Kamaiyah has had a tumultuous time since her Good Night in the Ghetto. In 2016, the Oakland rapper’s vibrant debut mixtape seemed to announce a star in the making. She signed to Interscope later that year, but her album was repeatedly delayed, and eventually shelved entirely. By the following year, she’d self-released the mixtape Before I Wake in mutiny against the label, a move she now calls a mistake. She was arrested after a TSA altercation, and for firing a gun in a private movie screening room.
On her new mixtape Got It Made, released independently on her own Grnd.Wrk label after her departure from Interscope, Kamaiyah sounds newly refreshed and self-reliant. Half act of self-care, half immeasurable flex, it places her in the lineage of Oakland mack rappers like Too Short and Dru Down. The tape is a multifaceted consideration of self-sufficiency—escaping the thumb of domineering labels, ignoring bad boyfriends, and confronting haters. As she puts it on “Pressure,” “I love myself, yeah, I trust myself/Don’t need nobody else/I don’t need nobody’s help.”
She does get some help from a crack team of local producers familiar with her uncomplicated, optimistic, and referential style. Produced primarily by Oakland’s CT Beats, the mastermind behind her biggest hit, 2016’s “Why You Always Hatin’?” with YG and Drake, and featuring additional production by Swish, DJ Banks, DJ Official, Trackademics, and more, Got It Made builds upon her established sound, which brings local music of the past into the present day. She slides through minimalist, oscillating reanimations of classic Bay Area rap forms, ghost riding the whip through the town she still has every intention of taking over.
Kamaiyah is far less melodic than on past releases here—the only way she seems to be holding back on Got It Made. For about half the tape, she is bars first, and for the rest, she isn’t singing so much as chanting, one note at a time. On A Good Night in the Ghetto, her buoyant singsong made casual moments of hood escapism sound like bliss, elevating Dionysian songs about staying out all night, cruising around, and emptying bottles. This time around, she takes a bare-knuckle approach, allowing you to feel the impact of every punch. “No you ain’t active/You just pop off the lips and that’ll get yo ass smacked quick/I’m relaxin’, big maxin’/And I talk my shit ’cause I can back it/That’s facts, bitch,” she snaps on “Intro,” absolutely swaggering.
“Still I Am” is a post-separation reestablishment of personal identity. “I done took plenty losses/That’s why I feel like I deserve to keep flossin’/This shit is exhausting/When you boss up and run your own office,” she raps. In her estimation, being independent isn’t just valuable for the freedom it provides, but also the ability to take responsibility for oneself. That’s the subtext of “Whatever Whenever,” a slow-rolling slapper about having a plan, executing it, and defending your position. She raps like a woman ready to bury anyone trying to take the plot of land she’s worked for. “Mood Swings” is trapped in an argument spiral with a toxic partner; “Set It Up,” a vengeful team-up with Trina, is about getting the compensation owed from a boyfriend’s cheating by robbing him. At nearly every turn on the mixtape, she reevaluates what it means to be reliant on others, and she sounds liberated doing it.
Got It Made is at its best when it shows its reverence for Oakland. Kamaiyah gets J. Espinosa, the official DJ of the Oakland Raiders, to scratch all over the bass-propelled “Get Ratchet,” an incredible twerk song. She matches the tune and tone of rising local yowler Capolow on the strutting, pick-up-line-filled “Digits.” On the mixtape’s centerpiece “1-800-IM-Horny,” she gets twerk expert and forefather Too Short to talk his shit over an interpolation of his own classic 2003 track “Shake That Monkey.” It feels like a passing of the baton: Oakland’s longest-reigning mack inducting the next great one.
