“Nothing for algorithms”: Bbymutha is reclaiming her musical agency

Bbymutha is knitting a pair of colourful pants in her cozy Atlanta home when she enters the Zoom call on a quiet Thursday afternoon. She’s going to wear the outfit that night to go bowling with her partner, Fly Anakin, and his friends who are visiting from out of town. She tells me she’s bad at bowling, but that’s clearly not going to stop her from being the best-dressed person in the building.

Born Brittnee Moore, the Chattanooga-born rapper went through several aliases—heads might know her as Cindyy Kush or Miss Cherry Cocaine—before landing on bbymutha. She was raised by her estranged hyper-religious mom (“We went through some weird shit in the name of Jesus,” she jokes.) who, to this day, doesn’t completely understand her artistry. Still, bbymutha paved her own path to what motherhood would mean to her. As a parent to two pairs of twins, she also fights “baby mama” as a derogatory term through the moniker.

Known for being outspoken, bbymutha chooses to be more guarded from the public these days (her Twitter account is locked now that Elon revoked everyone’s verification), but on our call, she’s still as candid and open as ever about what she’s been through the last several years. And despite setbacks, she always seems to bounce back. She laughs as she retells the story about how she blacked out after her On The Radar freestyle on Valentine’s Day earlier this year. After drinking in the morning on an empty stomach with Fly Anakin and his friends, she gets to the New York City studio only to take a few more shots.

“I get so nervous,” she recalls. “So I keep drinking because usually when I drink it makes the nerves go away, but I hadn’t eaten anything. So what usually would have taken my nerves away just took it overboard. I don’t even remember doing the performance. I don’t remember nothing.” She later wakes up in a bathtub, in a completely flooded bathroom, with paramedics hovering over her. She still makes it to her show in Brooklyn that night.

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Art comes first for bbymutha, but she also doesn’t take herself too seriously. In 2020, after years of putting out well-received EPs and mixtape, she released her debut album, ‘Muthaland’. At the time, she said it would be her last. “I never stopped making music,” she clarifies. “The issue was I was frustrated with trying to play this game of being a musician—you got to be so calculated and you got to think too much. You can never just drop shit because you feel like it. It’s always got to be a schedule.”

She continues: “As an independent artist with no team, that’s extremely hard to do and extremely hard for me, personally, to give a fuck about. Because that’s not what I do. I don’t do nothing for algorithms. I just be trying to have fun and make my music connect with my people. It just got really overwhelming.”

Now four years later, her second studio album, ‘sleep paralysis’, embodies that approach. During the pandemic, bbymutha was left homeless due to a mold problem in the house she was living in. Her dad, who acted as a quasi-landlord, didn’t do anything to help. To make matters worse, she was also grieving a friend’s death and lost her apothecary shop. “The pandemic really fucked my life up,” she says.

Bbymutha felt she had no choice but to tour and make an album for money. But in the end, her 2021 European tour pushed her in ways she never expected. “As much as I wanted to be sad and depressed about the shit that was going on back home, I had to go out there and kill them shows everyday,” she explains. “I had to push it in the back of my head and actually have fun and enjoy the shit I was seeing in the places I was going. Like, I went to fucking Greece.”