DAZED - ICE SPICE - Issue #279

To us normies, being born on January 1st seems like an airtight affirmation of chosen-hood. The New Year starts with you, you set it off, on the least likely of all the holiday-birthdays (which all feel unlikely), and experience the surreal ceremony of the entire world counting down to the day you arrived. Anyone born on that day might have a sense of self-importance, one figures. But on a mild January afternoon between video shoots, Ice Spice offers up a more droll reality. “That’s so funny that that’s what people got from it,” she says, when I ask about the flurry of jokes that ran online on New Years Day, when fans realized it was also the 23-year-old rapper's birthday. “Having a birthday on New Years is so crazy because everybody is celebrating their New Years, but it’s your birthday,” she says with a laugh. “That’s always been my issue with that. And usually, my Christmas gifts are also my birthday gifts." But isn’t a baddie gon’ get what she likes? Maybe sometimes she has to wait. “Now,” Spice says, post her ascent to a star-status that has all of hip-hop transfixed, "it makes sense.”

Ice Spice’s given name wasn’t revealed for some time after she broke out in the summer of 2022. But if you watched her video for “No Clarity” closely, you might’ve spotted a nameplate worn around her neck that read “Isis.” That video, released in November 2021, quietly knocked around the emerging Bronx drill scene in New York, and its star-making elements were already apparent. Spice, born Isis Gaston, balances a brash Bronx-bred audacity with glimpses of vulnerability rarely displayed in today’s strain of alpha-female rap. Commenters on the “No Clarity” video comically deemed it “Bouncing ass to her struggles”—Spice, in around-the-way-girl garb of Jordan 4s and a brick-orange Moncler coat, wiggles and wobbles defiantly while recounting an ex-boyfriend who broke her heart, all in front of a corner store soda fridge. On her “On The Radar” freestyle, she’s even more intriguing, spitting from her deepest core about a complicated relationship the way male drill rappers rhyme about besting their opponents in the street. One of her signature catchphrases, “Graaah,” mimics a gun sound, but it often punctuates her bars about matters of love, lust, and broken trust: “After all that, you should’ve told me,” she raps on “No Clarity.” “Fuck that, I’m by my doly. Fuck that I’m going O.D. Would violate, but that was the old me.” For Spice, and the girls who hear their own inner monologues in her lyrics, opening up to someone really does carry stakes of life or death.