The vibe is a perfect combination of comfy cool and fun inside Detroit’s MGM Grand casino hotel. Rapper Kash Doll and a few members of her glam team — Chanel, Chaniece, and Dr. Carnisha — are in a suite on the 17th floor prepping her for an early morning photoshoot. She’s seated in a white robe looking at the city’s skyline while Chaniece uses various makeup brushes and sponges to create the desired look. But Kash Doll’s yawns between her smiles tells the tale of a woman who’s more tired than she’s letting on.
The previous night was a good one: R&B crooner Trey Songz surprised a packed house at Little Caesars Arena when he brought her on stage to perform during his performance. But more significantly, Kash Doll is six months pregnant, and glamming up after rocking the stage the night before is hitting different.
Once finished, Dr. Carnisha (yes, she’s a real doctor) drapes Kash Doll’s body with a full-length black and white fur coat and Chanel places a black Detroit Pistons snapback on her head. Kash looks in the mirror, and pulls a snapback down a bit over her forehead.
She’s ready.
At this point Kash Doll has been Detroit’s reigning queen of hip-hop for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when she wasn’t. Outside of fellow emcee DeJ Loaf, no other woman emcee born and raised from Detroit has made the impact in hip-hop or achieved the celebrity status that she has. Born Arkeisha Knight, the Detroit westside native burst onto the scene in 2015 with more ferocity than her male counterparts and a heavy dose of raw sex appeal.
She officially kicked the door in with the release of her 2015 mixtape Keisha vs. Kash Doll. Tracks like “Cheap Shit” and “So Crazy” were bass-heavy Detroit bangers perfect for the club or cruising. She followed that up the next year with the mixtape Trapped in The Dollhouse that featured the viral single “Run Me My Money.”
Kash was bold, brash, lyrical, and flexed a Detroit sexiness never seen before in hip-hop, earning reverence from both the fellas and ladies alike. Almost instantaneously heavyweights like Drake, Rick Ross, and Big Sean became fans, and the legend of Kash Doll had begun.
But despite how effortlessly her rise seemed, the early years were a tough grind. She still had to claw and scrape to earn her respect from the industry. Hip-hop is a crowded space, and she wanted to make sure she was being heard.
“It was just about growing tough skin, learning how to ignore negativity,” she says. “Supporting myself financially because it wasn’t as much money as it is now, and staying consistent and believing in myself.”
She drove her boss bitch mentality into 2018 like an SRT on the Lodge freeway as she released two highly applauded projects: Brat Mail and The Vault. Her single “Check” was a women’s anthem. A year later her album Stacked dropped and has been her most successful to date. Featuring big names like 2 Chainz, Lil Wayne, Trey Songz, and Summer Walker, it debuted at No. 76 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and reached No. 14 on Billboard’s “Rap Album Sales” chart.
In 2023 she was one of a dozen women emcees that were highlighted on the Netflix docuseries Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop, co-produced and directed by Detroit native dream hampton.
“They let us know they were doing a series and they wanted all the female rappers in each region,” she says. “And of course for the Midwest they reached out to Kash Doll.”
There are now more women across the country making significant impacts on hip-hop than ever before. Kash Doll feels this has more to do with the talent of the artist than industry gatekeepers pulling strings.
“I don’t think it was so much of the industry allowing women,” she says. “I just think the internet is so big and powerful that it’s nothing they can do about it. Because you can have a career on the internet. It doesn’t have to just be in the industry. And you can’t deny it.”
She adds, “I love all the women rappers, but I do wish it was more serious rappers than just like people just doing it because they cute and have a following.”
Throughout the years Kash has also carved out a space for herself in the world of acting. She’s appeared in the TV series Empire on Fox and BMF on Starz, as well as indie film projects I Got the Hook-Up 2 by rapper Master P and Buffed Up!: The Movie. (Logline: “Believing that all it takes to score with the ladies is a pair of Cartier frames, three college students hustle for the money, no matter the cost.”)
“I enjoy acting, acting is so much fun,” she says. “And it’s so, I don’t know, I have way more stability when I’m acting than when I’m rapping.”
When asked how working on an album compares to acting, Kash says, “It’s harder to be in album mode because when you’re in album mode you have to really be in a creative space of writing music and picking beats. It takes up a lot of your time. Compared to acting, it’s already scripted, you don’t have to come up with the script. You just have to embody who you’re playing and then you get to sit still.”
For the first two seasons of the BMF, based on Detroit’s real-life Black Mafia Family, she played the role of Monique, a love interest of the main character Meech. She was the only cast member who was born in Detroit and added a layer of authenticity to the show. Her character was written out at the end of season two.
“I knew before it even started I was going to pass away because the lady I played, she really passed in real life,” Kash says of her BMF role. “I wasn’t disappointed but I didn’t want it to end, of course.”
However, Kash Doll will be appearing in an episode of Diarra in Detroit airing on BET beginning March 21. The series is created, produced and stars Diarra Kilpatrick, half-sister of ex-Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and is billed as a dark comedy about a divorcing school teacher whose refusal to believe she’s been ghosted by her rebound Tinder date “pulls her into a decades-old mystery involving the Detroit underworld.”
In September 2021, Kash Doll posted on her Instagram account that she was expecting her first child, with Atlanta rapper Tracy T. On Jan. 6, 2022, she gave birth to a boy she named Kashton. For Kash Doll, motherhood has been transformative and enlightening. She says she’s become much more conscious of the impact of her career moves, her content, and how she manages her time.
