Photo credit: Samer Ghani
Shle Berry started rapping the way most people do when they’re young: by trying to mimic other artists. It was the mid-’00s, the peak of 50 Cent’s popularity, and she and her friends formed an amateur rap group, rapping into the chintzy microphones they used to use for AOL Instant Messenger, mostly trying to recreate the music they heard on the radio.
“When you first start out rapping, you rap about what you think you’re supposed to rap about,” Berry recalls. “So we were rapping about all the things we have and all the things we were going to do. It was so cheesy, but it was so fun.”
Of course she wasn’t fooling anybody, she says, but she loved the craft. “I was always a writer in school,” she explains. “I didn’t like math and science or subjects where there was one definite answer. You couldn’t tell me I was wrong about something I wrote, though. So when I started rapping, I realized all these poems that I’d been writing for school could be put into verses. It was so easy: The writing component really complemented rapping.”
These days when Berry raps, she’s not trying to be anybody else. Her upcoming EP, Yellow Streak, due Dec. 1, puts her vibrant personality on full display. Playing off the assured, low-key persona she’s honed through her live shows, it’s four tracks of laidback, inspirational hip-hop and infectiously syrupy R&B (she’s a Drake fan and shares some of his unabashed romanticism).
“There’s this thing in rap where people think in order to do it they have to be super cool, or super serious or a hard ass,” Berry says. “And I’m none of those things. I don’t like being serious, ever. And I was never part of the cool group anyway, so that’s not something I’m trying to do now. When I’m on stage, I’m joking around and smiling and having fun and acting goofy. I just wouldn’t do it any other way.”
On the EP’s standout, “Free Throw,” Berry addresses the elephant in the room: She doesn’t look or act like your archetypal rapper. And while you’d never know it from her extraverted live shows, where she leads crowd sing-alongs, dances and fires off jokes at the clip of a carefree standup comedian—she absolutely relishes performing—she’s spent a lot of time wrestling with her outsider status. There aren’t many women rappers in general, she says, and fewer still with her tomboyish sensibilities. She doesn’t want to be seen as a novelty.
“I’m used to it, though, because I’ve always been the odd man out,” she says. “I’ve been gay as long as I can remember, and that was such a hard thing to deal with. I was in denial for a long time. Only my close friends really knew. It was easier for me to write about it than to tell someone about it. So I developed this very intimate relationship with writing, because it was my way to let it out—what I was feeling, and what I was going through. It made me feel so good. I actually told music before I told anybody else.”
Over time, Berry says, she’s come to see all the things that set her apart from the rappers she’d once hoped to emulate—her gender, her mellow personality, her cheeky humor and romantic streak—as an advantage, traits that help her stand out from a sea of rappers that can sometimes bleed together.
“It’s funny. I have some friends who are trying to get into rap right now, and they all feel they have to talk a certain way or dress a certain way,” Berry says. “And I’m like, ‘You don’t have to do those things to be a rapper! You can actually be yourself, and it’ll actually make you a better rapper.’”
Shle Berry plays an EP release show Friday, Dec. 1, at Company Brewing featuring DJ Alpine, Juke Marciano and King Myles. The show starts at 10:30, and tickets are $7 at the door.
