Inside of Monaleo’s two-story fortress, in the outskirts of Houston, you’ll find a scene that looks straight outta one of those Black Christmas movies right before the fuck-up older brother shows up. Gathered around the couch, in a spacious living room soundtracked by hushed jazz piano, her little sister disassociates with headphones while her pops casually chats to her stepmother; observing from a wheelchair is her 94-year-old great-grandmother. In the kitchen, her cousin shakes up a few lemon drops as her manager waits for a drink at the granite counter. Quietly handling the cornbread, with a buttery scent that smacks you right in the face, is her paternal grandmother. Meanwhile, her other granny, freshly back in town from her umpteenth cruise, holds Leo’s two-year-old son in her arms, as she tells me stories of tracing her husband’s roots back to slavery in the Carolinas and the time she spent a whole week with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis in the 1980s.
What’d you all do for an entire week?
“Drink,” she says, like I should have already known. She’s a sharp-witted, say-it-like-it-is woman; it’s easy to tell that Monaleo’s funny-as-hell, don’t-take-no-shit punchlines have been passed down from generation to generation.
“I grew up around some slick-talking women with potty mouths,” emphasizes Monaleo. “It’s very natural, very intellectual. Both my grannies and my mother are smart women who can cut you with their mouths without having to resort to slapping you upside the head.”
Her granny, rocking the toddler, nods along, “The truth is more painful than anything.”
Carrying on the Houston rap tradition of keeping it real, Monaleo dresses down loser dudes and online trolls inside of tightly structured hook-verse-hook singles that would have the radio on smash if they were hip. Just give me control of Hot 97 for a day, and we’re coming back from every commercial break with “We on Dat,” an anthemic cut that has a hint of the aggression of old bottle-smashing Three 6 Mafia hits designed to get clubs shut down: “Yeah, bitch, we on that, you know you don’t want that/We lay bitches out, out, out in the streets.” Or maybe, I’d go with her standout verse on the remix of Babyfxce E’s “PTP,” where she gets on the case of all the men out there wearing cheap watches who are lusting after her embarrassingly hard. They’re the kinda bars too pointed not to be about some very real person.
