JT: Larger Than Life

“I always knew how to rap,” JT says. “I was born with this gift. But did I think I was gonna be a professional rapper? Hell no.” She’s calling from Los Angeles, where she’s preparing to release her debut solo project City Cinderella this Friday. “I never thought I would be a celebrity growing up, but I always wanted to be,” she continues, the clacking of her nails audible through her microphone. “Like, who don't want to be what they see on TV?”

Raised between Carol City and Liberty City, Florida throughout what she has referred to as a “chaotic” childhood, wealth and fame never seemed to be in the cards for JT — and when they first appeared in her hand, the game revealed itself to be rigged. Most of the world heard her for the first time as one half of the rap duo City Girls in their brief uncredited feature on the highest-charting song of summer 2018, demanding “the black card and the code to the safe” on Drake’s “In My Feelings.” The morning of the song’s release, JT left a recording studio and self-surrendered at the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution to begin a 24-month sentence. While her voice traveled around the world, JT found herself trapped behind bars. She had simultaneously arrived at the precipice of her wildest dreams and her gravest trials.

Just over six years to the day after she first entered prison, nearly everything has changed. Today, JT is more inescapable than ever: her first solo singles “No Bars,” “Sideways” and “OKAY” have each progressively surpassed one another, with the latter track becoming her first solo Hot 100 entry. Dubbed a “rising fashion fixture” by Vogue, JT has made front-row appearances at Paris Fashion Week, and starred in campaigns for Mowalola and Poster Girl.

Last October, JT announced in Interview Magazine that she would be releasing her first solo EP in 2024; in June, Yung Miami seemed to confirm that the City Girls had officially disbanded. By the time JT unveiled City Cinderella in July, her solo EP had evolved into a 16-track project.

“I would have never thought that today, I would be a week away from my first solo project,” JT says. “Not in no way, shape or form.” When she made that initial announcement in October, she explains, hardly any of those 16 tracks existed yet. Most of City Cinderella was recorded between Los Angeles and New York in the months since.

“City Cinderella is definitely a mixtape,” she clarifies. “People work on their albums for a year, albums are just different. So City Cinderella is not my first album, being that I made this project so damn fast. I had to create this project throughout the tour and moving around, so I didn't have time to really nurture and doctor it. This is just something that I'm putting out with my pure instincts.

She adds, “I mean, seven songs isn't bad, but why not give a lot of music? I talk entirely too much to be doing [only] seven songs.”

City Cinderella reveals a new maturity in the 31-year-old rapper, most present in her vulnerability and her focus. Lyrically, JT is at her sharpest. Her beat selection is precise and varied, lending the project a sense of cohesion that is rare for a mixtape. “Immediately, if a beat talks to me, I already know what I'm gonna go in there and rap about,” she says about her process. “I kinda know the lyrics before the flow.”

Sprinkled throughout the runtime are hints of the kind of rap JT grew up listening to, from a song named after Uncle Al to the “OKAY” remix with Jeezy, the latter of which JT dropped two weeks ago as a single. “I wanted to be a surprise, but it sounds so good, as soon as I heard it, I was like, ‘I want it out this week,’” JT explains. “I'm so thankful to Jeezy — I'm such a fan.”

Brash and self-assured tracks like “Servin’” allow her to truly flex her muscles with plenty of the slick punchlines and addictive catchphrases that have become her signature, and the prophetic “JT’s Coming” is deliciously cocky with its victorious horns and drumline. With just a handful of features, it feels like a long-awaited pleasure to get so many minutes of JT laying down bars uninterrupted. The fuel behind her verses tends to rise throughout the course of a song, resulting in crescendos of energy and lyrical deftness that peak higher the longer they build.

City Cinderella’s standout, however, comes right at its beginning. “Still the same bitch, ain’t shit changed/ Still a lot of trauma eatin’ at my brain,” JT raps in the opening track. “Intro (Hope)” is easily the most emotionally unguarded and confessional she has ever been on a record: “Young, Black and lost, but never lost hope,” she repeats, reflecting on how far she has risen with awe.

The inspiration behind the project? “Just wanting to win, to create a project of my own,” JT says with a sigh. “I just wanted to authentically be myself and make music.” Previously open about her frustrations with a lack of promotional strategy or creative control within the City Girls, it is no coincidence that JT frames the creation of an authentic project of her own as synonymous with winning a battle.

