There’s a party on the street, people dancing in front of Eddy’s Food Center in the Hill. People jammed onto the stoop of a house.
Snowprah comes to the party draped in the Jamaican flag, but leaves no mistake as to where she’s from.
“Out’cha feelings, get up and go get ‘em,” she raps. “This is the Yank riddim / this is the Yank.”
With over 170,000 views and counting, “Yank Riddim” is a viral hit. It has landed the 23-year-old New Haven-based musician on Hot 93.7 — and beyond. Not bad for someone who started writing songs only in March.
Snowprah — her real last name is Snow (she declined to give her first name) — grew up in Bridgeport, the child of a DJ father and a dancer mother. (“My parents are lit,” she said.) She moved to New Haven as a teenager and graduated from Hillhouse High School. She currently lives in the Hill.
She grew up around music thanks to her family and “always did poems,” she said, “as soon as I could write.” As a student, she did a little spoken word. She listened to “all the heavy hitters,” she said, Tupac, Biggie, Nas, Jay‑Z. “In English, they would ask for an essay, but I was better off expressing myself in poetry.”
She want to Gateway Community College but didn’t finish. “Institutions are not for me,” she said. What she excelled at was throwing parties, which she did regularly from October 2016 to June 2017. “I ran the scene for a month,” she said, hosting events in houses, warehouses, and biker clubs.
“The biker club parties were the best parties,” she said.
In June 2017 Snowprah started making dance videos. She developed a following on social media. Working up her own songs was always in the back of her mind, but “I was scared,” she said. “Scared about what people would think.”
Then she suffered through the deaths of a few friends (“Yank Riddim” is dedicated to Zoe Dowdell, an aspiring rapper who was shot and killed in a run-in with police in New Britain in December 2017.) She realized, she said, that “I had nothing to lose.”
So in March, she started writing songs. “Soft Drink” came first. Then the song “Flex Lon Don.” “Yank Riddim” was the third song she wrote, in April, but “the first one I dropped because it was the most ready,” she said. “I was getting impatient.” She teamed up with New Britain producer Chillshump. In homage to Dowdell, they moved forward and made a video.
She only started rapping in front of people at the end of May, at the second Wifi and Friends festival in Hartford. “Yank Riddim” came out in June.
“It’s been magic since,” she said. “I didn’t know it was going to be that fast.”
“Yank Riddim” and Snowprah herself landed on Hot 93.7 in late June. On the strength of “Yank Riddim” and a “catalog” of songs that she has written since, she said, she ended up courted by record labels, and signed to Island Records. She got the call about that while visiting her niece, who had just undergone a liver transplant. The advance is going to help pay for the procedure, she said, which was a factor in her signing: “the fact that they cared so much about my family,” she said — not to mention the label’s Jamaican connection.
Her grandfather, so the family stories went, hung out with Bob Marley. Her father is a DJ in Jamaica. Her brothers are DJs. “When you’re Jamaican,” she said, “music is in your culture.”
But Snowprah is mostly ready to lift up the state’s culture, by making more music and throwing more events. “Connecticut is going to be on the map for sure,” she said. “We got culture here.”
Click above to see another video Snowprah shot outside Eddy’s Food Center in the Hill.