The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.
Cortisa Star has a utopian vision for the club. “There’s four stories,” she explains near the beginning of February. “There’s three stories where the club is actually at and on the fourth story, there’s an apartment complex where the workers get to live for free. That’s always been my dream club. And also, there’s theme nights — pirate night, anime night, furry night. I need all the furries in their fursuits dying from heat stroke in the club.”
Cortisa’s hypothetical discotheque is a lot like her music: varied, inclusive, nonstop, expansive, eccentric, excessive, humane. On any given song, the 19-year-old might rap over distorted Philly drill, blown-out rage, or a glitzy nu-jerk beat; gigantic low-end is the primary common denominator. “The 808s are so important,” she says. She’s calling me from New York, where she’s been holed up in the studio working on her debut EP, and the lack of sleep means she would rather keep her camera off on our video call. (A few days later, she’ll show up to this photo shoot nearly three hours late without a jacket, despite the negative-degree temps.) “As long as there’s a strong bassline in a song, I’m gonna bop out to it.”
Her rave-ready raps position Cortisa as a perfect after-hours MC, dictating the terms of the moment: no lore, no future, just the present throbbing at 160 BPM. Her charisma oozes through speakers in frenetic, ecstatic bursts, like on combustible 2023 cut “Menace” or 2024’s “choke” by skaiwater, where Cortisa’s guest verse catapults #gigi to a delirious peak.
Swag you can hear is a prerequisite for any rapper, but Cortisa’s charm is extra apparent on LCDs and OLEDs, ideally blasted on Friday night minutes before the Uber arrives. A December 2024 From The Block performance of her single “Fun” immediately went viral, racking up thousands of enthusiastic and disparaging replies overnight. The initial comments were mostly confused and focused on her complexion and bleached fro to label her a knockoff Ice Spice. But as the footage continued to trend, hip-hop social media aggregators began reposting the video as transphobic outrage bait, honing in on one bar from the song: “Hundreds of bands put that bitch in my panty/ He like my body he know I’m a tranny.”
“The way my brain is wired, especially since I’m not seeing any of these people and they’re literally hating me through a pixel screen, I just can’t even take them serious,” she says of the digital hate. “I just turn my notifications off and go to bed.”
“As long as there’s a strong bassline in a song, I’m gonna bop out to it.”
Though Cortisa’s upbeat, I get the sense she’s had to develop a thick skin from an early age. Born in Baltimore, Cortisa mostly grew up in a small town in Sussex County, Delaware, where the nearest fast food place is 30 minutes away. She started recording music in late 2022, sometime after dropping out of school due to bullying. “I posted a little TikTok saying I’m pretending to be the rap princess and people grabbed it and started running.”
Her early songs were punched in over type beats from YouTube or loops she would add drums to herself. These tracks were recorded into BandLab on her Chromebook, either in the basement or her bedroom surrounded by her sisters and best friend. They quickly garnered the young rapper a seriously invested 250K+ TikTok following.
Over 2023, Cortisa steadily built her skills, developing her flows and honing her lyrics. She says she’s inspired by Rico Nasty and Chief Keef (she calls “Bitch Where” “diva-coded”), but is also quick to cite Valee and Skypearleddat as inspirations for their flows and intensity. Even with her vocals pitched up and layered over themselves (“I like them pretty punchy, more extreme”), her outlandish personality was conspicuous from the get-go: “Feeling really crazy I’ma stalk her with a drone,” she warbles on “100Cherries.” “It’s taking your deepest thoughts, and putting it all out,” she says of her verses. “That’s the menace side of me that I never got to express.”
“My whole thing was, I don’t care about how people perceive me, I’m gonna do whatever I want.” she adds of her first songs. “What’s changed is definitely the mixing and organizing and just making it more clean-cut, because the mixes was crazy, I can’t lie.”
Cortisa is otherwise coy with details about the new songs she’s recording for her debut EP. She teases collaborations with hyperpop producer Umru — “a generational talent. He was cooking something very serious y’all,” she says — though when I ask about guest verses, she demurely deflects. “There’s some girls on there.” Over email, Umru tells me he wanted to make sure the sound of “recording on a Chromebook in Bandlab… wasn’t totally lost in the music even though it was recorded in a studio,” adding that he “loved her energy.”
She enjoys making music in a space where she can be really loud and more freely experiment. On the new project, she says she sings, has a “little R&B moment,” experiments with tempo, and switches up her flow and cadence. “I never knew I could do that before,” she says. “Just trying to make things a little different for me and the bitches.”
“I don’t care about how people perceive me, I’m gonna do whatever I want.”
Her vocals are still raw and intense, but deliberately so. On the new single “MISIDENTIFY,” Cortisa’s Auto-Tuned flow surges and soars over a roiling sea of bass. The midtempo instrumental focuses attention on Cortisa’s flow, “mastering rap high up in the mountains with a samurai.” The shift from self-recording has helped her bars land harder and punchier: “Call me man but I don’t give a fuck / ‘Cause I’m that fucking guy,” she flexes on the bigots.
“At the end of the day, trans people are always going to be here,” Cortisa says. “We’re never going to leave. And I just want to stay close with my community, and make sure everybody knows what resources you have, where you can go and be safe, where it’s not safe.”
“Growing up, I didn’t know too many queer rappers just because there wasn’t too many openly on the song saying, ‘I’m a tranny, I’m gay, this, this,’” she adds. “Especially in the current day, I have so many amazing trans women around me who rap, and it’s a blessing.”
Styling by TANK & Mickey Worsley. Hair by Jarrin McDowell
