J Noa, the Dominican teen rap dynamo, drew expressions of wonder and joy from a quartet of rap’s founders with an intricate, sometimes lightning-paced freestyle that stretches on and on. In video, filmed at the birthplace of hip-hop in the Bronx this week, she went off verse after verse, boasting about her freestyle skills, how no one can compare to her, and how she’s always repping the Dominican flag.
Her audience included DMC, Grandmaster Caz, the Funky 4 + 1’s Sha-Rock, and the Fearless Four’s Mighty Mike C — four of the genre’s trailblazers who were also visiting the site. The meeting was unplanned.
As she raps, DMC nods his head and looks her in the eye, his smile widening as the video goes on, and Caz get into the groove. Sha-Rock, who, it should be noted, was rap’s first female MC, smiles and leans forward as she watches. J Noa, her ballcap reversed (like her hip-hop forefathers), bends slightly at the knees and gesticulates each word. After a minute, she kicks things into fourth gear and spits a warp-speed verse that would impress J.J. Fad. When she ends, the hip-hop luminaries break into applause and cheer, as Mighty Mike C introduces his friends. “This is what hip-hop does,” he says.
J Noa, who is only 17, has been one of the leading emcees in the Latin rap scene since bursting out of the Dominican Republic. A couple of months ago, she released a new EP, Autodidacta, which contains seven songs, including some verses at her signature whiplash-inducing velocities.
“I feel like I came to revive rap,” she told Rolling Stone recently. “To me, most rappers should be intentional about what they write, about what they recite. Otherwise, why would rap serve them, or why would they be considered rappers if they don’t live the reality of what they’re rapping about?”