Growing up on the east side of town, Victoria McElhinney wasn’t much into hip-hop. While many of her young friends were getting down with rap, Victoria was more content to hang out in her bedroom and write poetry.
But something clicked along the way. She began to discover that beneath the beats of hip-hop, beneath the heavy thumping of the rappers’ words, Victoria heard lyrical words strung together, expressing feelings, attitudes, despair, hope, anger, love.
“This is poetic,” she said about the music that she had professed to dislike. “I used to hate rap.”
Today, not so much. For the past several years rap has become her passion. She writes her words, linking them to the beats. She records her music in her computer at her Flowing Wells neighborhood home and reaches out to her audiences through the internet — YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify.
Expressing herself, defining who she is through her music, is what motivates this 29-year-old charter school fourth-grade teacher, a graduate of Sahuaro High School.
“I never really wanted to be a rapper,” she said. “It just kept happening and happening.”
Going by artistic name Ill V, Victoria, with support from her husband and family, has been charting her own course through the competitive waters of hip-hop. She has performed at hip-hop festivals here and other parts of the country, and gatherings and clubs here in town.
She recorded her first song in 2011 and, laughingly with self-deprecation, Victoria recently couldn’t remember the title. But she was sure of one thing: “I wasn’t that great.”
When Victoria gets onstage to entertain audiences with her rapping and personality, she’s another person. Because, for the most part, Victoria considers herself an introvert. Growing up, she said, she was happy to sit in her bedroom and lose herself in writing poetry and reading.
She still likes the stillness of her solitude but appreciates that her music and stage performances have pulled her out.
“I’ve learned to be more open,” she said in a coffee shop conversation.
Hip hop and rap have come a long way since the 1970s when black and Latino urban youths began mixing records while talking over the music. Breaking out from New York City, widely considered the music’s birthplace, it spread to other urban areas and quickly into largely white suburbs. The music took hold and today is heard worldwide, performed in different genres of music and languages.
Along the way, however, rap has been heavily criticized for its violent lyrics and messages of misogyny and anti-social behavior, as well as its down-to-the-bone rejection of authority. But rap’s defenders and creators have argued that the music is a reflection of a wide swath of urban minority youths who have been marginalized at best and beaten down at worst by an uncaring society.
Early in her musical development, Victoria focused on what she called “violent core” rap. The subgenre is intense. Unapologetic about its lyrics. In “Outta You,” one of her videos on You Tube, Victoria stands in an empty bay at a self-service car wash and drops F-bombs, flips the finger, and raps about bringing “the b---h outta you.”
Victoria is clearly aware of the music’s history and its critics. She herself is a critic. In the dawn of the #MeToo movement, Victoria has questioned herself, the aggressive oversexualization of women, and the harshness of some aspects of rap.
“That’s not my life. It had me thinking about changing my image,” she said.
And part of that change is the result of her 2017 baptism into her Christian faith. As her self-image has evolved, she is looking to project a different image by tapping into the vein of Christian rap. There is a growing audience for gospel rap, as it is also known, a music that carries uplifting messages of evangelization.
Victoria doesn’t necessarily want to be labeled as a Christian rapper, but she wants to explore the music and generate a wider fan base. And as she continues to develop her music, Victoria wants to continue to deal with more realistic themes in her life.
She’s a rapper, yes, but she’s also an artist. With her words and beats, Victoria intends to create a musical world that she can live in and share with others.
