As I approached this week I wondered how my older readers would react to an artist named Rico Nasty. I gauge such responses based on some of my friends who do not follow modern music makers. Of course, many are parents and like me, grandparents. We all have a guarded view of things that might affect young ones adversely. Music, is always the generational dividing line. However, it’s not just the music, but also the artists’ presentation. The individualism of artists has always separated them from the rest of society. The artist tends to be bold and unique. Such actions may seem crude and vulgar to older ones, but younger music fans are drawn to modern artists like bees to honey. This week we get to examine the life and career of another young budding superstar who last month appeared here in South Florida and gave a performance that had social media buzzing for a while afterward. Therefore, lets now look into how Rico Nasty got started, and the implications of her fantastic Rolling Loud performance.
Maria-Cecilia Simone Kelly was born an only child. to a Puerto Rican mother and an African American father May 7, 1997 in Washington D.C. She spent her childhood years in New York and Virginia, but she’s lived most of her life in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Kelly’s father was a rapper who went by the name Beware, toured with fellow rapper Jadakiss some years ago. Young Maria Kelly was exposed to rap music at a young age therefore, you might say rap music is in her DNA.
When she was in sixth grade, her parents enrolled her in a boarding school in Baltimore, in the hopes of providing her a better education than the one her school district offered. A bus would pick her up from a local rec center every week and return her to spend weekends at home. After three years, when she was 14, a boy named Martinez invited her outside to smoke weed. She was so young, she says, she didn’t even know how to use a lighter. The pair got caught at a bus stop. They weren’t even stoned yet — “and that was the worst part about it,” she says — but she was expelled and sent back to a public school near home. At that new school she started making music.
Returning from Baltimore, Rico felt different — “the weird one out the pack,” she says. Her new schoolmates, many of whom she’d known since elementary school, treated her with disdain. That switch from boarding school to public school at the time was a crazy place in Kelly’s life. That, she says, is when Maria Kelly became Rico Nasty: “I started doing shit the way I like to do it ‘cause I got tired of waiting on everybody else to do shit for me.”
In fact, it was from that hostile high school experience where she adopted her stage name. She used to wear a lanyard around her neck that read “Puerto Rico,” an embellishment acknowledging her ethnic heritage. One day, in the 10th grade, a boy, attributing a bad odor to her, teased her as she was walking away. He yelled: “Rico nasty!” On the bus home from school that day, she changed her Instagram name to Rico Nasty.
Rico started rapping in high school and released her first mixtape, Summer’s Eve (2014), when she was in tenth grade at Charles Herbert Flowers High School. After graduating from high school, she started focusing on her music career and released two mixtapes in 2016: The Rico Story and Sugar Trap. Rico Nasty gained some prominence with her 2016 single “iCarly” which amassed over 500 thousand views on YouTube within months. She also released the single “Hey Arnold,” which was later remixed featuring Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty. The duo would later link again in 2017 for the single “Mamacita” as part of The Fate of the Furious: The Album soundtrack.
Many of you reading this post might be familiar with Lil Yachty. If so, that pairing with Rico Nasty might seem like an excellent idea. It places her with an artist who embraces that same kind of individualism that marked her rise toward success.
In May 2017, Rico Nasty released her fourth mixtape, Tales of Tacobella, which is her earliest commercially available release as of September 2020. Kyann-Sian Williams of NME described the mixtape as “otherworldly and synth-heavy” and noted that the mixtape proved Rico’s singing abilities. In June 2017, Kelly released her single “Poppin” which quickly garnered over five million views on YouTube The single was also featured on the HBO television series Insecure. Kelly’s fifth mixtape Sugar Trap 2 was released in October 2017 and featured an appearance from rapper Famous Dex. Critics of Rolling Stone listed the mixtape as one of the Best Rap Albums of 2017.
At this point in her career it was apparent Rico Nasty had the ability to create good recordings. How would her music work delivered to a live audience? Quite well. In fact, the summers of 2017, 2018 and 2019 found Rico Nasty headlining tours, the last would be her Live in Europe Tour. The young artist by this time would have international appeal, well on her way toward major success.
That kind of brings us to last month at the Rolling Loud Miami concert. Of course the weekend festival was filled with many successful musical acts of our day, but one performance stood out. Yes, Rico Nasty created a buzz with her stage presence. Impressed with the energy Rico brought to her performance, fans on Twitter gave her props at every turn. For the set, she ran through a variety of cuts, including slaps like “10fo,” “Let It Out,” and, of course, fan favorite track “Smack a Bitch.”
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has placed us indoors and away from such major events for a long time. I must admit, Im still very much confined and not able to attend events like Rolling Loud just yet. However, I’m very happy for all the performers who are able to take the stage. I’m certainly happy for all the fans who were able to attend. Certainly Rico Nasty delivered in a way that she might have gained even more fans that day.
Another positive development of her overall successful performance is that a woman gained praise and stood out to an audience of men and women. It appears we might be reaching a place where women have gained footing in the male dominated world of hip hop. We’re not at that place of equality yet, but I think we’re a little closer.