It’s been just over a decade since the moniker ‘Mykki Blanco’ was created — first as a video art project portraying a teenage female character (inspired by Lil Kim’s ‘Kimmy Blanco’ alter ego) posting vlogs and raps on social media, but it inevitably evolved into a vehicle of self-discovery in the artist’s journey of forming their personal self-identity.
One of the first Mykki Blanco tracks released was in 2012, and it was on and popping from there. In the time since, they have pushed hip-hop to some of its most untethered bounds, melding noise and experimental elements with club and trap sounds, whilst also forging a uniquely subversive path within a genre historically entangled in a problematic ideological web of misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.
And while Blanco is widely recognized as a pioneering trailblazer in the so-called ‘queer rap’ sub-genre, the music of this new chapter represents such significant evolution toward eradicating the confines of genre categories and smashing any previous notion of the ceiling of their potential reach.