JT’s solo era makes a compelling case for the value of returning the reins to the hands of the artist; each decision, from her album artwork to her music videos to her selection of beats and lead singles, feels refreshingly true to her. After being denied personal and artistic agency for so long and by so many — from record label executives to the carceral state — she is at a point in her life and career where she is finally her own sole authority. The City Cinderella is rising from the ashes for good, ready to take full advantage of what she calls her “second chance at music.”

JT was born Jatavia Shakara Johnson, the eldest of her mother’s three children and among the youngest of her father’s 16, the rest of whom were her stepmother’s children. When she was about five years old, JT’s mother was incarcerated, and she went to live with her father and stepmother in Carol City, where she often felt ostracized. “I always felt like I was the black sheep in my family,” JT told Angie Martinez in a 2023 interview. But despite that, she found a way to connect with her siblings.

“I was in a [rap] group when I was a little girl, called The Protegees, with my sisters and brothers,” she says. “I used to write my raps down. I was such a little girl that I don't even remember much about it, but I know that I was writing my own music, and I was writing my sisters’ and brothers’ too.”

Throughout her teens, JT alternated between living with her aunt in Liberty City and sleeping on the couches of her friends' homes. One such friend was Caresha Brownlee, also known as Yung Miami, who would eventually make up the other half of the City Girls.

Beautiful, popular, well-dressed and notoriously slick-mouthed, JT was known among her friends for the freestyle raps she would come up with in her car and occasionally post on social media. Knowing she had potential but too shy to record and release a song all by herself, JT recruited Brownlee to rap with her.

JT and Yung Miami uploaded their first song, “Fuck Dat N*gga,” to SoundCloud in August of 2017. Over an earworm sample from Khia’s classic “My Neck, My Back,” JT sets the tone from the opening line: “Give me the cash, fuck a wedding ring!” What had originally been a diss track directed at rival girls in the neighborhood had become a scathing critique of sentimental men seeking romance without the means to fund a lavish lifestyle.

In her early 20s, JT studied Fashion Merchandising with dreams of becoming a designer. But she was no fan of the broke college student lifestyle, and her dreams weren’t panning out as quickly as she’d hoped. Her friends would borrow her car for the weekend and mysteriously return with bags full of designer clothes and shoes obtained through credit card scams; one day, JT joined them. Working jobs at the Miami Seaquarium, Burger King and Whole Foods, she was no stranger to hard work — but that hard work simply wasn’t paying enough. “Every two weeks, $500? $600? Like, what I’ma do with that?” JT demands in a clip from the documentary Point Blank Period. “They need to pay people more. The rush with scamming was you gon’ get all that stuff you wanted. In a bad way, but you was gon’ get it.”

I see myself being who I am, who I know I could be, which is larger than life.

A week after recording “Fuck Dat N*gga,” JT was charged with seven counts of aggravated identity theft and a single count of unauthorized device access, following an arrest for a fraudulent purchase in the shoe department of Nordstrom. By the time her sentencing date arrived in January, the two girls had become the first women signed to the Quality Control Music (QC) imprint under Motown and Capitol Records, giving them just six months to record their first mixtape.

“I know I gotta go, I gotta wear my punishment,” JT says, gazing out of a car window in one shot from Point Blank Period. “I should have never did it.” She pauses. “Well, I don’t really think I should have never did it... I don’t know what I think.”

“‘Cause who wanna be broke?”

The cultural influence of the City Girls was difficult to quantify. Their signature affirmative “period,” along with its phonetic derivatives like “periodt,” saw significant spikes in colloquial usage on Twitter following the duo’s official rerelease of “Fuck Dat N*gga” through QC in December 2017 and the arrival of their first mixtape PERIOD the next summer. In the years following, they shifted the way an entire subset of their generation idealizes sex, lifestyle and romance. The City Girls were infectious; they made you start talking like them, joking like them, thinking like them, demanding like them.

