Inside of Monaleo’s two-story fortress, in the outskirts of Houston, you’ll find a scene that looks straight outta one of those Black Christmas movies right before the fuck-up older brother shows up. Gathered around the couch, in a spacious living room soundtracked by hushed jazz piano, her little sister disassociates with headphones while her pops casually chats to her stepmother; observing from a wheelchair is her 94-year-old great-grandmother. In the kitchen, her cousin shakes up a few lemon drops as her manager waits for a drink at the granite counter. Quietly handling the cornbread, with a buttery scent that smacks you right in the face, is her paternal grandmother. Meanwhile, her other granny, freshly back in town from her umpteenth cruise, holds Leo’s two-year-old son in her arms, as she tells me stories of tracing her husband’s roots back to slavery in the Carolinas and the time she spent a whole week with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis in the 1980s.
What’d you all do for an entire week?
“Drink,” she says, like I should have already known. She’s a sharp-witted, say-it-like-it-is woman; it’s easy to tell that Monaleo’s funny-as-hell, don’t-take-no-shit punchlines have been passed down from generation to generation.
“I grew up around some slick-talking women with potty mouths,” emphasizes Monaleo. “It’s very natural, very intellectual. Both my grannies and my mother are smart women who can cut you with their mouths without having to resort to slapping you upside the head.”
Her granny, rocking the toddler, nods along, “The truth is more painful than anything.”
Carrying on the Houston rap tradition of keeping it real, Monaleo dresses down loser dudes and online trolls inside of tightly structured hook-verse-hook singles that would have the radio on smash if they were hip. Just give me control of Hot 97 for a day, and we’re coming back from every commercial break with “We on Dat,” an anthemic cut that has a hint of the aggression of old bottle-smashing Three 6 Mafia hits designed to get clubs shut down: “Yeah, bitch, we on that, you know you don’t want that/We lay bitches out, out, out in the streets.” Or maybe, I’d go with her standout verse on the remix of Babyfxce E’s “PTP,” where she gets on the case of all the men out there wearing cheap watches who are lusting after her embarrassingly hard. They’re the kinda bars too pointed not to be about some very real person.
Leo’s been on this wavelength since breaking out in early 2021 with “Beating Down Yo Block,” where Texas player-rap cool and BeatKing’s party-hard spirit bleeds into the no-holds-barred lawlessness that Rio da Young OG and RMC Mike had going crazy in Michigan at the time. The track set the stage for what she does best: talk shit and be vulnerable in the same breath. “I can’t break no bread if you wasn’t sleeping on that couch with me,” she snaps, the cliched nature of the bar overshadowed by the you-know-she-meant-that intensity.
“I laughed so hard when I first heard that line,” remembers her maternal grandmother. “Because I remember sleeping on that couch with her.”
Initially, Monaleo, now 24, used rap as an artistic outlet for the hard life she had lived—depression, childhood abuse, loss, her first suicide attempt in the fourth grade, struggles she’s been open about to some extent in her music and through an extremely intimate social media presence. The music can be interpreted as a release of bottled-up feelings and an imagination that was nearly stifled. “What I really love about the Texas rap I grew up on is that they didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought and just did real nigga Texas shit,” Leo says, name-dropping everyone from UGK to Megan Thee Stallion to Z-Ro, the “Mo City Don” from Missouri City, the area of Greater Houston where she also grew up. “I may not agree with everything they said, but it’s so real and so raw.”
Putting those human complexities on wax isn’t always a freedom granted to the women of hip-hop, too often overanalyzed and unfairly critiqued for their personal lives with a fervor the guys mostly don’t have to deal with. Ridiculed if they don’t look on point. Have crossover appeal. Be a down-to-earth role model. Talk their talk but say the right thing. Have thematic depth but still be the life of the party. Be a put-together star and deal effortlessly with the stress that comes with that. It’s been that way since the exploitation of Roxanne Shanté, since the tabloid fodder of Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, since Megan had to beg to be believed. “Something about being a Black woman you just get treated in the most sinister, weirdest ways,” says Monaleo, exhaling deeply. “They’re obsessed with holding us accountable for things that nobody needs to get held accountable for and are constantly trying to chastise you for every decision you make in a way that’s really harmful.”
She combats that feeling on her new mixtape, Who Did the Body, by not shrinking away from the loose-lipped punchlines, but doubling down on them. It’s my favorite of her three projects because it has a range of rap styles that captures the different sides of her. Leo gets her slurred-word Houston stunting on with “Putting Ya Dine.” She taps into her theatrical Baptist church roots with Zaytoven on “Bigger Than Big.” Makes room for storytelling rich message tracks, like the Eazy-E-inflected “Spare Change.” The whole time the raps are reliably unfiltered and dusted with a morbid streak that calls back to the Geto Boys.
