Daisha McBride
WNXP’s Nashville Artist of the Month for June, 2021, is Daisha McBride, who’s been known as the Rap Girl since she was the one dropping squeaky clean bars in the cafeteria at her East TN high school; she left her permanent mark by supplying the pep rally pump-up rhymes still used by its sports teams.
It was a given, in her high-achieving, church-going household, that she would continue her schooling, and she had savvy ways of making those years count. McBride elected to attend Middle Tennessee State, to study how careers are made in the music business, and she found her primary producers, Big Bruno and Sci-Fy, among her classmates, and courted modest virality from her dorm room by posting clips of herself freestyling over already popular tracks.
She graduated more than ready to lean into the singularity of her persona and carve out her own professional path in and beyond Nashville hip-hop. She brings humor to her swagger, and laidback agility to her performances, attacking more aggressive beats as an athletic technician, adopting a sing-rapping approach on tracks with melodic R&B inflections and often splitting the difference in casual displays of attitude.
She was one of the first in her wave of young, Nashville-based writer-emcees to land a deal with a publisher, and she’s gotten into soundtracking TV shows, even as she focuses on developing, personalizing and, little by little, using more potent language in her own work, in the process landing headlining spots on the city’s biggest hip-hop shows and garnering enough attention to be a semi-finalist in a BET talent competition.