How did Flo Milli get her rap name?
Even the most casual of music listeners will know that stage names are not necessarily what appears on the musician’s passport. Unsurprisingly, this is the case for Alabama-born hip-hop star Flo Milli, who was born Tamia Monique Carter in 2000.
Fusing witty lyrics with unapologetic confidence, Flo Milli is one of the most exciting names in this decade’s rap scene. First appearing on the scene with her single Beef FloMix, which went, as so many bangers do today, viral on TikTok in 2018, neatly following it up the next year with In the Party, which received Platinum Certification.
Thus followed the kind of success streak most can only dream of; a label signing with RCA, a debut mixtape that received widespread industry acclaim upon release, a place upon Rolling Stone magazine’s Greatest Hip Hop Albums of All Time list, and nominations for Best New Artist at the 2020 and 2021 BET Hip Hop Awards.
But how did Tamia Carter, no relation to the Carters of the industry, it should be noted, become Flo Milli?
“I used to be in a girl group when I was in middle school up until high school, and my name was always Rose Milli,” Flo explained in an interview with ELLE magazine in 2022.
“After we had broken up, I started doing Instagram videos and I would put them out. I remember [Ethereal’s 2015 single] ‘Beef.’ I did a freestyle to that and everyone was like, you should make this a song. At first, my name was Clap for Mia, and then after that I thought that if I’m going to make this a song, I need a rap name, so I actually came up with Flo Milli quick as fuck. I always had Milli in my name, and I came up with Flo because everyone would say my flow is so hard.”
In the same interview, the young musician spoke about her experience at school. Not that she was bullied; “I just didn’t want to be tried”, she explained, granting context to the defensive sound of her lyricism. Defensive, to put it lightly; lyrics include references to ‘shit talkin’’ and ‘come outside, ho’.
“When I got older, it was a lot of girls that didn’t like me in school,” she explained. “For what reason? I don’t know. I used to come as a bad bitch, and I was just that girl. A lot of girls did not like me for certain reasons. You just deal with cattiness a lot in school, so it kind of came from there—me being a straight A and B student, I was in honor society. I really just had my head on straight. I really couldn’t tell you why girls didn’t like me, but I had a lot to lose, so I would just put it in the music instead of fighting. That aggression and anger had to go somewhere.”
And yet, insecure she is not. As any of her fans will be quick to assert, this is a musician who radiates confidence, something she explains in the interview is integral to her identity.
“I feel like a lot of people expect dark-skinned women to automatically be insecure because of the way society accepts them or doesn’t accept them,” the rapper says. “I feel like people think every dark-skinned woman feels that way. We all don’t feel that way.”