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MC Lyte is back on the mic — and she’s doing it 1 for 1.
Lyte — long considered to be one of the pioneer female rappers in hip-hop — was so inspired by the hype surrounding the 50th year of the genre that it propelled her to release her first album in nine years.
“I felt like with all the love that was out there in every venue, that it was time,” the “Bad as I Wanna B” rapper tells Newsweek. “I think for the most part a lot of us felt that way last year, which is why you have this onslaught of legendary emcees coming back to rock the mic.”
For Lyte, that means collaborating with some of the most well-known names in the genre — everyone from Stevie Wonder to Queen Latifah to Common.
“As we started to record more of the record, the record would kind of tell us who we needed to call,” she tells Newsweek of how she decided which stars to bring on the album. “The music spoke to us on who needed to be added.”
For Lyte, she gets so into the recording process that “when my entire team knows I’m going to record, [it’s] stop, drop roll.”
“I am in that studio, my phone is off and I’m committed to the process of making the music and that’s what I love,” she shares.
While her own love for hip-hop shines through on the record, she also has a message she wants to get through to fans.
“I just wanted people when they listen to it, to understand that there are second chances,” she explains. “That there’s a way to become who it is that you say you want to be … that it’s OK to flaunt what it is that makes you great. I call it 1 of 1 – but we’re all one of one. We all have a DNA that if we, really just envelop what it means to be the best that we can be then there’s no need to mimic or copy what we see out there. Because you’re never gonna be great as a carbon copy of anybody.”
As for what’s coming up on deck, Lyte already has a new project in the works — noting that there were several high-profile collabs that didn’t even make it on 1 of 1.
“We have songs with Toni Braxton, with Anthony Hamilton, with Slick Rick. We’ve got quite a few that may make it to this second album,” she teases.
