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Lady Leshurr
© Mike Massaro
Music
5 reasons Lady Leshurr is brilliant
We dissect the science behind the Birmingham MC's appeal.
Written by Red Bull UK
5 min readPublished on
Lady Leshurr performs in Berlin, 2016
Lady Leshurr performs in Berlin, 2016© Dirk Mathesius/Red Bull Content Pool
Lady Leshurr – real name Melesha O'Garro – has exploded onto magazine covers and festival bills this year and, as she readies her debut album, seems set for massiveness.
Powerful flow, smart lyrics and a fizzing, passionate approach to everything she does make her the kind of MC every fan wants to be mates with.Or, as one put it to NME at Manchester Carnival in May, "F**k Me! She's a f**king badass!" Here, we examine just what makes her so great.

1. She came up hard

First things first: Lady Leshurr has been working very hard for a very long time. Growing up in a musical household, she was rapping and writing poetry by the age of six and made her first mixtape as an Eminem-obsessed 14-year-old, releasing it under the name Lady L and leaving copies on buses in the hope people would listen. Her strict father – who once wrote different professions on pieces of paper and asked his children to draw them from a hat, with the idea of foisting a career upon them – initially discouraged her musical ambition and she got a job as a security guard.
I was going through a lot personally, sometimes I wouldn't even know where I was sleeping the next day
Lady Leshurr
But not for long. She quit and moved to London after appearing in 1 Day, a violent local film that caught the attention of MCs including Wiley and Ghetts. Then, a YouTube parody of Look At Me Now by Chris Brown and Busta Rhymes (who are both now big Lesh fans) racked up 100,000 views in half a day and led to a contract offer from Atlantic Records in America, who wanted to pit Lady Leshurr against Nicki Minaj. She refused, and went back to sofa-surfing in London. "I was going through a lot personally, sometimes I wouldn't even know where I was sleeping the next day," she told The Guardian earlier this year. The unfortunate blow of a supposed friend deleting her social networks forced Lady Leshurr to start again, so she took some time out and returned reinvigorated, intent on using humour, attitude and awesome music videos to succeed.

2. She's mega fun

Lines like "I'll upload a picture of your dog and sell it on Gumtree" and "You got a pot belly like Rick Ross" show Lesh's knack for comedy. So does the fact she called her old clothing line Friggin L. But stories like the time she spent Christmas and New Year with Akon are funnier still. Speaking to Complex in February, she described recording Queen's Speech 5 in the 43-year-old's studio. "There's a lyric that I say, 'All blacked out like Akon' - which was very awks. The disrespect was real, but he laughed it off when he heard it so I was off the hook."
Lady Leshurr
Lady Leshurr© [unknown]

3. She's fighting music industry sexism

In 2013, speaking to The Observer in one of her first major interviews, Lady Leshurr said, "The industry just doesn't know what to do with women." Discussing the offer from Atlantic to record a diss track against Minaj she added, "The only way to promote female rappers is to pit them against each other. Girl rappers are afraid to work together because we get fixed in these imaginary competitions."
The industry doesn't know what to do with women
Lady Leshurr
In the same article she discussed her decision not to wear revealing outfits and, tellingly, revealed that she wanted a successful female rapper to break through so much she didn't even mind if it wasn't her.
Almost every interview since has been as powerful. This quote from an October 2015 chat with Noisey sums up how important it is that someone like Lady Leshurr is around to fight sexism. “We don't get classed as just ‘rappers’, we get classed as 'female rappers' - like you're good for a girl. [The message is that] 'you shouldn't be doing this, you should be in the kitchen washing dishes'.”

4. She's in it for the right reasons

The first thing Lady Leshurr bought after Queen's Speech blew up? A house for her mum. But the rapper's good intentions stretch further than family.
She learned to record, produce and rap in a youth club opposite her Solihull home and wants to give young people the chance to do the same with her Lady Leshurr's Rap College project. "The youth are the future," she told Complex, "and the majority of them want to rap these days anyway."
We need a strong female who speaks for the youth. I want to be that person
Lady Leshurr
In another quote that should come followed by the fire emoji, she told BEAT magazine opening youth centres was her "biggest ambition". "I'm well down for the kids. It's just how I am and how I feel," she said. "We need a strong female who speaks for the youth. I want to be that person."
Her awareness of young people even extends to a conscious desire to keep her look, lyrics and videos family-friendly. "You’ll never see me with my breasts hanging out or showing so much flesh that you can’t show it to your kids," she told The Guardian. "Because, one, I respect myself as a person; two, I want to make people understand that you don’t have to go that route to be successful."
Lady Leshurr
Lady Leshurr© Mike Massaro

5. She's a queen

It's the one word that ties the whole Lady Leshurr package together, but why did she settle on 'queen'?
Unsuprisingly, the answer makes her sound like a total badass.
"People think it's all about money and power and me thinking I'm the queen of rap," Lesh explained in the Complex article. "But it's really just me feeling like a queen and knowing that I deserve to be treated like one; I wanna empower females to be confident in who they are."
Lady Leshurr is on Facebook
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