Flo Milli Is Only Going Up From Here

The rising rapper from Mobile, Alabama, spins rhymes that sound like schoolyard taunts. By Hunter Harris

The rapper flo milli had given herself a deadline: She was going to be famous by 18. Not rapping by 18—famous by then. “It was like an obsession for me,” Milli, now all of 20 years old, tells me one July afternoon, dressed in full glam in her Atlanta apartment. As a tween, she’d seen Nicki Minaj rapping on BET’s 106 & Park. She’d grown up around music—the women in her family singing in church choirs, her mom playing Jill Scott tracks on the way to school—but Flo (real name Tamia Monique Carter) didn’t trust her own singing voice. She decided to get a pen and paper and be a rapper instead. College was a backup plan she didn’t want to explore: “I was praying to God, like, ‘God, please don’t make me a doctor or anything. I want to be a rapper!’ ”

She missed her deadline by a year. Her catchy little beat,” she says when I ask why viral song, “Beef FloMix,” got her signed to she thinks her version popped in a way RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Carti’s couldn’t. (She clarifies that she’s a fan Entertainment. Last month, she released of his.) “With me, my voice is very unique. her first mixtape, a 12-song project titled Adding my unique voice onto the catchy Ho, Why Is You Here? At least three of the beat, it caught people’s attention, and they tracks are already internet popular: “BeefFloMix,” were just like, Oh my gosh, who is this the raunchy “In the Party,” and girl?–type thing.” Part of the effect is her “Weak,” which takes a classic lovelorn SWV voice, its youthfulness and brevity. Megan song and turns it love-annoyed: Instead of Thee Stallion makes bodacious triple singing about a man’s dizzying effect on a entendres; Doja Cat makes horny radioready woman, Flo Milli raps about being bored of hits. Flo Milli sounds like your overconfident easily manipulated men. “I feel like, as little cousin. She was born and young women, you deal with haters, you raised in Mobile, Alabama; early in high deal with insecure men. Sometimes you just school, she and a friend promised each have people trying to bring you down. So it’s other they’d make it as a rap duo. Their live like, ‘Ho, why is you here?’” she says. “Are performances as Real and Beautiful, and you contributing to my success, or are you, later Pink Mafia, are still somewhere on like, taking from it?” YouTube. When she and the friend grew

Nothing has contributed more to Flo apart, she kept writing lyrics in binders or Milli’s success than the opening rhyme stepping out of math class to record voice scheme on “Beef FloMix.” She raps with the memos of half-ideas on her phone in the disarming, cutesy facetiousness that has bathroom. “I worked at Metro [PCS, the become her trademark. It’s playfully cell-phone retail store], and it had a schoolyard, a cool girl’s “na-na na-na booboo”–style speaker. I would blast beats and rap, and taunt; it’s a mantra and a meme the people next door, it was like a tax company, all in one. “I like caaaash and my hair to my they would snitch on me to my boss. ass! / Do the dash, can you make it go fast?” Like, ‘This girl is rapping all day at work!’ ” she asks. “Fuck the fame, all I want is them A beat later, in her own defense, she adds, bands/If she keep on muggin’, I’ma steal “But nobody would come into the store!” her man!” The lines are punctuated with Flo Milli approaches everything in her single-word ad-libs, like audible notebookpaper life with the same brash buoyancy as the scribblings passed during class. In its opening of “Beef FloMix.” She’s newly music video, her lean frame twerks in a single after having been in relationships convertible, lounges with girlfriends in a for most of her adolescence, but she’s dexterous Crayola-colorful backyard, flips hair long at getting a man to do what she enough to dust the top of her booty shorts’ wants. “When I was like 15, I used to be a belt loops. She smiles to reveal a mouthful player. Like I used to play the hay-elle”— of braces. The song is a remix of a years-old she drags the word out, southern accent Playboi Carti tune; Flo’s version has gained thick and vowels long—“out of a n----,” nearly 9 million views on YouTube—twice she says, laughing. what his did in a quarter of the time. “I used to be thicc when I was younger,”

“The beat is so alluring; it already is a she continues. “Like, around that time, I was 160 pounds, I had a fat ass—everything, girl. I looked like I was 19 and 20 when I was really just 15 and 16. I would get a lot of guys trying to talk to me. All [older guys] want to do is just fuck. So let me just play y’all ass!” She wasn’t very interested in them, let alone what they wanted. She was just curious to see what the hustle could be. She had a Rolodex of admirers she kept at a distance. “It was really funny to me! But, you know—I forgot where I was going with that story. What was the question again?”

