In another life, Monaleo is toting a fuchsia briefcase into a courtroom, ready to argue on behalf of a girl who ran over her ex—allegedly. At least, that’s what her mother envisioned for her: a career in criminal defense, starting by attending Houston’s High School for Law and Justice. “She thought I just had a way with my words,” Monaleo told Vulture in 2022. Her new mixtape still brings her familiar brash humor, but this time, she’s also grappling with mortality and legacy. If Who Did the Body was a case, it would be a class action suit on behalf of the fallen and forgotten, whose memories live on in its stories.
It’s the topic of conversation on opener “Life After Death,” where Monaleo imagines throwing hands with an opp in the afterlife over a theremin-like whine and a drum loop that could have been pulled from a YouTube beat pack. “Dignified” is more affecting, using narrative fiction to dramatize Monaleo’s anxieties. “Fox News saying I was just a troubled star,” she raps, predicting the headlines that might follow her hypothetical death in a car crash. “That should show you how you die might become just who you are.” But the song falters in its melodramatic sung chorus, where cheesy swells of electric guitar come across like the soundtrack for a PSA against drunk driving.
On her 2023 debut, Where the Flowers Don’t Die, Monaleo flexed her singing chops with piano and acoustic ballads. Though she has a beautiful voice, these tracks continue to be weak points. The Mad Libs lyrics of “Locked In”—“I was shooting in the gym, but what happens when I get sore”—distract from her R&B runs. “Diary of an OG” is a touching ode to the adultification of eldest daughters, but nothing in the song stands out from the abundant online discourse that already exists on the topic.
When it comes to serious subjects, rap is the optimal vessel for Monaleo’s storytelling. On “Spare Change,” a Slick Rick-style fable of generational poverty, she narrates the self-disgust she feels when she unthinkingly accepts a cop’s claim that a deceased homeless man was “a junkie and a stoner.” Only then does she notice the sobbing young daughter the man left behind; when she looks closer, she realizes his red cup holds not liquor but a single dollar. Years later, working at a funeral home, her narrator encounters the daughter again, dead now, a stripper with her pimp’s name tattooed across her chest. “Shake, shake/Don’t be stingy, spare some change,” Monaleo chants, her cadence reminiscent of a high school cheer squad. She’s advocating social reform without ever sounding like an infographic.
Monaleo’s love for her people—family, friends, fellow Houstonians, and Black Americans—shines through on Who Did the Body. In “Open the Gates,” she’s damn near ready to break through prison walls and pearly gates to retrieve her homegirls. “We on Dat” is a collective curb-stomping featuring Houston icons Bun B, Paul Wall, and Lil Keke, and another speaker-rattling banger from Merion Krazy, producer of Monaleo’s breakthrough single “Beating Down Yo Block.” On “Putting Ya Dine,” she flips the Houstonian slang for enlightening someone into a Southern rap anthem that harks back to late 2000s and early ’10s Atlanta, specifically the synthy rap-pop of Soulja Boy. In this case, she’s saying, You better listen to the sounds of the South if you know what’s good for you. Imagine the on-air aneurysm that a Fox News correspondent would have reading the lyrics to “Sexy Soulaan”: Monaleo’s pro-Black anthem calls for non-Black people to stay out of Black business, revokes their invitation to the proverbial cookout, and commands them to step back so she and her loved ones can have a good time without their presence looming. If that wasn’t clear enough, she makes specific intracommunal references to Hoodoo practices and Black American traditions that eavesdroppers won’t understand.
The very best Monaleo moments capture the rush of meeting someone who shares your same, often dumb and inappropriate, sense of humor. But apart from “Sexy Soulaan,” Who Did the Body overrelies on cheesy wordplay (“We linkin’, Abraham”) and weak similes that reflect pop culture but don’t inspire a laugh (“Y’all got to livestream the service like I’m Kai”). Lizzo brings risqué humor to “Freak Show,” where the spooky xylophone beat sounds like a Halloween circus at a strip club and her whisper-rapping succubus promises to gobble penises with grills on and fuck until the room smells like stale Fritos—scary stuff.
As hilarious as Monaleo’s music can be, Who Did the Body is an exploration of mortality from a woman intimately acquainted with death. After all, she did train to become a forensic pathologist. When her own bars get lethargic, the production picks up the slack, like on the gospel-inflected “Bigger Than Big,” which sounds like it belongs in the final scene of Sister Act. Monaleo is far more interested in doing too much than too little, the type of audacious spirit that often comes with the knowledge that tomorrow is not guaranteed. When the Grim Reaper comes knocking, she’ll have left no earnest or intrusive thought unsaid.
