JT is on the cover of PAPER magazine and in her editorial she dives into her solo career, her new album and her past.
The editorial starts out with her saying:
“I always knew how to rap,” JT says. “I was born with this gift. But did I think I was gonna be a professional rapper? Hell no.” She’s calling from Los Angeles, where she’s preparing to release her debut solo project City Cinderella this Friday. “I never thought I would be a celebrity growing up, but I always wanted to be,” she continues, the clacking of her nails audible through her microphone. “Like, who don’t want to be what they see on TV?”
Raised between Carol City and Liberty City, Florida throughout what she has referred to as a “chaotic” childhood, wealth and fame never seemed to be in the cards for JT — and when they first appeared in her hand, the game revealed itself to be rigged.
Most of the world heard her for the first time as one half of the rap duo City Girls in their brief uncredited feature on the highest-charting song of summer 2018, demanding “the black card and the code to the safe” on Drake’s “In My Feelings.”
The morning of the song’s release, JT left a recording studio and self-surrendered at the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution to begin a 24-month sentence.
While her voice traveled around the world, JT found herself trapped behind bars.
She had simultaneously arrived at the precipice of her wildest dreams and her gravest trials.
Her early years
JT was born Jatavia Shakara Johnson, the eldest of her mother’s three children and among the youngest of her father’s 16, the rest of whom were her stepmother’s children.
When she was about five years old, JT’s mother was incarcerated, and she went to live with her father and stepmother in Carol City, where she often felt ostracized.
“I always felt like I was the black sheep in my family,” JT told Angie Martinez in a 2023 interview. But despite that, she found a way to connect with her siblings.
“I was in a [rap] group when I was a little girl, called The Protegees, with my sisters and brothers,” she says. “I used to write my raps down. I was such a little girl that I don’t even remember much about it, but I know that I was writing my own music, and I was writing my sisters’ and brothers’ too.”
Throughout her teens, JT alternated between living with her aunt in Liberty City and sleeping on the couches of her friends’ homes. One such friend was Caresha Brownlee, also known as Yung Miami, who would eventually make up the other half of the City Girls.
In her early 20s, JT studied Fashion Merchandising with dreams of becoming a designer. But she was no fan of the broke college student lifestyle, and her dreams weren’t panning out as quickly as she’d hoped.
Her friends would borrow her car for the weekend and mysteriously return with bags full of designer clothes and shoes obtained through credit card scams; one day, JT joined them. Working jobs at the Miami Seaquarium, Burger King and Whole Foods, she was no stranger to hard work — but that hard work simply wasn’t paying enough.
“Every two weeks, $500? $600? Like, what I’ma do with that?” JT demands in a clip from the documentary Point Blank Period. “They need to pay people more. The rush with scamming was you gon’ get all that stuff you wanted. In a bad way, but you was gon’ get it.”
A week after recording “Fuck Dat N*gga,” JT was charged with seven counts of aggravated identity theft and a single count of unauthorized device access, following an arrest for a fraudulent purchase in the shoe department of Nordstrom.
By the time her sentencing date arrived in January, the two girls had become the first women signed to the Quality Control Music (QC) imprint under Motown and Capitol Records, giving them just six months to record their first mixtape.
About going Solo
Last October, JT announced in Interview Magazine that she would be releasing her first solo EP in 2024; in June, Yung Miami seemed to confirm that the City Girls had officially disbanded.
By the time JT unveiled City Cinderella in July, her solo EP had evolved into a 16-track project.
“I would have never thought that today, I would be a week away from my first solo project,” JT says. “Not in no way, shape or form.” When she made that initial announcement in October, she explains, hardly any of those 16 tracks existed yet. Most of City Cinderella was recorded between Los Angeles and New York in the months since.
“City Cinderella is definitely a mixtape,” she clarifies. “People work on their albums for a year, albums are just different. So City Cinderella is not my first album, being that I made this project so damn fast. I had to create this project throughout the tour and moving around, so I didn’t have time to really nurture and doctor it. This is just something that I’m putting out with my pure instincts.
