“I’m pushing rap towards God through my music, for real,” 21-year-old Bktherula says over a bicoastal Zoom call. Though the Atlanta-born rapper is fairly open about her complicated relationship with institutional religion, faith, and her eccentric dialogue with the divine — her mission statement is loaded with a metaphysical twist.
The genre-bending rapper and singer-songwriter is competing in her own lane — perhaps even in her own dimension. Bktherula’s enigmatic talent is indicative of the diversification of rap, a genre that was once praised for its insularity and reliance on tradition. “I’m making that shit cool again,” Bktherula says.
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Rap, as an art and space, exists on the frontlines of the music industry and is in constant flux. In many ways, 2024’s rap chart-toppers sound unrecognizable to the hip-hop of the millennium’s end. In the past decade, the genre has ascended to the mainstream with unmatchable force, with rap artists dominating charts as they incorporate a distinctively pop mentality, one that favors virality over endurance, aiming to churn out records fast and often.
But artists like Bktherula aren’t looking for repeating methods of success, and certainly aren’t interested in picking up the playbooks of artists past. She, like her experimental peers, are vanguards of the genre’s evolution — and now rap must play catch-up as it rides in their wake.
Since first generating heat in Atlanta’s underground scene in the late 2010s, the rapper, born Brooklyn Rodriguez, made her way out of sweaty warehouses into studio sessions with the next generation of American rappers like Destroy Lonely, Babyxsosa, Cash Cobain, and NBA YoungBoy. With her 2019 breakout single “LEFT RIGHT” and her head-banging hit “Tweakin’ Together” released the following year, Bktherula has racked up millions of streams on SoundCloud, TikTok, and Spotify, catapulting her underground sound into an indisputably cool echelon of fashion and culture. In the past year, Bk has walked the runway for Nigerian designer Mowalola, starred in Marc Jacobs’ Summer 2023 campaign, and is now scheduled to tour with PinkPantheress for her 2024 Capable of Love tour.
With a shortened nickname out of the studio, Bk Zooms in from the Warner office in Los Angeles, wearing a black-and-pink Trapstar shirt and grungy two-toned jeans from 2nd Street. Seated on a small couch surrounded by posters, she excitedly flashes her unreleased fifth album to the camera. “That’s my eye,” she says, enamored by the tangible reality of her newest project, LVL5 P2 (standing for Level 5 Player Two).
To truly know Bk and her work is to recognize the underlying philosophy that contextualizes her music and worldview. “We’re definitely in a game,” Bk says, easing me in slowly to her eclecticism. “And then the levels are the different dimensions of the game.” Bk derives her philosophy from both a scientific and spiritual lens. She’s been taking online quantum physics classes at the University of Tokyo for nearly three years, studying what she calls the “science of the way the world is.” Through her relationship with God, she’s “studied” a high power. “They’re different, but they correlate,” she explains.
The third dimension, or Level 3, is our brick-and-mortar reality where most people exist, Bk says, candidly. “Those who ‘don’t get it’ are on Level 3,” she says. I look around the coffee shop where I’m seated and imagine the queuing patrons with tubes coming out of their heads, plugged into the matrix. “But a lot of people are there. I was once there, too.”
Since the age of 16, Bk has been operating in Level 5, an “egoless” place where she’s able to “change [her] future by believing something will happen.” Level 4 is the “astral realm” where one’s possibilities and imaginations are limitless. While we may be unable to control the fourth dimension, Level 5 is where the physical and unconscious reality meet. “Now you’re able to do what you can do in your dreams while still being among people in the third dimension,” Bk says. “That’s when it gets scary because you can change shit.”
But make no mistake: This is not your average TikTokers’ manifestation. “I wish people were telling the truth about [manifestation]. It’s not just writing sticky notes on your mirror. ‘I am beautiful. I’m smart.’ That’s not it — that’s bullshit,” Bk says. Unlike the witchy TikToks of journaling and sage-burning Gen Zers, Bk has “made a mathematical equation” that proves you can change your reality.
Bk realizes how her maverick dogma may seem to the average listener. “I’m sorry I’m a nerd about this shit,” Bk says, halting her explanation. But she boasts that her fans are “nerds who understand music theory” and “get her work” from a “fifth-dimensional perspective.”
