At first blush — a blush that should register anywhere from incandescent to thermonuclear — Sexyy Red doesn’t seem to care about subtlety, even though her hyper-freaked raunch rhymes totally depend on it. That stealth nuance has to be the very thing that made this 25-year-old St. Louis native into the year’s breakout rap star, right? Shouting her rhymed bedroom commands in a finely tuned deadpan, her music seems designed to short-circuit respiratory systems, making the lungs unsure whether to gasp or laugh. Either way, your face will burn.
So it’s really too bad that so many rap listeners with weak imaginations and poor attention to detail have dismissed her searing summer album, “Hood Hottest Princess,” as sex-shocks-for-cash, or even worse, an opportunistic echo of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s very naughty 2020 megahit, “WAP.” Regardless, Sexyy Red seemed deeply unconcerned with any of that during the hour she spent under the bright lights of the Fillmore Silver Spring on Friday, where she paced the stage like a disenchanted substitute teacher, talk-shouting her lyrics as if taking roll in an unruly homeroom. Behind the lenses of her signature glasses, there was no mischievous twinkle in her eyes whatsoever. This is a woman who truly does not care what anyone thinks.
End of carouselWhich, of course, drove the audience completely berserk. To the world outside, Sexyy Red is a rookie provocateur, but here in the club, she was a blunt-force truth-teller — and that psychic friction gave the crowd permission to laugh, exalt, twerk, spill their drinks and shout along at volumes that make joy sound something more like madness. To keep the proceedings from spinning too far out of control, the rapper interrupted her own set with a 15-minute twerk contest during which select audience members were invited onstage to shake their backsides for a $200 prize. At a Sexyy Red concert, this is apparently how you bring the energy down.
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After that, she broke out the three most concussive tracks from “Hood Hottest Princess” — “Hellcats SRTs,” a song about carnal misbehavior in cars; “SkeeYee” a song about other kinds of car-adjacent misbehavior (amended with a slang tutorial: “When I holler ‘SkeeYee,’ that mean pull up!”); and “Pound Town 2,” during which Sexyy Red described two distinct parts of her anatomy by color, the audience chanting along with the synchronized intensity of an army marching onto an ancient battlefield. The euphoric absurdity of this moment makes me desperately wish those lyrics could be printed in a newspaper, but I don’t make the rules.
And, again, the lyrics are only half the deal anyway. Sexyy Red isn’t just reciting graffiti in the bathroom stall; she’s channeling the fundamental powers of rap — a music in which words become sounds, forcing their concomitant meanings to expand in new, unprecedented directions. SkeeYee!
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