Rico Nasty: “I think genre deserves to get bent and broken”
Rico Nasty’s teachers often told her parents that their daughter had an excellent memory. When they gave the class poetry to learn, Rico could pick it up faster than any of her peers, sometimes after reading it only once. “In order to remember stuff,” she explains, “I would see [the information] as a song. I literally always loved music.” She grew up immersed in sound, with many of her earliest memories made watching her dad create music in the studio. Although it would be a few years before she began to write it herself, Rico unconsciously laid the groundwork for her future by continuing to explore poetry, writing poems for her church while she was in middle school, and later turning her hand to spoken word. “I wouldn’t say that I ever learned how to write musi...
