By 2011, just when drill music starts buzzing outside of Chicago, BlockOnDaTrack, a local beatmaker, decides it is time to offer a feminine voice to this virile sound. He convinces his cousin Kiara Johnson - a student trying to make a living out of a waitress job at McDonalds, who never thought she could be a rapper - to record a song with him. This results into "I Need A Hitta", a hit with the Chicago youth, and leads to another, "Ridin' Around And Drillin'".
Then, King Louie notices the young woman, he asks her to join his own Lawless Inc. imprint, and he contributes to her most famous and defining banger: "Pop Out". Thus begins the career of Katie Got Bandz. Afterwards, she will release several mixtapes, and become the undisputed queen of drill.
BlockOnDaTrack, actually, has urged her cousin to start rapping for another reason: she is also a delinquent, walking a dangerous path, and he wants to remove her from the streets. At first, he isn't too successful: Katie is imprisoned on gun charges, at the very moment "I Need A Hitta" buzzes. However, upon her release, surprised with the popularity of her own song, she eventually takes rap seriously.
This translates into her association with King Louie. And in 2012, just when drill music turns into a national sensation, she releases a first project, Bandz And Hittaz. Expectedly produced by her cousin, it is already worth - or it is even better than - her infamous Drillary Clinton mixtape series.
Loyal to her roots, Katie follows the gospel of drill music, the only variation being her harsh and proud feminine voice. This is the full formula: short and catchy rhymes, declaimed mechanically; a kind of rap relying on the weight and aggressiveness of her lyrics, more than her skills; trap music rhythmic patterns; emphatic, heavy and threatening synthesizer sounds; and here and there, a few gun claps.
The lyrics smell of gangs and the 'hood. On "I Need A Hitta", the rapper looks for a lover as brutal as she is, and she claims loudly her love for money. With the tough "Yall Niggaz Ain't Hittaz", she pretends she will shoot her rival. With "Middle Fingers To Da Opps", she fucks the police.
The rapper, actually, never exposes her feminine side. Sex is a common topic, but it is bestial, and definitely not about her attractiveness. The only romance there, "Lady Hitta", is actually sung by a man, and his object of desire, Katie herself, is everything but a cute, fragile and sensible woman.
Katie copies the thuggish attitudes of her male colleagues. She postures as a gang leader in the videos of "I Need A Hitta" and "Ridin' Round And We Drillin", surrounded by accomplices of both genders. Thus, she defines what female drill music will look like. She edicts a model that most women in that genre will follow, in the months to come.
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