Amanda Howell Whitehurst for NPR
One night in 1998, Katrina Laverne Taylor was hanging with a few friends when she got a phone call. Her friend Trick Daddy, rising Miami rap star and mainstay of her Liberty City neighborhood, was in the studio completing his album www.thug.com, and he’d had an idea. Duet tracks were taking over hip-hop: They were hard, yet sexy, and Southern rap didn’t have an answer for them yet. He was going to make that answer, and he needed a counterpart. So he begged Katrina to come down to the studio, and played her a song he had already cut called “Nann N****.”
Katrina, known these days as the Southern rap legend Trina, laid down a verse that night that got her a record deal on the spot, and led a generation of women toward being liberated on mic — as she calls them, “a whole universe of bad bitches.” But in a time when women were expected to be “ride or die chicks” hanging their whole careers on a man’s cosign, Trina put the girls on her back and left Trick hanging in the balance.
On this episode, we take you from that night in ’98 to today, when the style dubbed “p***y rap” is everything. Along the way we unpack the ride or die trope, dive into the legacy of Trina’s own Da Baddest B**** and find out just how Trick Daddy feels about her growing mountain of accolades. We also talk to Latto about what it was like to come up after Trina set a raunchy tone for Southern women in rap, and how sexual agency still gets misconstrued by men in the game.
To follow along with the music in this episode, check out the Louder Than A Riot playlists on Apple Music & Spotify. We’ll update them every week.
To connect with us, follow the show on Twitter @LouderThanARiot, or send us an email at [email protected].
Audio story produced by Gabby Bulgarelli
Audio story edited by Soraya Shockley
Audio story engineered by Gilly Moon
Podcast theme and original music by Suzi Analogue and Kassa Overall
Fact-checking by Zazil Davis-Vazquez