“I’m the girl that raps / I know you heard ’bout that / Need a massage / ’Cause I put the city on my back.” Those lines come from “Nothing Else,” a recent track that serves as a statement of purpose from rising MC Daisha McBride. Earlier this year, the 22-year-old Knoxville native graduated with a music-business degree from Middle Tennessee State University and moved to Nashville to take her rap career to the next level — not necessarily a move you’d expect, since the infrastructure for hip-hop here is so limited.
But McBride comes well-equipped with an understanding of the business and outstanding skills. As a student, she already began establishing a fan base online with videos of herself doing covers or freestyle raps, a couple of which went viral, and one even earned her a follow from one of her heroes, Missy Elliott. We recently sat down to talk shop at a coffeehouse in the Gulch.
Once you graduated, what made you want to come to Nashville?
I knew I wanted to be a musician, but it was either going to be Atlanta or Nashville because I have family that lives in Atlanta. It would’ve been a lot easier financially for me to move to Atlanta, because I would have a place to stay, and I’m more familiar with the city. But I was thinking, and I was like — compare the number of female rappers in Atlanta versus the number of female rappers here. I was like, “I’ll probably stand out more.” One of my good friends, he does music, and we graduated at the same time. He called me one day, and he was like: “I think you need to stay here. I just feel like you’ll do really well in Nashville.” I was just like, “I don’t know.” I just had a gut feeling telling me to stay in Nashville, so I stayed. It’s been going really well ever since. I’ve only been here a couple months, but it’s been really dope, though.
You mentioned in a previous interview that you’ve been booked on a lot of bills with pop artists. Do you feel like that’s a positive thing?
I found it very helpful for me just because … I think the pop scene right now in Nashville is just so oversaturated. There are so many, so many pop singers. I like doing the pop shows because people go there, and I’m still fairly new. So they see my name on the lineup, but they don’t really know anything about me. They might not even know I do hip-hop. Then when I get up there and I have my live band, and I’m rapping, it’s just interesting watching everybody just be like — they kind of scoot in a little bit and turn their head because you don’t see this.
That’s kind of the reaction that I’ve gotten since I’ve been here. People like my music. It’s not like I’m just doing this — because if I wasn’t good, and I was just up there just kind of doing rap that was just “meh,” they might be like, “Oh, this is not good.” But then the fact that they think my music is good and they like it, it’s just been really good for me. I’ve gotten nothing but positive feedback for the most part.
You’ve also talked about the seeming lack of support for female MCs from other women who rap. Do you have any ideas for how you want to address that?
Definitely collaboration. I feel like there’s a lot of tension and not a lot of unity just because people have egos, and … I think people also have people in their ear telling them things, telling them how they should act that might not necessarily be the right way to approach things. With me, it’s always just, I try to be as genuine as possible. I have other friends who are female rappers, and with us, we can all get in a studio, and there will be no type of tension, no type of — I mean, with any rappers, there’s competition because obviously, you want to have the best verse on the song. It’s friendly fun. It’s not like we’re tearing each other down.
It’s like the kind of competition that encourages you to do better.
Exactly. When you play up your friend in basketball one on one, if you lose, you’re not going to hate them forever. You’re going to be like, “Ah, I’ve got to work on my layups next time.” You just take it and get better. But it’s not anything to the point where people should be fighting or tearing people down on the internet or any of that. I just feel like life is too short to worry about stuff like that.
Do you ever feel pressure to do things in order to appeal to one kind of listener or another?
Yes and no. That’s kind of the thing I’m trying to figure out now, because obviously, I don’t rap about the same things that you hear other female rappers rap about on the radio. I don’t sound like Cardi B, I don’t sound like Nicki Minaj, I don’t sound like Remy Ma. I don’t sound like all the mainstream female rappers, but I could. I was trying to do a sync placement one time, and I remember the people’s email was like, “We want you to sound like Cardi B.” I did the song in, like, five minutes, and my producer was like, “This is so good,” and I was just like, “I hate this.” He was just like, “What do you mean? It’s so good,” this and that. I was just like: “I hate this. It’s so basic to me. It’s what I hear every day on the radio. I don’t like this.”
But then also, I know that I can’t make music that’s so far opposite of that, because then I know that it might be hard for people to link to. … Everybody loves Drake — his music is good, and it has a meaning and a message, but you can play it on the radio. I think that’s a balance that a lot of the great artists have found a way to do. Like Michael Jackson makes great music. His songs have message, meaning, purpose, but they’re commercial. So now, I’m trying to just find a balance between how to make music that’s good but that’s commercial also, because obviously I need to eat.
Sometimes, I do feel pressured just to make a club record. I have a couple of those that will be coming in 2019, just because it’s like, I didn’t want to be conscious in the studio that day. I just wanted to have fun and turn up. I’ll have a couple of those, but for the most part, I try to make sure it has some type of substance to it. But then there are those records where you’re just like, “I don’t feel like it, I just wanted to have fun.”
