CupcakKe refers to her vagina as “Garfield” for a good 10-percent of her latest album. Over the course of the 33-minute long Eden, the rapper born Elizabeth Harris also compares her genitalia to: a keyboard, honey, a barbell, a dryer, a car parallel parking, straws, a furnace, Ring Pops, soup, a purse filled with loose change, Dial soap, and a satin cushion. She writes with a weird, wonderful specificity. In CupcakKe’s world, bodies don’t just defy social conventions; they defy physics.
This has classified the 21-year-old Chicagoan as a “raunchy” rapper—a term that never seems to be leveled at male hip-hop artists—slinging dildos on videos that get taken off YouTube for graphic content, calling her steadily growing fanbase “Slurpers.” She’s capable of more, though, and on her second album in 10 months, she’s determined to prove it. “Most people already skipped this song because it ain’t about sex and killing,” she rapped on her last album, Ephorize. The songs on this month’s Eden are still slathered in sex. The majority of the album is spent asserting her sheer competence, as she tries on different trends and flavors of modern hip-hop and still sounds uniquely, ecstatically like herself.
CupcakKe’s raps have velocity. Each track on Eden propels into the next, and her flow stays tight, whether she’s cooing or shouting. It is a masterclass in control. That’s what has always been delightful and, in its own way, empowering about CupcakKe’s work. She takes no shit when she raps about her sexuality, and for someone who’s spoken openly about her history of sexual violence and abuse, it becomes all the more radical. “That’s funny when abusers ain’t locked away/They in the crib giving more beats than Dr. Dre,” she raps on “Cereal and Water.” Moments later on the song, she spits the words, “Fucking rapists,” and it sounds like a declaration of war. CupcakKe’s music transforms the site of trauma into a place for ridiculous, fearless, uninhibited acts. Her work is a rallying cry for sexual assault survivors. That doesn’t stop it from being fun and totally insane.
CupcakKe occupies her own outrageous space in the rap world, and she easily could have stayed there. On Eden, though, she sieves herself through different strains of modern hip-hop: Latin trap (“Prenup”), a synth-pop adjacent heartbreak ballad (“Dangled”), tingling reggaeton (“Garfield”). These tracks are still uniquely CupcakKe—punctuated with moans and hi-hats, sprinkled with giggle-inducing flexes (“Bitch I’m so cold gotta rock me a thermal and sweater right under the coat,” or “Wrist ice be so creamy/So we naming this shit Edy’s”). Sometimes this feels self-conscious, a way to conspicuously show off her talent. But it’s hard to fault her for that when she’s twirling rhymes around hi-hats, or when she’s silencing critics with a line like, “What trends have you set?”
There seems to be a CupcakKe lens of looking at the world—danceable and glistening with who-knows-what, full of elaborately wrangled metaphors and puns. When she uses that lens to call out men who post pictures of her on Insta (“Post Malone can’t even post my shit”) or proclaim how great she is, it’s slick and funny. But that lens is equally effective, if a little jarring, when she employs it to examine more serious topics. On Eden, these range from an odd but earnest and sweet song about autism to stark statements about racism. Her flexibility is astounding. CupcakKe can go from a condemnation of police brutality in one minute to a line about a dick the size of Ariana Grande’s ponytail in the next. That ability to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal, distinguishes CupcakKe from any other rapper. There’s a pulsing power in the center of her songs. It’s the sound of a woman in charge.
