If you’re a faithful Princess Nokia fan, chances are you’re well aware of the Nuyorican rapper’s obsession with pop punk and emo. Destiny Frasqueri has never been shy about her love for the genres; you can find her slam dancing to Blink-182 and Paramore fairly regularly in her Instagram stories. What’s more, on “Goth Kid,” a track from 2017’s re-issued 1992 Deluxe mixtape, Nokia makes it pretty clear she’s “goth as fuck,” even when she’s not dressed in black.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Destiny is going into a deep dive of her love for emo and pop punk on a brand new Beats 1 radio show called The Voices In My Head. On the first episode, titled “Your Eyes Are Bleeding,” listeners will hear about her love for Paramore’s Hayley Williams, losing her virginity to System of a Down, and how her first boyfriend looked like Panic! At the Disco frontman Brendon Urie.
Nokia even speaks out about race and class privilege in the emo scene, and how they have shaped accessibility to the genre. In the interview, Nokia challenges the stereotype that this music is largely read as white. “My experience is that white kids love hip-hop, and brown and black kids love rock music. And I think that the majority of all the goth kids, punk kids, ravers, emo kids, scene kids – the whole hardcore scene that existed in New York City – was all the kids in the hood, which is really beautiful, because you have all of these hood-ass kids going to shows, dressing in bondage clothes, dressing in those ways, in those aesthetics…That shows that brown kids – they carry emotion, they carry pain, they carry oppression and strife. And they carry so much that that music was an escapism.”
The young rapper will host all of the first season of The Voices In My Head, which will tell the story of Nokia’s musical education via a series of themed episodes. Expect Destiny to guide us through her multidimensional music tastes and share plenty of personal anecdotes with her irreverent humor.
Press play on a few snippets from the first episode of the series below to learn more.
The Voices in My Head will air in over 100 countries every other Sunday at 12:00 PM PST on Apple Music’s Beats 1 starting this weekend on 2/18. Listen live here.