Your new Boyfriend – New Orleans female rapper to perform Saturday

Boyfriend will perform Saturday as a part of Baton Rouge Arm Wrestling Ladies’ Heartbreakers Brawl at The Spanish Moon. Cover is $8. Doors open at 9 p.m. Proceeds from the event benefit YWCA Greater Baton Rouge. Malibu Barbarian and comedian Jeff Buck will also perform. For more information and to RSVP, click here.

In 2012, a female rapper came out of New Orleans going by the moniker Boyfriend. Don’t bother to try and ask for her name, she won’t tell you. She came to Louisiana from Los Angeles, and before that, she grew up in Nashville with a family of musicians and artists.

“My mom is a photographer, my dad is a songwriter … I was always the odd man out,” she says. “I was always working in the entertainment industry on the logistics side. While my family was composing works of art, I was doing spreadsheets and writing e-mails. This has been brewing under the surface.”

She’s referring to her satirical rap game that launched with the 2012 single “Hunch N Munch” as Boyfriend. Later this year, she’s planning to release an album.

Listening to Boyfriend is like hearing a mash-up of Weird Al and trap music. She turns topics on their ears. A new song, “Swanky,” is about being cool and hip without having much money. Forget having dollar bills, she’s content to revel in the spare change she finds.

At first, she admits hip-hop was an odd choice, considering her family’s background. She’s not a die-hard rap fan, either, and listens to just as much Kate Bush and Weezer as she does Three Six Mafia and Nelly. Rapping is just easy for Boyfriend.

“A lot of why I rap is growing up in the household where words were the main artistic medium,” she says. “My dad was a wordsmith. He knows words and how to put them in order. There were certainly guitars around the house, but I have no patience for learning an instrument. With rap, I really caught on fast. I couldn’t be a guitar savant within the first month. Rapping came easy to me. I embraced it and chose it as a conscious arena for comedy.”

When she first started, other female rappers like Kreayshawn were gaining attention, only to disappear from the mainstream as quickly as they popped up. The difference for Boyfriend is that she refuses to be idle.

“In 2013, I released 13 music videos,” she says. “No one was watching, but I did it. That’s part of it. People get so bogged down with having this specific equation. Everything is niche with the Internet. We consume in tiny chunks, so there’s room to love and hate parts of one artist. I’m always changing the hat so there is something for everybody. I’m not speaking to change the world. I just want people to approach the content they consume a little differently.”

One can point to her background in marketing as to why she’s so savvy and connected.
“The creative part of this is 10% of it, the rest is the hustle,” she says. “There’s a reason why they call it the game. I feel so lucky to have been on both sides.”

But if you do see her live and catch one of her songs, be prepared, she warns.

“You have to pay attention,” she says. “It’s jarring, off-putting, and you’ll have to have an opinion. I want people to approach this like they do a vaudeville act, or a theatre/cabaret show. I’m entertaining people and participating in the culture around me by pointing to the culture around me.”

For more information on Boyfriend, click here.