Rah Digga, the hottest, hardest new female MC in hip-hop, opens the door to her Newark, N.J., apartment dressed in a fuzzy bathrobe with faded pastel stripes.
This is not what you expected. Hip-hop in the year '00 is supposed to be dangerous, seductive, ghetto fabulous. It's supposed to be so real it's almost unreal--like something beneath an electron microscope or blown up on an IMAX screen. Hip-hop '00 is supposed to be a post-Puffy dreamscape of excess and escapism and bouncing low riders cruising down streets clogged with dancers and azure pools lined with thong-clad hotties.
Rah Digga is supposed to be part of that fantasy world. After all, she's the MC of the moment. She's a Busta Rhymes protege (he plugged her shamelessly on air at the Grammys); she has recorded cameos alongside some of the biggest acts in rap (for example, on the song Cowboys on the Fugees' 1996 album The Score); and her hard-hitting, long-awaited debut album, Dirty Harriet (Elektra), is due out April 4. From Eve to Lil' Kim, female rappers are hot right now. You can easily imagine Rah, in the near future, taking her place with rap royalty, reclining dazzlingly in fashion layouts alongside Lauryn Hill, gliding into parties with DMX and his crew.
That's the dream.
This is the reality.
Rah Digga--a.k.a. Rashia Fisher--lives in a rundown apartment complex. The security is spotty (you enter through an unlocked back door) and graffiti line the hallways. Rah herself, who is tall (5 ft. 7 in.) and striking, isn't dressed for ghetto fabulousness just this moment. In fact, she isn't dressed for much of anything. She isn't wearing makeup, and there's a blemish the size of a cigarette burn on her right cheek. Her pajama-clad daughter Sativa, 3, stands behind her, peeking between her mother's legs. They look as if they just got up. It's 1:27 p.m.
You sit down on a wooden chair in the living room while Rah and her daughter go into the other room to change. You look around. On the wall there's a platinum record Rah was awarded for her work on The Score. In the kitchen--it's a kitchenette, really--there's a Speed Queen washing machine sitting atop four bricks. In one of the two bedrooms--actually a bedroomette--there's a small wooden bunk bed. The living room--which is only a little larger than a changing room at Banana Republic--is dominated by a large black couch, a 52-in. Zenith projection television and a cluttered table. On the table, there's a colander, a swan-shaped ashtray filled with cigarette butts, color copies of the cover artwork for Dirty Harriet. Next to the table is a stack of vinyl records: Commodores Live, An Evening with Diana Ross, a couple of albums by Marvin Gaye. "How long have you lived here?" you ask.
"All my life," Rah says from the other room. "My parents live here too."
"They have a place nearby?"
"No, they live here too."