“I was curled up in a blanket,” starts the Grammy-nominated rapper Rapsody, in a spoken word-like cadence, as our respective faces first appeared on Zoom. “I see, and I’m not mad at that,” I replied, and we cackled as if we weren’t strangers. We shared a seemingly kindred understanding that when you have a busy career and live in a chaotic world, being at home cozily wrapped in a blanket is just as lit as taking center stage.

The task at hand was two women with an appreciation for documenting hip-hop — the highs and the lows of it — coming together to tell a story that celebrates the herstory of the almost 50-year-old genre, with Rapsody as the muse. When it comes to modern-day lyricists, the North Carolina native is always brought up in purist discussions as one of the genre’s glimmers of hope. She’s humble, and still processing her ascent (that has been over a decade in the making) so when I asked her what it felt like to be a new school favorite rapper’s favorite rapper she suggested that maybe it’s too early to answer that question.

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“I tell people it's hard for me to see my impact. Lately, I've been getting small glimpses but I still really don't understand my impact on people completely. I know I'm respected and that keeps me full,” Rapsody tells BET. “Every artist I come in contact with shows mad love and respect. I'm not the biggest artist in the world and I have no platinum plaques, no hit records, but in conversations, artists tell me how people talk about me when they’re in certain rooms.”

Emphasis on impact.

It’s not hard to fall for Rapsody, the aptly self-described homegirl. She’s laid back, smart, thoughtful, and as easy to talk to as it is to listen to her music. She’s also authentic but not in the smarmy performative way that is pervasive throughout the cult of celebrity, especially on social media. Her self-awareness and inherent pride in her Blackness translates in her studio albums, The Idea of Beautiful, Laila’s Wisdom, and Eve, which are all love letters to Black women and blackness in general.

Amid a seemingly endless assembly line of bad b-tches and by extension, the hard-to-escape pressure to aspire to impossible beauty standards, Rapsody uses her rhymes to examine what it means to be an unconventional beauty undeterred by pretty-politics, and the visceral impact of self-hate. She also celebrates the victory of being an underdog who knows their worth.

It’s never about being pitted against or above women who may rap differently, with fewer skills, or have a different aesthetic. This phase of Rapsody’s evolution involves more vulnerability and transcending the respectability politics you get caught up in when you’re a woman who raps. People either put you on a pedestal and praise you for being lyrically adept and fully clad, or they judge you for it. Either way, it doesn’t feel good.

“In this age of social media it’s hard because you might want to come in being yourself, but you're so influenced because you have all these images in your face all the time, and you might second-guess yourself,” says Rapsody. “It's like, ‘Damn, I would love to show up as myself, but I want to be successful.’ I see the comments like, ‘Rap is dope but she'll never make it because she ain't showing her titties,’ and I’m like ‘F--k you!’ I just want women to know that having balance is cool. And however, you want to be seen in this world, do that as long as it’s you.”

After two years in quarantine, focusing on herself, and her vision for her career, Rapsody, like a lot of us, is “back outside.” Most recently, she made the rounds at New York Fashion week where her stylist, Misa Hylton, was honored for her life’s work, she also lent her talent to shaping the lyrical vision of On the Come Up, the movie based on Angie Thomas’ novel about a young woman trying to make it as a rapper, and she took the stage at New York’s Blue Note in October.

She’s working on a new album that will hopefully be out next year. It has been three years since the release of her last album, Eve, a critically acclaimed masterpiece heavy on womanist overtones, but the pandemic changed everything. At the moment, Rap, as she refers to herself, has 250 songs worth of new material, but narrowing down the messaging is the most complex part. Because when you’ve shared a traumatic experience with the rest of the world by way of a global pandemic that only made the inequities that you rap about worse, it’s hard not to make it to the other side as a different version of yourself.

“I got to really sit with myself and really feel a lot of things and question myself and why this was happening. Because we're not here to be the old us. We’re here to always continually evolve,” says Rapsody. “There’s so much to say and I never gave myself the place to say it because I was so busy trying to prove that I was good and trying to gain respect, not for how I looked and how I dressed or where I was from, but my gift and the music that I make.”

Boxes are stifling, and sometimes even the fiercest among us can find themselves contained by them. However, the freedom to exist without restriction, especially inflicted by self, is what every artist desires, and sometimes it takes work to get there. Rapsody adds that a pivotal conversation with Don Cannon,  co-founder of the Atlantic Records imprint, Generation Now, helped her put what she was already thinking into perspective.

“He said, ‘We know you can rap now, but people think you’re perfect and you have to tell people you’re not perfect,’” she says. “I had to think about that because I don't give too much in interviews and it’s hard to give yourself fully as an artist. You have to be so careful because everything is clickbait, and you might say something that has all this depth but people just hold on to that one headline taken out of context.”

If the brilliance we’ve seen from Rapsody’s past music was her holding back, then this next era is going to be epic. It’s safe to assume we can think of this next phase of Rap’s artistry as a reintroduction, one where she will have more fun.

“I’m at a stage now where I have nothing to prove. I can just be human. I can connect with people, so that’s my evolution in a nutshell,” she explains. “I don’t want people to want to be like me, but I’m ready for people to relate.”