“I’m pushing rap towards God through my music, for real,” 21-year-old Bktherula says over a bicoastal Zoom name. Though the Atlanta-born rapper is pretty open about her sophisticated relationship with institutional faith, religion, and her eccentric dialogue with the divine — her mission assertion is loaded with a metaphysical twist.
The genre-bending rapper and singer-songwriter is competing in her personal lane — even perhaps in her personal dimension. Bktherula’s enigmatic expertise is indicative of the diversification of rap, a style that was as soon as praised for its insularity and reliance on custom. “I’m making that shit cool again,” Bktherula says.
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Rap, as an artwork and area, exists on the frontlines of the music business and is in fixed flux. In some ways, 2024’s rap chart-toppers sound unrecognizable to the hip-hop of the millennium’s finish. In the previous decade, the style has ascended to the mainstream with unmatchable power, with rap artists dominating charts as they incorporate a distinctively pop mentality, one which favors virality over endurance, aiming to churn out information quick and sometimes.
But artists like Bktherula aren’t on the lookout for repeating strategies of success, and positively aren’t focused on selecting up the playbooks of artists previous. She, like her experimental friends, are vanguards of the style’s evolution — and now rap should play catch-up because it rides of their wake.
Since first producing warmth in Atlanta’s underground scene in the late 2010s, the rapper, born Brooklyn Rodriguez, made her method out of sweaty warehouses into studio periods with the subsequent technology of American rappers like Destroy Lonely, Babyxsosa, Cash Cobain, and NBA YoungBoy. With her 2019 breakout single “LEFT RIGHT” and her head-banging hit “Tweakin’ Together” launched the following 12 months, Bktherula has racked up thousands and thousands of streams on SoundCloud, TikTook, and Spotify, catapulting her underground sound into an indisputably cool echelon of vogue and tradition. In the previous 12 months, Bk has walked the runway for Nigerian designer Mowalola, starred in Marc Jacobs’ Summer 2023 marketing campaign, and is now scheduled to tour with PinkPantheress for her 2024 Capable of Love tour.
With a shortened nickname out of the studio, Bk Zooms in from the Warner workplace in Los Angeles, carrying a black-and-pink Trapstar shirt and grungy two-toned denims from 2nd Street. Seated on a small sofa surrounded by posters, she excitedly flashes her unreleased fifth album to the digital camera. “That’s my eye,” she says, enamored by the tangible actuality of her latest undertaking, LVL5 P2 (standing for Level 5 Player Two).
To really know Bk and her work is to acknowledge the underlying philosophy that contextualizes her music and worldview. “We’re definitely in a game,” Bk says, easing me in slowly to her eclecticism. “And then the levels are the different dimensions of the game.” Bk derives her philosophy from each a scientific and religious lens. She’s been taking on-line quantum physics lessons at the University of Tokyo for practically three years, finding out what she calls the “science of the way the world is.” Through her relationship with God, she’s “studied” a excessive energy. “They’re different, but they correlate,” she explains.
The third dimension, or Level 3, is our brick-and-mortar actuality the place most individuals exist, Bk says, candidly. “Those who ‘don’t get it’ are on Level 3,” she says. I go searching the espresso store the place I’m seated and picture the queuing patrons with tubes popping out of their heads, plugged into the matrix. “But a lot of people are there. I was once there, too.”
Since the age of 16, Bk has been working in Level 5, an “egoless” place the place she’s in a position to “change [her] future by believing something will happen.” Level 4 is the “astral realm” the place one’s potentialities and imaginations are limitless. While we could also be unable to regulate the fourth dimension, Level 5 is the place the bodily and unconscious actuality meet. “Now you’re able to do what you can do in your dreams while still being among people in the third dimension,” Bk says. “That’s when it gets scary because you can change shit.”
But make no mistake: This is not your common TikTokers’ manifestation. “I wish people were telling the truth about [manifestation]. It’s not just writing sticky notes on your mirror. ‘I am beautiful. I’m smart.’ That’s not it — that’s bullshit,” Bk says. Unlike the witchy TikToks of journaling and sage-burning Gen Zers, Bk has “made a mathematical equation” that proves you may change your actuality.
Bk realizes how her maverick dogma could appear to the common listener. “I’m sorry I’m a nerd about this shit,” Bk says, halting her clarification. But she boasts that her followers are “nerds who understand music theory” and “get her work” from a “fifth-dimensional perspective.”
