By the looks of her web presence and colorful music videos, 22-year-old Portland rapper KayelaJ (AKA Makayela Johnson) is the real deal. But the young MC doesn’t have a big team behind her—since April, she’s just chosen to invest in herself and take music seriously. It’s a lesson many artists could benefit from: looking legit online attracts opportunities.
Johnson, a Northeast Portland native, has been rapping since she was seven years old, and performed at PDX Pop Now! for the first time when she was just 15. Now using the KayelaJ moniker, she’s been making appearances on outlets like KGW, giving interviews to KBOO community radio, playing shows at Holocene, and headlining the Thesis at Kelly’s Olympian—and that’s just in the last month.
After her breakout PDX Pop Now! performance in 2012, Johnson says she started getting more attention from fans and the media, but at that time she simply wasn’t ready for alladat. “I was starting to get the emails of people wanting to interview me, and starting to get a little bit of buzz, but at the time I couldn’t handle it because I was going through so many growing pains in high school and just going through a lot with my family, and it all just kind of overwhelmed me,” she explains over coffee, wearing a T-shirt that says “Queer and Black Is Beautiful.”
