Consumer Guide Album

Princess Nokia: A Girl Cried Red [self-released EP, 2018]
What I loved most about 1992 Deluxe was its spunk. Biting off and shaping up her girly voice into a lively signature flow, a runway rapper with pan-Manhattan attitude put "my little titties and my fat belly" in hip-hop's face and claimed street for an Afro-diasporic bohemia of her own devising. So of course I was disappointed when she went sad-sack emo on a mixtape timed to vie with Cardi. But soon I caught it catching my ear the way sad-sack anything seldom does. "Goth as fuck," as she once bragged, she's not always so confident, and she wants us to know it. Her auto-tunelets range sad to determined, hopeful to boastful, hostile to empathetic. Depressive as fuck but nothing like self-indulgent, she tries to be not just honest but nice about it. B+