In middle school, she set out to become “IG famous.” “I used to have a tactic when I was in middle school. Little sneaky tactics to get followers,” she admits. She hems and haws about not wanting to tell me what they were but finally relents, explaining the ecosystem of high-school Instagram like it’s a science. “I made my page private, and I would follow a lot of people that have private pages, because they have to accept it,” she says. This means they also tend to send you a follow request back. Once she got the follow-for-follow, she’d wait a couple months and unfollow them in the middle of the night to keep her ratio enviable. “At like 3 a.m., when everybody was asleep, I would unfollow them and keep them in my requests and build it up.”

By 17, she’d amassed 20,000 followers. When she started working on “Beef FloMix,” she’d already graduated from high school, months early, but didn’t have a job yet. She was smoking and bored, playing around on YouTube, when she decided to play around with the song instead. She posted snippets of it on Instagram, and her fans begged her to record it properly. It stalled at 20,000 listens on SoundCloud when she uploaded it in October 2018. After fans used the song to soundtrack their own videos, it moved around Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. “Beef FloMix” didn’t technically chart, but it is considered the rare TikTok hit that’s as good heard in full as it is in short, viral bursts.

When it came on RCA’s radar, they called Flo in. The label was drawn to the then-teen’s wild confidence and how assured she was of her talent, said George Clark, the director of marketing/A&R. “She’s got the shit that everybody says I have,” says the rapper Rico Nasty, whom Flo Milli counts as a friend and role model. “[People say] ‘Rico, you have this personality.’ She has that shit.” “Weak” is the mixtape’s standout track, a song Rico says announces the debut of someone who will be in the industry for a long time. “[Flo is] making music, not fucking bops,” she continues, dismissing short-lived viral hits. “Beef FloMix” got her attention, but

folklore aaron dessner confirms: folklore is Taylor Swift’s goth record. Or, at least, it’s her most gothic record. It’s also a spiritual companion to his 2019 album with the National, I Am Easy to Find. Below, liner notes from the instrumentalist who produced most of the album’s songs in secret over the past few months. (See our review, p. 66.) as told to brady gerber

“cardigan”

This is the first song we

wrote. I sent Taylor a folder of stuff I had done that I was really excited about recently—“cardigan” was one of those sketches; it was originally called “maple.”

But, ultimately, it’s cathartic. It was a perfect match for how her voice feels. We both realized this was a lightning rod for the rest

of the record.

“the last great american dynasty”

up on a cliff. It’s the story of this woman and the outrageous parties she threw. She was infamous for not fitting in entirely in society; that story, at the end, becomes personal. Eventually, Taylor bought that house.

“seven”

This is the second song we

wrote.

It has one of the most important lines on the record: “And just like a folk song, our love will be passed on.” That’s what this album is doing. It’s memorializing love, childhood, and memories. It’s a folkloric way of

processing.

“august”

This is maybe the closest thing to a pop song.

It has this shimmering summer haze to it. Coming out of “seven,” where you have this image

of her on a swing and she’s 7 years old, “august” feels like fast-forwarding to now. It’s a breezy, intoxicating feeling.

“epiphany”

Taylor had this idea of a beautiful drone and a very cinematic, wide-screen song, where it’s like a sea to bathe in. I made this crazy drone, which starts the song, and it’s there the whole time.

It created this giant stack of harmony that was hard to manage, sonically, but it was beautiful to get lost in. She heard it, and instantly this song came to her, which is partially the story of her grandfather, who was a soldier, and partially a story about a nurse in modern times.

“betty”

This is the one where Taylor wanted a reference.

We pushed it a little more toward

since it has some drums. It’s this epic narrative folk song where it tells us a long story, and it starts to connect the dots back to “cardigan.”

“hoax”

If you leave me in a room with a piano, I might play something like this. After writing all these songs, this one felt the rawest. There’s sadness, but it’s a kind of hopeful sadness.