GloRilla Addresses Fabolous’ opinion on how female rappers are marketed, growing up in a religious household, being socially sheltered, and more as she hangs out with GQ Magazine.
Gerrick D. Kennedy for GQ writes -
There’s a surge of adrenaline that races through your veins when you smash a piece of office furniture with a sledgehammer. The crunching of wood splintering under steel. The symphony of shattered glass cascading to the floor. It’s a feeling that’s all the more satisfying when GloRilla’s spirited declaration of independence from fuckboys, “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” blares on loudspeakers and the Memphis rapper herself encourages you to take another swing at an executive desk.
It's a few days after GloRilla’s 24th birthday and we’re inside a sweltering warehouse in downtown Los Angeles that’s been repurposed into a maze of rage rooms. We are dressed in thick polyester protective coveralls; Glo’s pink gossamer-polished nails are tucked into work gloves, and her flowy jet-black wig is clamped under a neon-hued hard hat. Piles of glass and wood chunks surround us as we tear apart the desk and a vanity mirror. A primal scream occasionally emerges from elsewhere in the warehouse, but we are mostly giggling through our destruction.
“Oh, you really mad, huh?” Glo jokes after I take a big swing with the sledgehammer that she’s handed me.
GloRilla is having the kind of year every rookie artist dreams of—particularly one in hip-hop, a genre that moves at the speed of light. Since dropping her earworm “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” in spring of 2022, she’s performed at the Grammys (where she also had her first nomination, best rap performance, for “F.N.F.”); released a hit EP; played a buzzy set at Coachella; signed to Memphis rap legend Yo Gotti’s Collective Music Group label; dropped a top 10 Hot 100 hit with Cardi B, “Tomorrow 2”; and toured arenas across the nation. And all of this before releasing her debut album, which isn’t set to arrive until early next year. (2024)
GQ Article By Gerrick D. Kennedy
Photography by Julius Frazer
Glorilla Talks Jewelry
They get deep in the interview, with Gloria Hallelujah Woods, (or as we better know her) Glorilla, sharing she had a very strict upbringing being brought up in a conservative Christian household, and that it made her feel isolated from reality. She say's -
“We really couldn't listen to the radio. Never got a Christmas present from my mama a day in my life. We didn't do Valentine's Day. We didn't do Easter. We didn't do Halloween. Really only did the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving,” Glo says. “My mama was strict—but apparently I still ended up doing what I wanted to do.”
“I was socially sheltered,” she says. “I didn't really know the outside world, other than church and my siblings—so I really didn't know myself. By the time I finally [went to a traditional school] I was 10, I was around all these other different people and personalities, and I guess it brought me out.”
The writer states that when she and Glorilla first met, Fabolous had just gone viral for criticizing female rappers for not talking about “real shit,” a refrain we’ve heard from male rappers for years. When she brought this up, Glorilla rolled her eyes and responded, “What men rap about? Killing, fucking, robbing, cars, money.”
“Females rapping about the same shit,” she continues. “But guess what? We're not killing. We're not in gangs. We’re not robbing. That's what men be doing. What we doing? We're sitting pretty, we're popping our shit, we're hustling, we're getting money. We fuck, so we rap about what we do.”
You can check out the full article here...
It's a really good read and Glorilla looks beautiful (as you can see below).
