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When Flau’jae Johnson helped lead the Louisiana State University ladies’s basketball staff to a nationwide championship final April, in her first season on the squad, she ascended to the highest of the game. The win, the varsity’s first title, additionally vaulted her as a hip-hop artist, lifting a profession that has discovered her teaming up with rap royalty.
At least twice up to now 12 months, Johnson staged rap performances inside 24 hours of a recreation or a observe, in a single occasion opening for the chart-topping rapper and singer Rod Wave in Atlanta after touring from Louisiana on a day without work from the courtroom. She walked offstage to physique cramps after one other efficiency in November; she had scored 17 factors in a recreation hours earlier than her present.
“I do know that is what I’m presupposed to be doing,” mentioned Johnson, 20, a sophomore guard who averages 14.2 factors per recreation and over 62,000 month-to-month listeners on Spotify. “If you need to be a legend at one thing, you’ve acquired to do one thing no one has finished earlier than and execute it at a excessive degree.”
Johnson’s two careers went into overdrive over the previous 12 months, and he or she’s balancing each as L.S.U. prepares to defend its title within the N.C.A.A. match, beginning with its first-round recreation on Friday. The identical day, Johnson launched “AMF (Ain’t My Fault),” her new music with the rapper NLE Choppa, who final 12 months requested her and her L.S.U. teammate Angel Reese to look within the video for his single “Champions”; they made cameos alongside different prime athletes together with the boxers Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Mike Tyson. Johnson then requested NLE Choppa to collaborate on “AMF,” which premiered on Snapchat by a partnership with the social media platform.
“She’s redefining and showcasing the renaissance and the revolution that’s doable in ladies’s sports activities,” mentioned Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sports activities administration on the University of Michigan. “She’s displaying not solely the way you do it, however the way you do it masterfully with out compromising one for the opposite.”
Kia Brooks, Johnson’s mom and enterprise manager, estimated that the rapper-hooper has earned practically $3 million from endorsement offers involving her identify, picture and likeness, together with partnerships with the audio-equipment maker JBL and the sports activities drink model Powerade. Johnson additionally has a distribution take care of Roc Nation, and is coordinating a music video for an upcoming music with Lil Wayne, who turned a fan throughout the 2023 basketball match. Since late final 12 months, digicam crews have adopted Johnson for an Amazon Prime Video documentary that may profile her and different star L.S.U. athletes.
Johnson started rapping at 7 years outdated — a few 12 months after taking on basketball — impressed partly by her father. Jason Johnson, a rapper who was referred to as Camoflauge, was fatally shot in 2003 in Savannah, Ga., simply months earlier than Johnson’s delivery, however she mentioned she feels his presence every single day. Her first identify (pronounced FLAW-zhay) is derived from his stage identify, Brooks mentioned, and Johnson typically makes point out of him in her songs. She carried out a music about gun violence when she competed on America’s Got Talent at 14. In an introspective freestyle over the beat of the Fugees’ “Ready or Not,” Johnson raps, “They killed by daddy whereas my mama was pregnant, how I’m presupposed to really feel?”
“He’s undoubtedly my No. 1 inspiration,” Johnson mentioned. “I get my complete swag from him.”
While in highschool, she posted her music to YouTube, constructing a following that grew alongside followers’ curiosity in her plans as a prime recruit: She publicly introduced her dedication to L.S.U. in a video that additionally promoted the discharge of a brand new music.
Her off-campus two-bedroom residence doubles as a recording studio full with audio system, a microphone and displays. Her jerseys are hung up on the partitions, and the house studio additionally homes her championship ring and pet lizard. She typically composes lyrics throughout flights to away video games and information in her free time. Fans at her exhibits will maintain up 4 fingers as she performs — a reference to her jersey quantity.
“I’ve been rapping and enjoying basketball my complete life,” Johnson mentioned. “Now that they see me on totally different phases, they all the time ask, ‘How do you do it?’ But it’s like, I’ve been doing it. Turn up in the summertime, play basketball throughout basketball season after which go on about my day.”
Now, although, the victory lap for final 12 months’s title is over. And simply as she faces challengers on the courtroom, Johnson has seen social media commenters attempt to discredit her rap abilities. “Get within the fitness center,” is a standard quip, she mentioned. But she mentioned these jabs solely serve to encourage.
“You might be proficient at a number of issues and I don’t assume persons are used to seeing that,” she mentioned.