LVL5 P2 — which follows a different player and alter ego of Bktherula — feels to her like her “first album ever.” Released today, the album opens with the glitching, techno track “CODE,” features mosh pit singles “TATTI” and “CRAYON,” and incorporates wild collaborations with Cash Cobain and JID. The project is distinctively fresh and entirely strange — as all of Bktherula is — with clear dubstep-inspired production, whip-smart lyrics, and stellar vocals. “It’s like hip-hop slash dubstep slash instrumental,” Bk says. “If I take out the instrumentals to my songs and remove the 808, I could perform that shit at an EDM festival.”
The rapper credits growing up in Atlanta for her gritty, swaggering sound. “I often think about how it would be if I didn’t grow up in Atlanta,” Bk says. “And it’s kind of scary. If I was born in New York, I would not be the same artist.”
In her childhood home in Atlanta, Bk was surrounded by creative inspiration. “I’ve been making music since I was a baby,” she says. “My mom’s a very good singer, and I sing because of her.” Bk says that her first songs were penned to sing to her mother. “But I also rap because of my dad, who was a rapper.” Between her singer mother and her dad, once a member of Planet X, an underground hip-hop group from Atlanta, there was a diverse mix of old-school hip-hop and R&B playing in her house.
But life at school wasn’t as easy. She was bullied and left sophomore year to be homeschooled. “I didn’t have friends in high school. I felt so alone,” she remembers. But Bk had the bug for songwriting. “I just started doing shit.” By 14, Bk was consumed with the sprawling landscape of SoundCloud’s underground rap scene.
“I would say that I’m the most inspired by underground bands,” Bk says. “The passion in their music is just completely different. It’s raw, and it’s real.” Bk started putting out songs on Instagram and SoundCloud and instantly hit a nerve. “I was blowing up everywhere but Atlanta,” Bk says, jokingly. “No one [here] knew that I was making music.”
A group of young creatives soon scouted Bk out on Instagram and “offered to record [her] first studio session, mix [her] music, and even do a video for [her].” The group — Molly, Josh, and Benji — became her closest friends, taking her to underground shows and helping her find a place as a performer. “I was 15 performing at fucking [warehouses] for 20-year-olds on Fridays and Saturdays and shit. That’s how I got in the game,” Bk says. “And now they still do all my videos.”
But even though Bktherula never found her groove in the high school hallways, her rambunctious, youthful spirit is integral to her life offstage. “Lately I feel like a jock,” Bk says as she slings a letterman jacket over her shoulders. “I wasn’t a jock in high school, but I’m getting it in my 20s.” When Bk’s not in the studio, she’s “skating with [her] friends, getting dumb tattoos, and doing random shit,” she says, laughing and showing me her Tech Deck collection. “But that’s Brooklyn.” If it were up to Brooklyn, she explains, she’d just “run away and not answer my phone and shit.” Luckily, Bk is more strategic.
She assures me that her fans know both Bk and Brooklyn, even though there’s a lot more to her adventurous personality than what’s currently out there. “I want to voice a cartoon, be an actor, make a movie, design clothes. I want to do a lot of shit, I’m not going to lie,” she shares.
Bktherula knows that people are catching onto her rising star, even if some haven’t yet voiced their support for her publicly. “At first you think that no one sees you — but they all do,” she explains. “Everyone knows who I am right now, I swear to you. Drake has seen me before, and they’re just keeping it quiet because if they reveal it, I’m out of there,” Bk says. “A little bit more out of there than they are.”
As whimsical and otherworldly as the rapper may seem, Bk is decidedly tapped in — with a work ethic as rigorous as a drill sergeant’s. Dropping five albums and a series of tracks between 2020 and 2024, all while maintaining a distinct and experimental sound that continuously pushes the boundaries of rap, it’s clear that Bk’s high-vibrational ideology enhances the quality of work and is, in part, what sets her apart as a trailblazer in the field. If the music industry wants to capitalize on what’s fresh, it’s clear they’re going to have to embrace artists like her, without shepherding down the paths of their successors.
“It’s about to be my damn time,” Bk says. “I pulled up, I’m here, and I come in peace.”
