You’d figure Kamaiyah would be used to hearing her own voice in public by now. For the past few months, it’s been blasting from passing cars in her hometown of Oakland via 106 KMEL, where her breakout hit “How Does It Feel” has become a staple in rotation. But the 24-year-old rapper hasn’t been getting out much – she’s been holed up in the studio putting the finishing touches on her debut, A Good Night in the Ghetto, released earlier this week. Read more…

Last week, she finally heard her own song in the wild, bumping from the car behind hers in the McDonald’s drive-thru at 2:30 a.m. “I thought I was tripping,” she says in measured disbelief. “They played two songs in a row of mine and I just started laughing.” When you’ve won the hearts of the late-night McGriddle contingent, you know you’re doing something right.

One spin of “How Does It Feel” and you know why this song has birthed her career. The beat, via producer CT Beats, is an uncorked champagne spray of nostalgic Miami bass rattle rounded out by ecstatic California G-funk; it sounds more alive than anything else on the radio. The video for the track establishes Kamaiyah’s reference points within a nostalgic now. Decked out in box braids and color-block blouses that could’ve been jacked from the set ofFamily Matters circa ’92, sipping Moët and clutching a brick cell phone (fully functional, she notes: “That’s the phone I’m on 90% of the time”), she fantasizes about the life that comes after being broke: “How does it feel to be rich? … How does it feel to just live?” Kamaiyah says she’s not quite there herself, but she’s optimistic. She wrote the song in 15 minutes, sitting outside of an Oakland studio after her brother canceled his plans to record a different song. “You overanalyze the hard shit,” she says. “The shit that comes out easily is what people want to hear.”

Read the rest of the article via MTV HERE.