“This is alter ego music,” JT told the Miami Times in February 2018. But it is also not a coincidence that the particular alter ego that resonated with so many is that of a savvy, scamming, powerful woman — one whose power is derived from the manipulation of men, the weaponization of her own hypersexualization and a disregard for social norms and the law. The modern woman is expected to work and make her own money, but women still only earn 82 cents to every dollar earned by men as of 2023, and Black women only earn 70 cents to every dollar earned by a white man. For a generation raised amid the Great Recession, rising inflation, flatlined wages and an increasingly unaffordable cost of living, there is a cathartic honesty in the ruthlessness of the city girl mindset: an acknowledgement of the savage norms of heteronormative romance, the extortion of financial restitution and a mythological sense of triumph over the phallus. The city girl takes her power back on terms that you can count in dollars and cents.

After all, it’s merely a self-protective measure: “If you pay attention to male [rap] lyrics,” JT points out in Point Blank Period, “when they fuck a bitch for free, they make fun of them. They make fun of you!”

In late 2021, a snippet of a JT verse emerged online, the first hint of a solo track since her “JT First Day Out” freestyle in 2019. “My titties perfect, they plastic,” she spits, “I like my money Jurassic/ This pussy pop back, elastic/ You bitches don’t want no static!” The clip went viral immediately, spreading through the corners of the internet and accumulating hundreds of lip-syncing videos across TikTok.

“I hate that song, lord,” JT says now with a laugh at the mention of the clip, called “White Noise.” The song was a throwaway in her mind, one of the many tracks she recorded while she was living in a halfway house in Atlanta upon her initial release from prison. She had no idea so many people would love it. “That's why I don't have a doubt in my mind about City Cinderella,” she admits, “because y'all like the most stupidest things I put out sometimes, and I'm like, Oh my god, this is cringey as fuck!”

I plan on being a huge star.

“White Noise” was never meant to be a solo JT song, but the reaction to it was an indicator of the kind of hunger for her solo music that she could come to expect. In fall of 2022, JT posted another snippet, this time of what would become “No Bars.”

“‘No Bars’ is literally a freestyle, it was something I just needed to get off my chest,” JT explains. “It was so me. That song was the gift that kept on giving. Every time I thought it was over, it was something else in that song that went viral.”

JT finally released “No Bars” last June, and in the year since, it has sold over 500 thousand units. As of today, the audio of the song’s closing line “mwah, no bars” has been used more than 122,000 times on TikTok. “I couldn't hold it,” she says. “I was like, This needs to be out. People kept begging; it was almost a year and people were still asking for that fucking song.”

“One time, I remember being really depressed about our record sales,” JT recalls. She is referring to the October 2023 release and underwhelming commercial performance of RAW, the third studio album by the City Girls, which triggered a wave of online mockery when it was projected to sell between 6,000 and 8,000 units in its first week. “I was like, Oh my God, it's fucking over, and then ‘No Bars’ went viral again. That song got me through a lot, it will always be so special to me. I'm sad that it's not even on my debut project, but I feel like it did what it had to do to get me where I'm at today.”

The music video for “No Bars” opens with a dedication to Monica Suh, JT’s late friend and creative partner who encouraged and helped JT as she made her way into the fashion world. When Suh’s name is mentioned, JT lights up. “I will always wanna talk about Monica. Oh my god, I can talk about Monica all day,” she says, reflecting on the early days of their friendship. “I’m a brick wall. I don't let people in easily, but Monica was such a Leo and she had thick skin.”

In January of 2023, Monica took JT to her first Paris Fashion Week. “I remember having a meltdown in Paris, saying that I do not belong here, I'm not gonna fit in,” JT says. “I was freaking out, going the fuck crazy on her and she was just staring at me in the calmest way, saying, ‘Well, you definitely belong here.’”

JT had no stylist with her, but she did have a makeup artist. So they decided on an all-black look, to draw the attention to her face. “That's when my viral lip came out, when I did the black lip liner with the little deep cut at Mugler,” JT says. “Monica was so happy. I remember her never shutting up, like ‘I told you [that] you was that bitch, I told you, I told you, I told you!’ She told me, ‘You definitely belong here. You don't belong anywhere else in the world. You are a fashion girl.’”

Sitting front row, JT even participated in the show as part of a staged tug-of-war with Arca, who stopped halfway down the runway to “steal” an unreleased Mugler bag out of JT’s hands before continuing to walk. A few months later, Monica would help JT book her first campaign with Poster Girl for their Fall 2023 line, once again pushing JT out of her comfort zone and into something new.

