Via NPR:

To be seen as successful on a mainstream level, people feel like women in hip-hop have to be super sexy. Everybody has to look the same. I read comments all the time like, ‘Yo, Rap is dope, but she’s never going to make it because she don’t sell herself. She don’t sell her body.’ And that’s not necessarily true. There can be another lane where you have me, you have a Cardi B, you have a Megan Thee Stallion, you have a Leikeli47, you have a Noname, and we all look different. We all can be successful in whatever way success means to us, even on a mainstream level. I look back at a time where Aaliyah was one of the biggest artists, and she dressed like a tomboy. A lot of people look at me like it’s not cool to be who I am and dress the way I am. [They say] it’s not feminine.

Femininity comes in different ways, and this is my form of being a female. The way I dress is feminine in my way, so I call it tomboy femininity because that’s what I saw in Aaliyah. It was cool to be a tomboy. It’s cool to be a woman that raps, that’s super lyrical, that can bust. So I wanted to make something that felt like that, embodied that, like the tommy girl that Aaliyah was. She was an R&B artist but she could be hip-hop, too, with it. That’s why I made that song. Even the instrumental has this duality. Listening to the beat, to me, it’s super sexy. But at the same time I’m busting on the lyrics. That’s a duality for me.