Issa Rae is the master of capitalizing on a cultural shift. And Rap Sh!t, now in its second season, is further proof of that. But back in June, at the ABFF (American Black Film Festival) Community Day in Miami with Rap Sh!t showrunner Syreeta Singleton, even she marveled at the fortuitous coincidence of having a series about female rappers on the come up during a moment when female rappers are, well, on the come up. “It’s so fascinating that this time in music, especially for women rappers, is so unheard of,” she said, adding that “we were excited to explore that territory with the show this season.”
Last year when we met Mia and Shawna, two school friends and Miami natives whose paths crossed again in the most female of ways around childcare, they were just coming together as a rap duo a la City Girls, whose members Yung Miami and JT even serve as Rap Sh!t producers. Mia, a single mother and former stripper, was trying to make it as a makeup artist, meanwhile Shawna, an aspiring conscious rapper who dropped out of college, Spelman at that, worked at a hotel to make ends meet as she posted on the gram hoping to build up her profile and get her music out. Their infectious single “Seduce & Scheme,” however, changed that.
Good news didn’t come without bad for Shawna. Unlike Mia, who relied on an OnlyFans account, among other legal side hustles, to get by, she joined in a credit card scam with her co-worker-turned-lover Maurice and is under investigation. Although going to prison, similar to JT’s real-life story, is still a looming possibility for Shawna, rapper/Love & Hip-Hop: Miami star-turned-actress KaMillion, who plays Mia, really believes Rap Sh!t is successfully moving away from its City Girls-inspired origins to a lane all its very own.
“It’s about girls trying to make it that come from urban environments [but] Shawna and Mia really took on a whole life in themselves and the story really shifts,” she says.
Season two introduces Shawna’s family and complicated relationship with her upwardly mobile immigrant mother, not to mention intensifies the one she and Maurice now have. Mia still has a difficult relationship with her own mother, plus is constantly ironing out the kinks of co-parenting with her daughter’s father Lamont, a rising music producer whom she still loves, while balancing her rising fame and new baddie status with richer and more successful men pursuing her. Chastity, Mia’s friend, is still on her Hustle & Flow grind but even moving from pimp to manager isn’t easy, especially when Shawna still doesn’t like her. But, like Issa and Molly on Insecure, Shawna and Mia are the backbone of the show, and they are barely on speaking terms.
“I think, for the first season, the relationship between the girls was reconnected and formed out of survival. Mia needed something, and Shawna needed something, and they both saw, with me and you together, we can both fulfill our interests and accomplish something,” explains KaMillion. “I think with the relationship this season, it’s really just become a business at this point; we’re on now, we got opportunity, we might as well be friends versus ‘let’s see what this friendship that we used to have could potentially go to and we can find the beauty in it together and go viral.’
But this time,” she continues, “it’s like, ‘alright girl you flaky, whatever, we here now, let’s just get this bag.’ And I think, not to give up too much, that’s really what it is: learning how to build business relationships and keep the personal out. And I know a lot of people can relate to that: you might not like who you work with, but you got to work with them to get the job done. So I think that is the dynamic of their relationship here.”
“Shawna has kind of cornered herself into a bad place. Last season, she took some, let’s call them creative liberties on stage, and it left a rift between her and Mia so she’s feeling alone,” explains Aida Osman, who plays her and is also one of Rap Sh!t’s writers. “I think she kind of shattered her own confidence in herself because the liberties that she took didn’t go as smoothly as she had planned. And now, although she’s dedicated to win and stay on the journey of becoming a successful woman in rap, I think she’s feeling really dejected, a little bit hopeless, and kind of just going through the motions of what she thinks success looks like.”
“We really wanted to see Shawna, Mia, and Chastity in a new world,” Singleton shared during a recent press conference. “It’s like ‘okay, we’ve had a lil bit of success; now, let’s actually put them in the music industry, whatever that looks like, and see the compromises they have to make. We literally have them on a new journey, which is on tour, …. We wanted to really test them individually and as a group.”
Jonica Booth, who started her career on the reality show Bad Girls Club, says she feels sorry for her character Chastity who has taken a huge risk stepping away from pimping in Miami, leaving others in charge, to go on tour with Mia and Shawna to level up. Earning respect in the music industry, however, has been hard. Shawna’s frenemy Francois Boom, who has successfully managed appropriating white female rapper Reina Reign, with whom Mia and Shawna, who hates all she is, is on tour, seriously detests Chastity.
“It’s like everybody is against her,” she says. “Francois Boom, he kills her every time. Then you got Shawna and then I think she’s starting to feel like Mia is slipping away. So Chastity’s just constantly being tested.”
“Shawna just don’t trust Chastity,” Osman explains. “Chastity came up with Mia, and Shawna respects people with industry experience which Chastity doesn’t have. The only industry she’s in is the selling coochie industry.”
Ultimately, Osman believes Rap Sh!t isn’t just putting a distinctly Black female spin on hip hop. For her, it’s “a very updated take on this this cultural debate we’ve been having since the dawn of Lil Kim and all of time, even with like Donna Summer and Whitney Houston if we’re leaving the hip hop world [which is] ‘how does society react when women, namely Black women, decide to sell their sexuality and do it successfully?’”
Catch season two of Rap Sh!t on Max.
Ronda Racha Penrice is the author of Black American History For Dummies and editor of Cracking The Wire During Black Lives Matter.