Rhode Island-born singer Mapei spent much of her early career in Sweden, where she felt pressured into the rap game.
The 30-year-old recently spoke with XXL about the experience, and whipped out a Kendrick Lamar comparison that required some explanation.
About Sweden, though...
"It's very backpacker," Mapei said. "They don't like rap songs with choruses, they've always dissed them. I used to listen to like... I used to go to clubs with the African immigrants in Sweden-I'm Liberian-so we would just get together and go to, like, teenybopper clubs as 14-year-olds and we used to like Ma$e, Missy, Diddy, Lil Kim, and the backpack scene was totally against that. So there is like two sides."
"The very commercial, bling, back in the day Rocawear-wearing bad side, and there is a backpacker side. The backpacker side is bigger. They are very good rappers. They are very good storytellers when they talk about the depression and the climate of Sweden. What is going on in Sweden. And it is very sad right now. There is a political party that's very racist, so people are also rapping about that a lot right now."
Her first rap song was a banger.
"It was a song called 'Come As You Are,'" she said. "I was like, [Rapping] "Home peoples using the scene, abusing the scene / But ain't nobody using me because I'll just steal on them / So they better have a shield on them." That was when I was 12. I used to hang out with the dudes and they were like, 'You sound American, can you rap?' Or, 'You sound like Lauryn Hill when you talk,' and stuff like that. So I just ended up rapping but I really liked to sing. I was shy because like I grew up with Mary J Blige, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and there in Sweden they listen to more traditional Swedish [music], like, it's kind of folk-y. So I was kind of a weird person there."
Mapei said she wants to work with Lamar above anybody else (join the club, girl).
"His ability to make melodies is just unreal," she said. "He has this spirit. He just sounds like Billie Holiday or something, you know what I'm saying? He sounds like an old spirit and I would just like to create with him, especially the project he just did with Flying Lotus, that 'Never Going to Catch Me' song. I'm like, 'Wow!' I sing that all day. I am like, 'What the hell?' I have a song with Flying Lotus also, 'Ideas.' Yeah. It's on his Ideas+drafts+loops album."
Her most recent album, Hey Hey, dropped in September. Check out a sample here:
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