On her debut album, the Chattanooga rapper balances raunchy sex talk with reflections on trauma. It’s a deliriously entertaining, ambitious project from an artist operating at her peak.
bbymutha believes in the power of reclamation. Originally performing under the name Cindyy Kushh, the Chattanooga rapper has flipped her current name, usually a pejorative, into a term of endearment. “It’s not an insult to me,” she told The Fader in 2018. Women in rap—particularly Black women—face constant pressure to repress their sexuality, but bbymutha is having none of that. Her previous projects balance her outward sexual bravado with the public and private turmoil bubbling beneath the surface. On Muthaland, her debut (and apparently final) album, she expands her ideas to feature-length.
The double album’s framing device involves skits depicting a game show, live “from the fiery depths of hell,” where a contestant named Bootyholeisha spends 24 hours with bbymutha. It’s a loose concept that telegraphs the levity sprinkled throughout the album. Opening song “Roaches Don’t Die” showcases her knack for balancing laughs with confessions. She’s dressing men down for trying too hard one minute (“Niggas tuck they tees/Tryna sell a fantasy/That buckle bigger than your dick, huh?”) and reliving memories of being jumped in her high-school gym the next. By its end, the song’s title becomes a battle cry; she’s clawed her way out of the pits.
The hallmarks of bbymutha’s lyrics are fairly straightforward: kiss-offs to ain’t-shit dudes, flexing on other women, reflecting on trauma, and a plethora of sex talk. Her style borrows from the blueprint laid by fellow raunchy Tennessee rap titan Gangsta Boo, but bbymutha is no carbon copy. Her rhyme schemes are elastic, her thick Chattanooga drawl stretching rhymes like taffy across entire songs. The run of songs from ”Holographic” to “Cocaine Catwalk,” in particular, is deliriously entertaining, with bbymutha constantly topping her own braggadocio (“Rock a nigga’s semen like a ski mask” from “Either Way” is a personal favorite). Her unrestrained freedom is a tonic in a world where conservative pundit Ben Shapiro can go viral for asking his “doctor wife” about the scientific accuracy of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP.”
The narrative focus allows her room to experiment with flows and music. Rock Floyd, who co-executive produced Muthaland alongside bbymutha, is responsible for more than half of the album’s beats. Some songs crunch menacingly (“Spooky Mutha Mansion,” “Cocaine Catwalk”) while others sail by on jagged house rhythms (“Nice Guy,” “Heavy Metal”), but all are united by a booming low end, affording bbymutha’s words considerable heft. The handful of songs produced by others, including Detroit sound masher Black Noi$e—who recently featured bbymutha on his electric new record OBLIVION—mesh nicely with Floyd and bbymutha’s vision. She sounds just as comfortable keeping pace with Yung Baby Tate over the metallic clangs of “Nice Guy” as she does singing over the plucky synths on “Dream Sequence.” Her versatility is even more impressive considering the album’s length. At 25 tracks—20 songs and five skits—there’s remarkably little fat on Muthaland. It’s the second album of the year, following Blu & Exile’s excellent comeback project Miles: From An Interlude Called Life, to justify such a loaded tracklist.
Across Muthaland, bbymutha reclaims several words used to jab at her pride: “baby mama,” “slut,” “hoodrat.” She says them with her chest and siphons the negative energy in order to lift herself above the competition. It’s exhilarating, which makes the prospect of her early retirement all the sadder. Rap could use several more voices like hers. If Muthaland really is the last album bbymutha plans on releasing to the public, she’s brought us into her twisted world at its creative peak.
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