Before she became one of the biggest rappers on the planet, Megan Thee Stallion was best known for her freestyles. The Houston rapper’s mother performed under the name Holly-Wood and passed the bug down to Megan at a young age, even bringing an infant Meg to recording sessions instead of leaving her at daycare. Megan began writing her own raps at 14, and by the time she was a freshman at Prairie View A&M University, she was chomping at the bit to let them loose. Two victories at on-campus cyphers in 2013 eventually turned into a flood of freestyle videos on social media, all of which centered her sex-positive gangster persona and sharp technical skill that, by 2018, had legends like rapper-producer Q-Tip desperate to help her sign a record deal.
Since her breakout mixtape, 2018’s Tina Snow, Meg has spent the last three years proving her early supporters right. Her latest project, Something for Thee Hotties, is a pointed attempt to continue feeding that titular fanbase, bringing a handful of recent freestyles and unreleased songs to streaming services for the first time. Hotties couldn’t come with lower stakes, which makes the quality of most of these loosies and B-sides all the more impressive.
The tradeoff for lower stakes is always more room to breathe artistically, but as much as Megan relishes in her victories, she isn’t afraid to remind fans of the beef and adversity she’s shouldered. She sneak-disses her alleged shooter Tory Lanez on 2020’s “Megan Monday Freestyle” and memorializes her mother on “Southside Forever Freestyle,” released earlier this year. Starting with these moments makes Juicy J’s acknowledgment of her Popeyes deal and other ventures on “Trippy Skit” hit even harder, recontextualized as winking snapshots in this new sequence. But once Megan is done rubbing sand in haters’ eyes with the first batch of freestyles, the road opens up and Hotties shifts fully into mixtape mode. The atmosphere is overwhelmingly about raps, raps, raps.
She doesn’t deviate from any of her usual subjects—pimp shit, money talk, stunting regardless of how much anyone loves or hates her, the occasional anime reference—and that doesn’t dilute her never-ending power and finesse. “Megan’s Piano” features vintage Meg bars (“Big ass stack in this purse so/these niggas gon’ work/and I’m holding this glock in my Birkin”) over an uncharacteristically minimal Lil Ju beat, nothing but stabbing piano and a bouncy bassline. She plows through beats reminiscent of early-2000s New York (“I ain’t a gold digger, but what the fuck I look like/fuckin’ broke niggas?” she raps on “All of It”) and some that sound like 2021 interpretations of blaxploitation theme songs (“Kitty Kat”). The run of tracks from “Megan’s Piano” to “Pipe Up” has the buzzy energy of a marathon studio session, and a good number of them—particularly “Eat It,” “Kitty Kat,” and “Opposite Day”—wouldn’t sound out of place on any of her most recent projects.
The details littered throughout Something for Thee Hotties amplify the project’s sense of fun. References both contemporary and dated turn songs into guessing games about when they were made—she mentions her recent Nike deal on “Megan’s Piano” and the soon-to-be-divorced Kimye on “Bae Goals.” Texas rap legends Bun B and Paul Wall each get space to heap praise onto Houston’s current star player in recorded voice messages, cementing her legacy as a hometown hero.
On the surface, Hotties is little more than a data dump and an excuse to attach extremely popular freestyles to the DSP milking apparatus. But its tone is too light and loose, and Megan’s raps are too polished and fierce for that criticism to hold. With no ceiling for her celebrity in sight, she’s reminding the world that breathless raps are her foundation.
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