Lola Brooke is tryna dust my ass on a go-kart track. We’ve pulled up to Jersey City’s RPM Raceway on a gray afternoon in May. The rapper rolls in, wearing a Cuban-link bussdown and thick Louis Vuitton shades, with the same energy she has arriving to the recording studio: two hands in the air (and a hearty “Hey, what’s goood?â€), geeked to go at it. There’s a kind of knowing written on her face. Brooke’s other name for herself is Big Gator, and it’s easy to see why she feels kinship with the reptile — how it lurks in absolute stillness, anticipating its prey’s entry to its airspace. As we take off, drifting and swerving through tight turns, I pass Brooke (“Lolita†on the track) and give her the Luigi stare down. The laps come and go with a few bumps and slowdowns, but I’m positive I got the win — up until we take our helmets off and look up at the scoreboard: Brooke has me beat by one second. She flashes that same knowing smirk, and my grin turns into a hung jaw. The gator doesn’t sleep; it stews.
Brooke had a similar outa-nowhere landing onto hip-hop’s terra firma with 2021’s “Don’t Play With It,†a record bristling with self-satisfaction and gunplay — “Gimme beso (muah!), extendo (grrahh)†— combining a grimy homegrown Brooklynite tongue, words almost knocking into one another as she speaks, with the signature deep, room-filling resonance that belies her four-foot-nine frame. A spot on 4 Shooters Only’s performance series, From the Block, released in November of that year encapsulates both her and the song’s appeal. The performance could’ve easily just felt cute: Here stands a shorty tryna spit like the big girls. But her cavernous voice never shrinks into itself; you can practically hear her diaphragm expanding and collapsing. The song experienced a delayed pop-off last summer, going from quiet banger to TikTok hit to, finally, a club smash for the girls and gays. In that time, the 29-year-old has put in motion a two-pronged strategy extending the song’s life cycle and addressing the market need to perpetually reintroduce herself and her talents in new, algorithm-savvy ways.
In March, she released a remix with Latto and Yung Miami that drove the song up the Billboard “Hot 100.†“Latto recently asked me, ‘Girl, you don’t get tired of the music?’†Brooke says. “And I was like, ‘This song been out almost two years, and it just popped.’ I can’t get tired of it. I don’t have space to be tired of it. I’m just tired of not having more music to work with.†Now, Brooke is emerging from a series of high-profile feature taps — with artists ranging from Flo Milli to Ciara — into the purgatory between first hit and first project, eyeing a late-summer drop, determined to own another season. For her and her team, the question this go-round is how to usher the masses to the virtuosity of the Brooklyn sound.
Lola Brooke — Shyniece Thomas — grew up in Bed-Stuy an only child raised by her mother. She was never too far from the street living in Marcy — the poverty, the crumbling homes, and the substance abuse — and though it informed her life, it’s not all she saw. During a summer in Birmingham, Alabama, where her late grandmother lived, she watched a video of Kriss Kross and informed her elder that she would become a rapper. She returned to Bed-Stuy and pressed her mom to buy her notebooks. Back then, her classmates didn’t know that she’d become a rapper necessarily, but they knew she might be something. “Every yearbook, I won class clown,†she says. “I loved high school. I was friends with everybody.â€
The only post-high-school plan Brooke had in 2016 was getting a full-time gig: something that she felt she could “get benefits from†and would let her “move out my mom’s home.†Her mother worked at a men’s shelter within Acacia Network Housing at the time and got her a job there when she was 22. That work taught her how to serve those who weren’t in the same position as herself — with a stable job and a family who had her back. “You had people that had felonies on their records. Or they won a murder case or just came home,†she says. She was never nervous about it because they’d built a community of care and protection. Sometimes she’d have to work in a basement lunchroom — “No Wi-Fi, no service, nothing†— alone. “You never treat people like shit,†she says. “I’m the same person catering to these people and telling them when they could sleep and when they could wake up. I have authority to make them feel like I’m bigger than them. Now I’m in that lunchroom by myself with no service; if I was being dumb, people would not make sure I was okay. But they felt like, ‘You took care of me before, I’ll take care of you.’â€
Meanwhile, Brooke was cutting her teeth making SoundCloud records with her cousins, stacking up a portfolio that soon attracted label interest. “Just that fast, I bumped into the real job†— music. She signed to indie label Team 80, led by Eugene “80†Sims, who was a friend of her stepfather’s growing up. Team 80 put her in contact with in-house producer Reefa while she was still working at the shelter. She started spending her days moving between the shelter job and the studio, a hectic schedule that she felt stunted her creativity. “I watch the clock all day in studio,†she recalls. “I’m like, Okay, it’s 12 o’clock. I should be leaving by three, but by three, I’m still in my zone. That started to be a norm. Studio, home, shower, no sleep, back to work, leave work. And I couldn’t really focus.â€
