LOS ANGELES, CA- Tommy Genesis is a boss. For real.
I won’t lie. I was a little skeptical of Tommy and her music when I was first introduced to her. We’re living in a very audiovisual time, and my introduction to her and her music was her very sensual/sexual video for her single “Tommy”. I honestly kind of brushed it aside as a ploy to get attention. I kept getting notices of her other videos and they each just perpetuated the “sexual rapper” identity that Tommy seems to embrace with its sexual visual themes and lyricism. I won’t lie. I kinda shrugged Tommy off.
Fast forward to after her self titled album was released in November of last year. A friend of mine emailed me a link to a track that featured Empress Of called “Naughty”. Thinking that it had a pretty dope vibe, I looked at the track’s info an lo and behold it was a cut off of Tommy’s latest album. I’m all about giving artists/music a second listen, so I pressed play on the album and let it run while I set about my work. While her music is still lyrically very sexual, I found myself actually banging to her bangers (especially “Rainbow”) and really enjoying her more downtempo jams where she sings more than she raps.
Intrigued now to see how her live performance stacked up to her video performances and her music, I made my way to the Moroccan Lounge in downtown Los Angeles to check out her show. I had read some mixed reviews of some of her prior performances, but I can honestly say that Tommy really commanded the sold-out room’s attention for the entirety of the performance.
Tommy seemed to feed off the crowd’s energy. There was a girl who was standing next to me who had flown in from Northern California to see this show, and when she wasn’t doing her social media thing, she was loudly yelling the hooks of every song that Tommy was performing. It seemed that almost everyone in the room knew every lyric that Tommy spit, and you could sense that Tommy’s confidence grew with each passing second. She would reach out into the audience on multiple occasions to embrace a singing fan’s face with her free hand and at one point even jumped into the crowd to get close to her fans in the back of the room. She even invited one fan who knew every word to every song jump on stage to join her for a number.
On this night, Tommy wasn’t the sex-kitten that I had seen in all of her videos. On this night, Tommy was a hip-hop queen, commanding her disciples to bounce along with every trap beat that was dropped. She was a rapper that held court and served … like a boss.
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