“Rap is definitely poetry,” Latto tells me. She also does the very thing that makes rappers poets: She works the language. In reaccenting the word, Latto charges it with her Southern drawl. “Pandemic” becomes “PAN-demic,” the stress displaced from its natural position. On “Youngest N Richest,” she raps it more deliberately atop a frenetic track fretted with a tense violin sample. On the XXL freestyle, she raps “pandemic” fluidly over a lazy instrumental, so the word sounds like urgent speech. Listen to Latto perform and you understand what she heard in that word. A few bars later, in her cipher verse, she adds: “I donated, too, so don’t mock me!” But boasting about spending $100,000 on a diamond-encrusted chain and watch amid a global health crisis also rates as particularly brazen, even in a musical genre that often centers the self and celebrates conspicuous consumption. It’s standard-issue braggadocio, in praise of her newfound wealth. “I just dropped a hundred on jewelry during a pandemic,” she raps, give or take a word.
has used it twice on record so far: once last summer during a cipher - a competitive and collaborative freestyle session with other rappers - when the hip-hop magazine XXL named Latto (as she’s known) to its 2020 “freshman class” of breakout stars and again on the opening track from her major-label debut, “Queen of Da Souf,” released last year.
Not surprisingly, one of the words that has come to mind during the past year is “pandemic” the 22-year-old M.C.
THE ATLANTA-BASED RAPPER Mulatto collects scraps of language on her iPhone, words and phrases that come to her suddenly, or that she’s picked up while performing online during the pandemic.
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