Daisha McBride Takes Command at Acme

At this point, just about anyone in Nashville (and if we’re being honest, in plenty of other places) knows exactly who The Rap Girl is. Though Daisha McBride claimed that title for herself while she was still in school, the MTSU grad has gotten cosigns from quite a few authorities. Take it from Missy Elliott, whose retweet helped one of McBride’s early freestyles go viral. Or take it from longtime Nashville rap standout Mike Floss, who made a featured appearance on her single “Nothing Else” in 2018. Though Bonnaroo got rained out last year, McBride was the lone MC on the planned Women of Nashville showcase at the festival. Nashville music discovery radio station WNXP picked McBride’s LP Let Me Get This Off My Chest, which dropped in November, as their Record of the Week. Near the end of the year, she announced that she had placed multiple songs in major Black TV shows.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that the new album shows the Knoxville-born artist expanding lyrically, exposing complicated emotions about relationships and bleeding out a lot of dark personal pain. On top of all the other things that make it great, the record is important because it normalizes talking about queer relationships in hip-hop — which like so many other realms of pop music has been outright homophobic at times. McBride got a lot of attention for the talent she displayed as a very young person, and the new material has made it clear that her more mature, fully realized self is an even stronger rapper. Saturday night, she took over the third floor of Acme Feed and Seed for an event called Element, a celebration of the person she’s grown into.

Walking into the space felt a bit like strolling up to a swank wedding reception. To my left was a photo booth inside an inflatable igloo. To my right was a roped-off VIP section. Across the room I spotted a merch table with T-shirts that replicated the Element poster. Directly ahead was a bar featuring three cocktails named for Let Me Get This Off My Chest tracks — “FWB,” “Loyal” and “Bounce Back” — being mixed by a trio of bartenders dressed in banquet black. Generally speaking, I’m more accustomed to showing up at a club and feeling my sneakers stick to the floor from an accumulation of spilled beer that even repeated mopping won’t entirely eradicate. This was a bit different from your run-of-the-mill Saturday dive bar gig.

Not long after 8 p.m., DJ duo GAS!**, the neon-headed twosome of Nashville rhymesmith $avvy and collaborative partner Enigma, powered up their laptops and began blasting a patchwork of jumbled squeals and obnoxious samples. It was weirdly engaging and the mark of something I was going to dig. After a minute or two, the cacophony resolved itself into Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body.” Their set lasted almost an hour, packed solidly with hits by Kendrick Lamar, Yeat, Jay-Z and Tyler, the Creator. Between each track, GAS!** blasted sirens and air horns, something you might expect as a running gag in some ’90s retro-disco bar or an SNL sketch. These dudes are a lot of fun.

When the lights went off, three screens behind the stage ignited to introduce The Rap Girl herself, as if she were a pro wrestler about to burst out from backstage. Phones went up all through the densely packed crowd, feeding video into the social media world in real time. The full band set to back McBride — including drummer Darren King, who played in shapeshifting rock outfit Mutemath and has contributed to tracks by Kanye West and Travis Scott among others — wound itself into a prog-rock crescendo, signaling the crowd that she was ready. 

McBride took the stage with a confident energy that she kept up through her entire hourlong set. Along with the Let Me Get This songs that inspired the cocktails of the night, she tagged in others from the album including the supremely melancholy “Ur Free.” The new album was the focus of this show, but she took the opportunity for a throwback as well. Jess, who sang on McBride’s 2017 grooving R&B-schooled track “Crazy,” was in the house, and she jumped onstage to join in on a live rendition.  

Once the set was through, producer and scene booster extraordinaire A.B. Eastwood took over the decks for the after-party. I made the call to bounce before Lyft fares escalated to late-night tourist pricing. In the end, the night was about McBride and the whole crew rightfully commemorating some major steps in her career. While she enriches the vibrant hip-hop scene we’ve got in Nashville, she’s also playing a big role in bringing what we have to the rest of the world.