Album Review: rent due by bbymutha
A Chattanooga rapper on her third album and her seventh life talks shit, counts grudges, and still can’t afford to quit.
The title is a demand and a condition. Rent is due—just the blunt math of being alive and behind. A Coming to America sample kicks off the album: someone walks in looking for a room, gets asked if they have money, and upstairs Stu owes what he owes. It’s funny until you know bbymutha’s situation, and then it’s just her life with a laugh track pulled over it. Brittnee Moore has spent over a decade rapping under names she kept shedding—Cindyy Kushh, Vanity Gold—before settling on the one that hurt when somebody else said it. She went viral in 2017, earned an 8.0 from Pitchfork for her 25-track debut Muthaland in 2020, announced retirement, came back a few months later, and spent the next three years dumping EPs onto Bandcamp with the regularity of someone who can’t stop talking and doesn’t expect anyone to listen. She signed to True Panther in 2023, her first label deal, after building an entire discography on free uploads and word of mouth.
Practically every song on rent due is sorting somebody. Who stayed, who faked it, who got cut. On “labor day” she raps, “I can’t even trust my mama, how I’m supposed to trust a hoe?” She means it as a starting point. The second verse of “muthaleficent back” gets to the thing underneath the bragging: “I don’t need you bitches, never really did/I just thought I missed them pieces put together, made us friends.” That couplet is the album’s keenest admission, buried in a song whose hook just says she’s back with her middle fingers up. She spends the album filing people into piles across “dreadhed” (“Envy me in public, but in private you’ll abandon”), “tempertantrums” (“I love to argue/This is not a safe space”), and “prettyugly,” where she insists she never needed a fan base or a hive. The hardest version of this comes on “personally,” when she flips and says, “I miss my friends, I miss the bitches who give me the hug.” And the distance between that pipeline and the rest of the album’s people-sorting is where bbymutha actually lives, mad enough to exile everyone, lonesome enough to notice the quiet.
On “runnin,” the hook lays it regular. “I wanna run away/Fuck it, I’m mother, so I gotta handle it anyway.” She’s tired, she wants to hibernate, she still has to pay for the food and the super cake. Fly Anakin answers her directly on the same song (rare for a feature to actually respond to the track it’s on), acknowledging where she’s coming from and saying he sees it. Self-parenting is the whole engine of “acting like my daddy,” and the logic is airtight: “Every time you glorify a nigga, he embarrass you/Had to glorify my damn self, that’s what daddies do.” Lisha G picks up the same idea on her turn, running through everything her father taught her and how she’s copied him down to the stubbornness. And “threat” ventures out the cost of being visible in the wrong body with the wrong résumé. When they see she’s country they tell her to read a book, when they find out her age they want to shelve her, God forbid she’s a mother, that docks points, and if she’s a witch they want to lock her up.
Her finances show up the same way her grudges do, openly, with “mainstream” has her bragging, “My Louis bag is bogus, pussy potent,” which is a better flex than most rappers manage with real designer. She fired her managers. They gave her headaches. Her boyfriend DJs for her, downstairs and on stage. She only works with women she respects. She gets into clubs on her nickname alone, after a decade of grinding without radio play or playlist placement. And then on “personally” the math tightens. “It take a toll when you on tour, still can’t pay the bills/I hate starting over, but this shit get real/I hate doing business, I hate signing deals.” The whole back half of the song is her naming every part of the industry she can’t stomach. She can’t stand working with people who see her as a check, can’t stand when strangers pop her neck online. The advice she gets is to ignore the hate, but what about the threats? The album is called rent due, and it could’ve been called anything and it still would’ve been about money—about how the grind never stops even when you’re supposedly on.
When she stops keeping score and just starts swinging, rent due turns into the most entertaining version of itself. Produced by Rock Floyd (who did the bulk of this album), “uber eats” opens with an eerie-synth Zaytoven-styled beat, with a chant of “Come outside, come outside, we ain’t gon’ jump you, bitch” and then promises to Uber her fists to your door. The hook has the energy of a drunk auntie at a cookout who will absolutely follow through. She calls herself “Black and scary, fuck it, still a fairy,” which is funnier and sadder than anything a punchline rapper would think to write. “tempertantrums” is all coochie and aim in the same breath, toting like an evil villain, walking down on someone with a mace. And “mutha massacre’s mental mania!” goes full cartoon. She’s a goofy goober, a three-headed dog, hell on wheels killing someone in her heels, giggling while her ass jiggles. Halfway through she announces, “Second verse for shits and giggles, hoes already dead,” which is the loosest she sounds on the whole album. These songs remind you that bbymutha’s influences are Gucci Mane, Trina, La Chat, and Gangsta Boo, women and men who understood that menace and comedy are the same muscle.
After all the grudges and the money talk and the villain routine, “personally” asks the question the album keeps dodging: “Why I always gotta be a bitch? Always gotta be a gangster?” She says she’s been a villain since other women put her in a corner, but she’s a hero to her kids, her man, and her neighbors. When her children’s father tries to turn her kids against her, that’s personal. When women mess with her money, that’s personal. She keeps a Glock forty-three on her person. She took it personal. The Kakegurui sample tacked onto the end, about how in a capitalist society money and life are the same and the craziest people love to gamble, fits. She’s been betting on herself for over ten years now, always from behind, and she still hasn’t cashed out. She says, “I leave it all up to you.” She does not sound like she means it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “acting like my daddy,” “threat,” “personally”