How did Megan Thee Stallion become the hottest rapper out of Houston? She got it from her mama.
Hip-hop has not historically been welcoming to women who rap: They’re ignored or pitted against each other or allowed to be successful only one at a time. But when she was growing up in Houston in the late ’90s and early aughts, that never occurred to Megan Thee Stallion. Instead of going to day care, she spent afternoons in the studio with her mother, Holly Thomas, who rapped under the name Holly-Wood. “My mom is the first female rapper I’ve ever known. I’m thinking, like, Okay, yeah, this is normal. Everybody’s doing this,” Megan, now 24, says. As Holly-Wood rapped, she thought her daughter was coloring or watching TV. “Really, I was ear to the door, thinking, Yeah, uh-huh, I’ma do that too.”
Megan’s in New York three weeks after dropping the video for her single “Big Ole Freak” and on the verge of dropping a new mixtape, Fever. It’s a breakthrough moment for her career but also a difficult one personally: Her mother is suffering from a brain tumor. And so, understandably, a lot of the ways she talks about the rapper she has become is by thinking about the one who raised her.
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