The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.
Summer is at least a six-month season for Baby Osama. “Once it’s time to put the hoodies on, it’s summer — I don’t even gotta skin out,” the 21-year-old, Bronx-born rapper-singer-designer tells me on a balmy August afternoon in Brooklyn, a merciful reprieve from the dog days.
Summer 2024 was all about skinning out, though, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better thesis statement on the matter than Osama’s July EP, SEXC SUMMER. Recorded in the immediate aftermath of a winter breakup, it’s full of irresistible earworms that burrow deeper when you’re scantily clad. “Some people don’t take breakups lightly; they get depressed and lose themselves,” she says. “Me? I’ma take the sexy route. I’ma be outside.”
Watching Osama live, bouncing like a miniature ball of outrageous energy, it’s easy to see why her star is on the rise. At her shows, she hypes up her crowds aggressively, refusing to take no for an answer when she demands that they move. It’s no surprise she’s having a moment now, just a few short years after she started releasing music. This summer saw her stepping up in weight class, splitting bills with the too-fun-to-fail trio of POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3, FearDorian, and AyooLii, and — as part of MIKE’s Young World festival — Earl Sweatshirt and Pete Rock.
Osama has been rapping since early high school, when she joined a group of upperclassmen to freestyle in the lunchroom and cut school to cyphe in the park. “It was this park down the block, and we used to smoke in the bathroom,” she says. “We’d deadass be on the toilets, sitting on the baby [changing] table, standing on the sink, all rapping in a circle.”
Even at the very beginning, she was never nervous to rap in front of the older kids. “I would just go for the kill, even if I sounded stupid, because fuck it,” she says. Her fearless attitude earned her immediate respect from her more seasoned peers, who encouraged her to keep rapping. Eventually, she turned to local open mics she found on Eventbrite to hone her craft. “I was like, ‘Yo, we go to the same spot every day; we need to do something,” she says.
“Some people don’t take breakups lightly; they get depressed and lose themselves. Me?… I’ma be outside.”
Baby Osama’s first upload to YouTube, a strikingly soulful pluggnb freestyle dubbed “Miami” in post, arrived in March 2021. A few months later, “Bullets,” a cloudy, bars-forward cut, became her first SoundCloud entry. In the ensuing three years, she released 100 tracks and change — a quick clip to be sure, but nowhere close to the release rates of the ever-multiplying hordes of track-a-day Gen Z rappers.
Her more considered approach was due in part to her time spent around older Bronx heads at open mics, and at home, where her dad introduced her to label-backed, turn-of-the-millennium boom bap — Jim Jones, Styles P, Method Man, et al. — and her grandfather played her Motown-era R&B. Both styles had profound effects on her musical development, the former building the foundations of her rap bona fides, the latter honing her ear for melody.
In the summer of 2023, Osama released her first official EP, Tank Girl — an eight-track, 13-minute suite of brash songs named after the ultra-confident, planet-saving heroine of her favorite film. Like that movie, it’s a dizzying ride, full of exciting but often unfinished ideas.
SEXC SUMMER is both a more cohesive and complex collection, though still a quick, easy listen: nine tracks averaging two minutes a piece. (“I like [making short songs] because it causes people to keep running it back,” she explains.) Wading from her pluggnb zone into the steamy waters of sexy drill, she still sounds self-assured as an MC, but she’s much more vulnerable as a protagonist.
Beyond a treatise on the good-bad decisions requisite for a sexy summer, it’s not a stretch to analyze the album as a real-time move through the five stages of breakup grief. This premise might feel contrived in more self-conscious hands, but Osama’s spontaneous authenticity makes it work: Rather than move fluidly from denial to anger to bargaining to depression to acceptance — a Platonic process that rarely, if ever, plays out in the real world — she flips back and forth between channels, sometimes in the space of a single song.
SEXC SUMMER opens with “I Don’t Mean It,” a track that starts off squarely in the anger stage. “I hate you, you a bitch / Had to let a pussy n***a go,” she begins. But by the top of verse two, she’s already backtracking: “And I’m sorry, I don’t mean it / Why you lied, had me dreamin’.”
She recorded the song hours after her break up. “I went to my crib, dropped my stuff off, and came straight to Brazz’s crib and made that song,” she tells me, referring to her manager’s apartment, which doubles as the headquarters of his label, Cavity, and whose concrete courtyard is the setting for our interview. “I was like, ‘Everything I’m gonna say is boutta be loud, but I don’t mean it.’”
Emotional maturity prevails, despite a few detours, on the next three tracks, which tell a story in three parts: On “Did Me Wrong,” Osama initiates the post-breakup closure conversation you have once you’ve gotten over the initial periods of denial and fury, though she regresses into accusatory rhetoric, promising to “air it out,” on “If I See You Wit Her” part one. On part two, though, she admits she’s still having trouble letting her ex go, emphasizing her conflicted emotions with a fluttering, almost SZA-like delivery.
By SEXC SUMMER’s second half, winter is over, and Osama is finally ready to skin out with the best of them, pulling off the Hanes she was wearing over her thong. There’s “Line Em Up,” essentially a pansexual take on Cash Cobain’s “Dunk Contest”; “Just Stay With Me,” a player’s anthem that commandeers Bobby Brown’s iconic “Rock Wit’cha” hook for its own; “Body,” a terminally horny indecent proposal; and “Free Max B,” in which Osama’s frequent collaborators $aint and Divine flip the titular Harlem legend’s “Porno Muzic” instrumental for an ice-cold display of indifference to her sexual conquests.
“I would just go for the kill, even if I sounded stupid, because fuck it.”
The project closes with “So Real,” a bonus track that abandons the record’s sexy drill theme in favor of a slow, soulful variation of Osama’s signature pluggnb approach. When I ask if it’s a teaser of her next direction, she demurs. “I’m tryna go more into boom-bap,” she says. “And that untz, untz rave music, too. And vogue music. My lil’ brother vogues, so I wanna do some shit with him.”
Here, Osama is referring to her friend Zaire; her blood family is small. She’s closest with her 16-year-old sister, with whom she recently started a homemade fashion line. Her only other sibling, an older brother, is in jail; most relatives on her dad’s side live in North Carolina; and her mom passed away when she was eight.
With only her sister, dad, and grandfather left in the Bronx, her dog Chowder, and a new boyfriend who loses to Brazz in nerf b-ball and slaps after our interview — there’s not much tying her to her home city. “I wanna leave so bad, but I just love New York, bro,” she says. “I wish I could bring New York with me wherever I go.” If she were to move, she’d leave the country for somewhere she could “go in the lake butt-ass naked,” watched only by “mad monkeys.”
While she’s still here, though, music is the best escape she’s got. When she’s in the booth, alone with the mic, she finally gets to explore the vulnerable side she’s too proud to show in public. “Hell yeah, it was therapeutic,” she says of the SEXC SUMMER sessions. “I finally got to say how I felt for real. Nobody saying nothing back to me. No ego. No pride.”