Riskiest of them all is “Sexy Soulaan,” a pro-Black anthem that pays homage to her Black southern roots by referring to herself as a “Soulaan,” a newly minted term to refer to Black Americans whose lineage in the country can be traced back to the 1800s. “All the non-Blacks to the back,” she chants on the hook surrounding lyrics that honor Black Southern superstitions and draw a cultural line in the sand. “I’m a Black woman in the South, so I’ve experienced some things and my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother have experienced worse things,” she says. “It was important to me to advocate against white supremacy. I’ve been this way since I first learned about Emmett Till in fifth grade. I remember looking around the classroom like, ‘Are y’all hearing this? How are we still not mad at white people about this?’ And I had Black teacher at the time and got angry ’cause she started talking about ‘’cause we lead with love.’”
As expected, putting out a track with a pro-Black message in this intensified moment of white conservatism was due for backlash, though a lot of the online huffing and puffing came from the loud corners of extreme, xenophobic Black American nationalists who were angry at the scene in the video of Monaleo posing in front of flags from across the diaspora. These small but vocal groups have viewed the song as a misrepresentation of the “Soulaan” identity, which they do not believe should be associated with cultures from Africa and the Caribbean. “Some people get criticism and start backtracking, but I’ve been sure about the things I’m passionate about from a very young age,” she says firmly. “And one of the things I show solidarity with is Black unity.”
Personally, I dig the song. It feels sincere and straightforward in her politics in a way that a lot of popular rap music is scared to be right now. After a few listens, I thought of the Confederate flag–burning cover to MJG’s 1997 solo album, No More Glory, a record that balances southern Black pride with pimp-rap flair. In 1999, he told Vibe the album was all about the “racist bullshit that happens down here. Like in Jasper, [Tex.]—dragging [James Byrd] to death. The tide, No More Glory, was about that—there’ll be no more glory for people who are still living in the past, doing that kind of shit.”
Wearing a flowing purple muumuu, Monaleo gets to throwing down a soul food dinner for the whole family. Her gravy comes to a simmer. The collard greens are braised with smoked turkey in a steel stockpot. She strains noodles and then later pours melted cheese over the macaroni before sliding the dish into the oven. “It’s always hella people here,” she says proudly. “If I cook, people come by to get plates; if my dad doesn’t come, I’ll send him a plate on Uber. It doesn’t have to be Thanksgiving—that’s family.”
As that’s going on, walking up and down the spiral staircase is Monaleo’s husband, the North Carolina rapper Stunna 4 Vegas. They’ve been together for four years and were married in mid-September at a venue just outside of Houston. The wedding was expedited out of fear that Leo’s father, who beat cancer and experienced heart failure, wouldn’t be able to walk her down the aisle. He did. The least personal parts of the wedding were livestreamed on TikTok. There was a reception performance from Bun B. When you stroll into Leo and Stunna’s house the first thing you spot is a wall lined with their framed wedding photos.
Stunna is doing miscellaneous chores around the crib, on his Clark Griswold shit. He’s stoic and to himself, and he looks at me with a protective skepticism. When I first met him out on the front lawn, dragging a heavy bin through the doors, he said, “Oh you from Pitchfork?”
Yeah.
“Oh y’all be talking shit about Leo, right?”
Hey, I haven’t reviewed any of her albums.
He side-eyed me and kept it moving.
Monaleo gets everyone their plates. She grabs a seat at the table next to her granny and pours herself a mix of Don Julio and kombucha to sip on. At first, she’s tentative about me being around and then relaxes as the drinks flow and she goes in and out of jokes and serious conversation with her grandmother. They talk about the time they got to drinking and got matching tattoos, memories from their massive family reunion that is on its 72nd year, and vent about the state of the political world and the polarizing reception of her music.
“People have been begging for a shift, so I don’t care if they’re offended,” Leo says. “I understand the importance of striking over and over and over and over until you kill they ass. You hit that one spot and then they bleed and you like, ‘All right, babe, I’m gonna walk away from your ass.’ Then, no, you just keep punching that bitch. I’m finna overkill it with this music.”
Long after the sun goes down, family members start trickling out with their to-go containers.
“Lee, I’m gonna’ make your papa a plate,” announces her granny from the pantry, “he swears nobody ever thinks about him.”
Before I go, Leo takes me to her sanctuary, an all-pink room with an apothecary full of herbs and spirits and an elaborately designed shelf that displays the bedazzled Jimmy Choos she was married in, photos of friends who have died, and the gold plaque she earned for “Beating Down Yo Block.” “I could never move to L.A. or anything like that, because I know if I leave Houston everyone will stop hanging out all the time like this,” she says, now that her folks are away. “I hate that I talk about mortality so much, but you never know when’s the last time you gonna talk to somebody and you too busy dying on that fucking hill.”
Do you ever worry that talking so heavily about death in your music will scare fans off who just want the club bangers?
She thinks for a second and then says, “I love the bops—they pay the bills—but I’m tryna create a space where I don’t have to worry about if a song does well or not.” And then after doing some more ruminating she adds a less diplomatic answer: “I’m from Houston: We gonna rub you the wrong way at some point anyway.”