LVL5 P2 — which follows a totally different participant and alter ego of Bktherula — feels to her like her “first album ever.” Released right this moment, the album opens with the glitching, techno observe “CODE,” options mosh pit singles “TATTI” and “CRAYON,” and incorporates wild collaborations with Cash Cobain and JID. The undertaking is distinctively recent and completely unusual — as all of Bktherula is — with clear dubstep-inspired manufacturing, whip-smart lyrics, and stellar vocals. “It’s like hip-hop slash dubstep slash instrumental,” Bk says. “If I take out the instrumentals to my songs and remove the 808, I could perform that shit at an EDM festival.”
The rapper credit rising up in Atlanta for her gritty, swaggering sound. “I often think about how it would be if I didn’t grow up in Atlanta,” Bk says. “And it’s kind of scary. If I was born in New York, I would not be the same artist.”
In her childhood residence in Atlanta, Bk was surrounded by inventive inspiration. “I’ve been making music since I was a baby,” she says. “My mom’s a very good singer, and I sing because of her.” Bk says that her first songs have been penned to sing to her mom. “But I also rap because of my dad, who was a rapper.” Between her singer mom and her dad, as soon as a member of Planet X, an underground hip-hop group from Atlanta, there was a various combine of old-school hip-hop and R&B taking part in in her home.
But life in school wasn’t as simple. She was bullied and left sophomore 12 months to be homeschooled. “I didn’t have friends in high school. I felt so alone,” she remembers. But Bk had the bug for songwriting. “I just started doing shit.” By 14, Bk was consumed with the sprawling panorama of SoundCloud’s underground rap scene.
“I would say that I’m the most inspired by underground bands,” Bk says. “The passion in their music is just completely different. It’s raw, and it’s real.” Bk began placing out songs on Instagram and SoundCloud and immediately hit a nerve. “I was blowing up everywhere but Atlanta,” Bk says, jokingly. “No one [here] knew that I was making music.”
A bunch of younger creatives quickly scouted Bk out on Instagram and “offered to record [her] first studio session, mix [her] music, and even do a video for [her].” The group — Molly, Josh, and Benji — turned her closest associates, taking her to underground exhibits and serving to her discover a place as a performer. “I was 15 performing at fucking [warehouses] for 20-year-olds on Fridays and Saturdays and shit. That’s how I got in the game,” Bk says. “And now they still do all my videos.”
But though Bktherula by no means discovered her groove in the highschool hallways, her rambunctious, youthful spirit is integral to her life offstage. “Lately I feel like a jock,” Bk says as she slings a letterman jacket over her shoulders. “I wasn’t a jock in high school, but I’m getting it in my 20s.” When Bk’s not in the studio, she’s “skating with [her] friends, getting dumb tattoos, and doing random shit,” she says, laughing and displaying me her Tech Deck assortment. “But that’s Brooklyn.” If it have been as much as Brooklyn, she explains, she’d simply “run away and not answer my phone and shit.” Luckily, Bk is extra strategic.
She assures me that her followers know each Bk and Brooklyn, though there’s a lot extra to her adventurous character than what’s presently on the market. “I want to voice a cartoon, be an actor, make a movie, design clothes. I want to do a lot of shit, I’m not going to lie,” she shares.
Bktherula is aware of that individuals are catching onto her rising star, even when some haven’t but voiced their help for her publicly. “At first you think that no one sees you — but they all do,” she explains. “Everyone knows who I am right now, I swear to you. Drake has seen me before, and they’re just keeping it quiet because if they reveal it, I’m out of there,” Bk says. “A little bit more out of there than they are.”
As whimsical and otherworldly as the rapper could appear, Bk is decidedly tapped in — with a work ethic as rigorous as a drill sergeant’s. Dropping 5 albums and a collection of tracks between 2020 and 2024, all whereas sustaining a distinct and experimental sound that constantly pushes the boundaries of rap, it’s clear that Bk’s high-vibrational ideology enhances the high quality of work and is, partly, what units her aside as a trailblazer in the discipline. If the music business desires to capitalize on what’s recent, it’s clear they’re going to should embrace artists like her, with out shepherding down the paths of their successors.
“It’s about to be my damn time,” Bk says. “I pulled up, I’m here, and I come in peace.”
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