Genres Rap cabaret Labels Independent | Years active 2012 - Present Website www.xoboyfriend.com | |
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Boyfriend is a sex positive American rapper, songwriter, and performance artist. Described as a "mile-a-minute rhyme-spitter; a bawdy, brassy performance artist and a feminist provocateur," her rhymes address subjects including sex, feminism, gender and empowerment with 'bracingly blue, carefully crafted, comic turns of phrase." She has said that she uses rap as social commentary, and as a way to start conversations about art and identity.
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A former teacher from a conservative Christian family, she identifies only as Boyfriend and has not publicly disclosed her legal name.
Early life and education
Boyfriend grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She was raised in the Church of Christ, and attended parochial school from kindergarten through her sophomore year of high school. In a 2015 interview, she said that her early environment forced her to develop a sense of self. "My personal reality growing up was very much conservative, hetero-normative, white, and Christian. So to do something like be vegetarian, or like girls, or explore another culture or, god forbid, question god... you had to grapple, have a mental reckoning."
After graduating from a public high school in downtown Nashville, Boyfriend moved to Los Angeles, where she attended UCLA. She graduated with a degree in creative writing.
Career
Following her graduation, Boyfriend remained in Los Angeles, where she worked in television production. After five years, she decided to return to the South, and moved to New Orleans with a job in arts education. Working a day job as a teacher, she began to develop the character of Boyfriend after she discovered a natural ability to rap while drunkenly freestyling with friends. She was drawn to rap by the amount of words she could use in a song, which allowed her to showcase her ideas.
She chose the stage name Boyfriend both because she wanted a name that evoked a feeling from everyone that heard it, and because she felt the overuse of the term among her friends was unintentionally oppressive. The first track she recorded was the overtly sexual "Hunch and Munch." It was accompanied by a video, released in February 2012, the first of 20 videos she would put out between 2012 and 2013.
With a mantra of "form and intention," she put together a Burlesque-inspired live show, which would sometimes include stripping. Categorizing her performances as "rap cabaret," she appeared as Boyfriend for the first time opening for bounce artist Vockah Redu at a New Orleans club. OffBeat wrote that Boyfriend's shows were "definitely outrageous for a reason. Giant hair-rollers, librarian glasses, granny panties and all, it’s fourth-wave feminism you can twerk to." In January 2015, she told an interviewer that there was "definitely repression being cast off—I certainly hope that there’s someone out there who hears my music and feels less ashamed, less scared, and less dirty as a result. But it’s not about shock value so much as embracing the darkness … employing darkness as a tool for light.”
Working with the New Orleans-based production team/party duo Sex Party, she released a series of songs about love through her Love Your Boyfriend project. Two EPs, Love Your Boyfriend Part 1 and Love Your Boyfriend Part 2 were released in late 2014. Love Your Boyfriend Part 3 was scheduled to be released in 2016.
Boyfriend resigned from her teaching position in mid-2015. In addition to touring as a headliner, Boyfriend has performed at events including SXSW, Fun Fun Fun Fest, Pemberton Music Festival, and BUKU Music Project. She toured with Big Freedia during the fall of 2015.
In April 2016, a Boyfriend performance at Proud Larry's in Oxford, Mississippi was cancelled "due to statewide pressures and the current political climate."
Boyfriend wrote 4 songs and co-produced Big Freedia's 2016 EP, A Very Big Freedia Christmazz. She collaborated with Big Freedia on "Marie Antoinette," a "big room banger" which premiered on The Fader in August 2016.
Discography
Selected videography
"Hunch and Munch" (2013)
"Swanky" (2014)
"Attention" (2014)
"Like My Hand Did" (2014)
"Jealousy" (2015)