She adds, “I mean, seven songs isn’t bad, but why not give a lot of music? I talk entirely too much to be doing [only] seven songs.”
City Cinderella reveals a new maturity in the 31-year-old rapper, most present in her vulnerability and her focus. Lyrically, JT is at her sharpest. Her beat selection is precise and varied, lending the project a sense of cohesion that is rare for a mixtape. “Immediately, if a beat talks to me, I already know what I’m gonna go in there and rap about,” she says about her process. “I kinda know the lyrics before the flow.”
How her friend Monica helped her step out of her comfort zone
The music video for “No Bars” opens with a dedication to Monica Suh, JT’s late friend and creative partner who encouraged and helped JT as she made her way into the fashion world. When Suh’s name is mentioned, JT lights up.
“I will always wanna talk about Monica. Oh my god, I can talk about Monica all day,” she says, reflecting on the early days of their friendship. “I’m a brick wall. I don’t let people in easily, but Monica was such a Leo and she had thick skin.”
In January of 2023, Monica took JT to her first Paris Fashion Week.
“I remember having a meltdown in Paris, saying that I do not belong here, I’m not gonna fit in,” JT says. “I was freaking out, going the fuck crazy on her and she was just staring at me in the calmest way, saying, ‘Well, you definitely belong here.’”
JT had no stylist with her, but she did have a makeup artist. So they decided on an all-black look, to draw the attention to her face.
“That’s when my viral lip came out, when I did the black lip liner with the little deep cut at Mugler,” JT says. “Monica was so happy. I remember her never shutting up, like ‘I told you [that] you was that bitch, I told you, I told you, I told you!’ She told me, ‘You definitely belong here. You don’t belong anywhere else in the world. You are a fashion girl.’”
Sitting front row, JT even participated in the show as part of a staged tug-of-war with Arca, who stopped halfway down the runway to “steal” an unreleased Mugler bag out of JT’s hands before continuing to walk.
A few months later, Monica would help JT book her first campaign with Poster Girl for their Fall 2023 line, once again pushing JT out of her comfort zone and into something new.
“I went crazy on her about Poster Girl, I went crazy on her about Mugler, I went crazy on her about everything,” JT says. “But when I look back, those were my most special moments. Monica would always tell me I was an it-girl. And it ain’t no shade, but she always wanted me to be a solo artist.”
Monica passed away in a car accident in Los Angeles in April of 2023. Since then, JT has been public with her grief and enduring appreciation for her friend. “I love her,” JT says, using the present tense. “I’m always gonna talk about her because it’s so easy to. She’s such a good person and she deserves to be talked about.”
Later that year, JT would star in a campaign shot by renowned fashion photographer Hugo Comte for a collaboration between Mowalola and Beats by Dre, as well as return to Poster Girl for their Spring 2024 campaign.
Lauded for “bringing visibility to alternative Black girls,” her distinctive image has proven to be as inspiring among fashion lovers as it has been controversial in the urban media landscape — but JT says that controversy has also “opened so many doors,” catching the eyes of collaborators who understand her taste.
Where she sees herself seven years from now
When asked where she hopes to be seven years from now, JT answers without missing a beat: “I plan on being a huge star.
Like, I’m already a star, but I plan on having a successful business, having a successful family, [performing in] arenas, making change in my community, giving back to my city, Miami.
I want to build a juvie house for unfortunate kids.” Some of that work has already begun; her No Bars Reform initiative launched last summer and provides employment, housing, and therapy resources for recently incarcerated women.
She continues,
“It’s a lot I want to do in seven years, which will come fast, ‘cause baby, time be going by fast. You would think that seven years is a long time from now, but it’s actually tomorrow.”
JT takes a long pause.
“I see myself being who I am, who I know I could be,” she says, finally. “Which is larger than life.”