Reefa — whose musical history stretches back to the Maybach Music Group’s heyday, when he produced records for Rick Ross, French Montana, and Brooke’s favorite rapper, Meek Mill — saw her dedication in the studio. “She wouldn’t leave,†he tells me with a chuckle over the phone. “She’d stay there all night and out-beat everybody else. While everybody else is asleep, she still wants to record.†Her experience there, Brooke says, also taught her how to use her time — rapping off the top and writing what came to her — efficiently: She was broke, and studio bookings were $40 an hour. “One time, I went to the studio with my cousin Bunky,†she says. “I made him pay for the session. He looked at me and said, ‘I knew you was gon’ do that,’†she remembers. “I used to do little slick things like that and just time myself.â€
Eventually, she got her mom’s blessing to quit the shelter and go all in on rap. Those early studio sessions spawned bare-bones work like 2018’s “Dubâ€: Her take-no-fuckboys ethos was there (“Why you come here with that / I don’t think you should be doin’ that / I took my time to maneuver that / He said he love me / He buggin’ / I’m through with thatâ€), but she was still figuring out how to use her vocal cords, experimenting with the ways she tapped into her deeper registers. “I was young,†she says. “The pocket and the energy and the cadence was there.†After a while, she started receiving more feedback from industry heads, people who she says could change her life but not direct her in ways that felt satisfying to her. “It was too much opinions. It was like, ‘Okay, she could rap, but how she’s gonna be marketable? How she’s gon’ sell records? What is her look, she need to be more sexy, she’s too aggressive,’ or, ‘She rap like a nigga.’ †Reefa remembers those moments well. “She was still tryna find herself and know what she wanted to do. And there was a conversation at one time, I think it was with 80, where he told her, like, ‘Just do what you feel, what you wanna do, and we gon’ back you.’â€
The first time she felt fully herself was on a 2020 track called “Options,†where she’d worked out the kinks of her vocal delivery. “Don’t Play With It,†produced by the Bronx’s Dizzy Banko, who’d made hits with local stars Pop Smoke, Fivio Foreign, and DreamDoll, was another moment of clarity. Her flow is strikingly lucid. That energy emerged during a conversation around another track, titled “Back to Business,†in which Reefa challenged her to attach her New York–style aura to an 808-laden, sparsely produced Detroit beat ripe for freestyling. They both understood that “straight raw†Lola was the best version of her — they just needed to tease it out. They found the hooks within a long, sprawling verse, added another, and boom, “Back to Business†was born. For Brooke, it was her “stamping her sound.†Something clicked, and the voice and her cadence meshed in a way that felt not just marketable but genuine to her. The success of “Don’t Play With It†led to beaucoup major labels reaching out. She eventually went with Arista Records because it accepted her whole team. “You know how the business goes; sometimes they be like, ‘Oh, we want you, but we don’t want the people that helped get you to this point.’ They wanted me and my team — they didn’t want to change me.â€
The new music Brooke is cookin’ up deepens the bad bitchery. She and Reefa locked in together on a number of tracks, like April’s “Just Relax,†which was influenced by the hip-hop history — the Waynes, the Meeks, the DMX’s — that she’s studied for years and samples Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited).†Another soon-to-drop banger kicks off with a sinister laugh and Brooke’s familiar deep whisper-growl before she bodies a wild, bass-heavy sample you have to hear to believe. Not everything is boisterous. There’s the breezy, shoulder-shimmy R&B bop where she straddles the line between the thematics of her 2022 loosie “On My Mind†and a more groovy flow fit for a season of blossoming. And she’s got songs reflecting on the occupational hazards of the rap game.
When I called Brooke last month, she was on the road, heading to a performance in Atlantic City. She’d just wrapped up a Summer Jam show where she worked with her R&B-and-hip-hop heroine, Teyana Taylor, who crash-coursed her choreography in less than two days. The schedule is packed to the brim, and that means a changing routine and an increased focus on taking care of herself. Earlier this year, Meek Mill posted a video of her rappin’ at the cafeteria table; now they go motorbiking together, doing wild stunts. She shows me a video of her riding backward on a bike with two other people on it in Times Square, just before busting her ass. She had a photo shoot the next day, but fuck it, you only live once. This is how she lets loose.