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.
