freestyled. A young producer named Foolery encouraged his mentor, the producer 9th Wonder, to attend as a judge, too. 9th Wonder’s group, Little Brother, had shot to sudden hip-hop fame. To the students, including Rapsody, he was rap royalty.

“People walked by and could see us performing. It would be two, and then it would be 10. We’d have a nice little crowd,” Rapsody says. She wasn’t even rapping, just facilitating. “Then it was wall-to-wall people, people standing on the windowsill. That’s the rush I got.”

This weekend, Rapsody will try to bring that feeling back to N.C. State. Alongside 9th Wonder, who has since won a Grammy and served as a Harvard fellow, she will headline N.C. State’s back-to-school block party, Packapalooza, as a rapper, not an organizer.

Rapsody’s cautious nature led to her late entrance as an emcee—and likely, much of her success, too. But after 10 years in the tumbler, she’s helping to reimagine what it means to be a woman in hip-hop. She embraces the term “role model,” using it as a litmus test for which projects she participates in and how she presents herself. Just don’t call her a female rapper.

“I hate that term. It divides us,” Rapsody explains. “Used to be, you can make music, but when it comes time to talk about Top 10 emcees, that’s male territory. A couple years later, and you can’t say I’m a female rapper. Everybody’s just an emcee. Not everybody can take that pressure, or that path to get the respect you deserve. It’s been terribly hard.”

Rapsody has stuck with it, and the respect is starting to show. Her spot on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was hard to miss, as the only other rap feature belonged to Snoop Dogg, who barely rapped at all. Interview requests from major outlets like MTV, XXL, NME and Spin poured in. Everybody wanted to know who she was, where she came from and how she landed on one of the biggest hip-hop releases of 2015.

But rather than aim for instant fame, Rapsody used her verse on Lamar’s “Complexion (A Zulu Love)”—her biggest step toward the spotlight to date—to reinforce her role-model image. A reference to being comfortable in one’s own skin, no matter the color, the title reminded Rapsody of a time she took her 5-year-old niece shopping for dolls.

“I was like, ‘Why don’t you want the black Barbie?’ And she’s like, ‘That’s ugly,’” Rapsody remembers. “As a child, that’s all that you see: White is beautiful, black is ugly. White is angels, black is bad or demonic. You don’t want them to lose their innocence that young and not think that they’re beautiful.”

Rapsody’s 7-year-old nephew recently called her to say he’d memorized her verse.

“I know what that’s going to do for him,” she says. “That’s going to make him love himself. And he’s lighter than his sister, so he won’t pick on her because she’s dark-skinned.”

She laughs and says, “That’s what feeds me.”