“I went crazy on her about Poster Girl, I went crazy on her about Mugler, I went crazy on her about everything,” JT says. “But when I look back, those were my most special moments. Monica would always tell me I was an it-girl. And it ain't no shade, but she always wanted me to be a solo artist.”

I was like, Fuck it. I'm gonna take the risk.

Monica passed away in a car accident in Los Angeles in April of 2023. Since then, JT has been public with her grief and enduring appreciation for her friend. “I love her,” JT says, using the present tense. “I'm always gonna talk about her because it's so easy to. She’s such a good person and she deserves to be talked about.”

Later that year, JT would star in a campaign shot by renowned fashion photographer Hugo Comte for a collaboration between Mowalola and Beats by Dre, as well as return to Poster Girl for their Spring 2024 campaign. Lauded for “bringing visibility to alternative Black girls,” her distinctive image has proven to be as inspiring among fashion lovers as it has been controversial in the urban media landscape — but JT says that controversy has also “opened so many doors,” catching the eyes of collaborators who understand her taste.

JT’s follow-up to “No Bars” came this year in February, with an accompanying video and cover art that paid homage to Florida rapper Jacki-O. “Sideways” debuted even higher on the charts than “No Bars”; then, in March, JT announced a string of upcoming club performances. Reluctant to crowd her Instagram with club flyers, she compiled the dates onto a single graphic and posted it, leading some to interpret it as her first solo tour.

“It was mind-blowing,” she says of the club tour. ”I kind of underestimated myself a little bit with what the outcome was gonna be, because when I announced it, people was clowning me. It wasn’t a real tour — I put all my bookings on a sheet and they took it as a tour. I kid you not, I thought that when I went out there, I was gonna really be in restaurants and waiters was gonna be walking past me while I was performing. That's how scared them bitches had me on the internet.”

JT laughs: “They really had me tricked. I was afraid, a little bit, but I was like, Fuck it. I'm gonna take the risk.” When she stepped out in front of her fans, who she playfully refers to as her “Juvies,” those nerves melted away. “I'm like, Oh, I did this before, like, What the fuck are you talking about? And it just started getting better and better and better. My fans have never not showed up for me.”

A highlight of JT’s club tour was a segment of the night called “Rap Cam,” when she would challenge her fans to rap her songs on stage, word for word. The ingenious idea was JT’s own. “I was like, I know they can get on stage and kill this,” she explains. “‘Rap Cam’ is literally my favorite thing to do. I love to see their confidence. I love to know that they know my music, and that they get their little five minutes of fame to be celebrities and be on stage. I love to see that for them.”

She giggles, “And I love when they just get to booing people like we at the Apollo. They be like, ‘Get down!’ It's so funny.”

Now, JT is gearing up to embark on her first official solo tour in August, with 21 shows across the United States. “I'm so geeked, I'm like, Oh my god, I got a real tour on Ticketmaster,” JT says, her voice becoming earnest. “That is what I'm really, really most excited for, to see my fans be able to buy merch in the venues, do meet-and-greets, you know, like the real tour experience — because we had some rough days at them clubs, baby. I'm happy for my fans to really get to sit down and get professional treatment, with real production and all that shit.”

In a seven-year-old clip, JT’s hair and lips are a matching bubblegum pink, her Miami drawl is thick and she smiles with a mouthful of braces. “Y’all not takin’ my rap career serious yet,” the then-24-year-old says in the video, pulled from a 2017 Facebook livestream. “I’ma have to make it so y’all can take me serious. When I make it, then y’all gon’ be wantin’ to take me serious, so y’all better take me serious right now.” Despite the obstacles she was facing, the young woman in the video seems to have a premonition of what is to come.

When asked where she hopes to be seven years from now, JT answers without missing a beat: “I plan on being a huge star. Like, I'm already a star, but I plan on having a successful business, having a successful family, [performing in] arenas, making change in my community, giving back to my city, Miami. I want to build a juvie house for unfortunate kids.” Some of that work has already begun; her No Bars Reform initiative launched last summer and provides employment, housing, and therapy resources for recently incarcerated women.

She continues, “It's a lot I want to do in seven years, which will come fast, ‘cause baby, time be going by fast. You would think that seven years is a long time from now, but it's actually tomorrow.”

JT takes a long pause.

“I see myself being who I am, who I know I could be,” she says, finally. “Which is larger than life.”