“When I first laid eyes on Kashton, everything I had from that day on was different,” she says. “That little boy means the world to me. I don’t know what I was doing before him. And it’s like it makes my life more intentional because like now when I’m doing things, it needs to make sense. I’m not just doing things just because. I’m not fucking off my time just because. Time is so valuable now because I’d rather be with him.”
Recently she announced that she was pregnant with her second child due this June, and says she still has the same maternal anticipation that she had the first time around. She says she’s looking forward to Kashton being a big brother.
“I’m still embracing it, it’s just that this pregnancy is way worse than the first one,” she says. “[The baby]’s kicking my butt. My body is sore, I feel my stomach stretching this time. I be sleepy, [the baby] doing me dirty,” she says through a soft laugh.
In February of 2023 Kash released Back on Dexter, an 11-track project part of DJ Drama’s legendary “Gangsta Grillz” mixtape series. The project was her proverbial “I’m back” moment as it was her first full release in four years. Back on Dexter was one of the best projects to drop in 2023 and Kash calls the project her favorite.
“Because I was coming out of postpartum, I kinda just got in that bag and started working, doing me again, and it took a lot of strength,” she says. “I worked with Joseph McFashion. It was a Detroit project, I worked with all the Detroit rappers and everybody just came together. I was very proud of that.”
The most notable track on the album was the bombastic “Oh Boy,” a Detroit posse cut that barrows its keys and bassline from the Eastside Chedda Boys song of the same name that was recorded 20 years ago. Along with Kash Doll, Baby Money, Skilla Baby, Cash Kidd, RiskTaker D-Boy, and DJBJ 3525 are all featured.
“My friend group compared to yours is different kind of bitches,” Kash Doll raps at the start of the track. “It’s two types, one who talk money and who get it.”
“I know I had that feeling when I recorded it,” she says. “That’s one of the first ones I recorded, I was so excited when I heard the beat. The beat is so familiar from the Chedda Boys. I grew up on that beat so I was like, ‘Man, I wanna hop on this.’”
“Oh Boy” is simultaneously an ode to street artists of Detroit’s hip-hop past, but also the best representation of Detroit hip-hop’s present. Over the past four years Detroit emcees like Icewear Vezzo, Tee Grizzley, Veeze, Babyface Ray, and 42 Dugg have graced national magazine covers, charted on Billboard, been nominated for awards, and have signed major label record deals. This current wave of Detroit hip-hop has been very influential and the artists are gaining notoriety and capitalizing.
“I’m so happy for everybody, I’m so proud,” Kash Doll says. “Those are all my brothers. Those are the bros. Detroit needed that. Before that there was no one that was really into street music … just real street shit. People are getting to see the real streets of the D.”
Over the last few months Kash has dropped “The Big 1,” Fawk Em,” and the impressive “Power” freestyle in which she raps, “Postin’ multiple pics with your one wrap/ Well, ain’t that a bitch? You was pandemic rich/ That’s why you screaming, ‘Bring Trump back.’”
All of these are preludes to her album dropping in May, which she feels will be her best and most mature album to date. Kash is making it a point to steer herself away from what she calls “microwaveable music,” saying she’s taken her time with this album and wants the songs to have real staying power and not hit and then recede like TikTok trends.
“I can say it’s a full body of work,” she says. “I feel like every song is a single. Every song should chart. Every song is huge. Every song is meaningful. It’s a representation of who I am today as a woman.”
She says her recording process hasn’t changed much over the years. She still writes, doesn’t punch in much, and will record as many takes as needed to get the song right. The biggest change has been her intentionality toward her bars and subject matter.
“It’s more grown,” she says. “It’s like I’m not as reckless as hell on a track because that’s how I’m feeling at the time. As I’ve grown as a person my music has grown with me. You know how as you grow as a person and everything around you and with you grows? So I just think it’s growth with me, but I’m still the same OG.”
This past December Kash announced she was joining the controversial web platform Onlyfans to share “unreleased content” — but not the x-rated material the site is known for. So far, Kash Doll has used it to share music clips and candid behind-the-scenes videos, and says she wants to monetize more of her content in a way that’s no different than yesteryear when fans had to purchase posters, magazines, and albums of their favorite artists.
“Because everything is free these days, when you are on social media you can just see what everyone is doing and back in the day it wasn’t like that,” she says. “You had to pay to see artists.”
In between motherhood, acting, and music, Kash has very quietly embraced her charitable side. She’s been sponsoring highschool girls’ prom expenses by paying for their dresses, hair, makeup, shoes, and transportation. She also provides financial assistance to impoverished new mothers by purchasing diapers, pacifiers, bottles, clothes, milk, and other needs.
“I’ve been doing it out of pocket, just myself for years,” she says. “I just officially started my organization a few weeks ago. It’s called the ‘Fairy Boss Muda.’”
The rest of Kash Doll’s 2024 has been scheduled: drop the album in May, have the baby in June, take two months to rest, and start touring in September. She says her village will make sure she’s able to be a present mom while touring so there won’t be any long absences between her and her children. When I ask her what she wants her legacy to be, she takes a short pause and says, “A beautiful Black woman with a darker skin tone that still looks good, still got that recognition, that gave back, that uplifted women. A woman that does everything as far as having a man, kids, a career, and still kept herself together.”
