It’s summertime, so you know what that means: the girls are serving curves and confidence at the pool, the beach, and the cookout. Sadly, this also means folks are out here offering unsolicited body commentary at the grill and in the DMs. A word of caution: Baby Tate isn’t tolerating any slick talk about her shape. Don’t try her. The energetic performer told you how she gets down in her petty anthem, “Pedi.” She’s the type of chick to take a screenshot and send it to your mother.
The daughter of soul singer Dionne Farris grew up as an “extremely small, very skinny” kid with enough aunties and grandmas telling her, “Child, you need to eat something. Put some cornbread on that body.”
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
It got to the point that the “Dancing Queen” rapper prayed for a fatty. She even chugged Ensures in university, but nothing worked. “Around 23, I just started to fill out. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m feeling this. I’m into it.’ And then 2020 hit and I was in the house—eating,” says the ATL head-turner. “I was cooking so much that I ended up gaining a lot of weight, which at the time, I had no problem with.”
But then random strangers on the Internet had all kinds of suggestions about how she could slim down. While finding reckless comments on social media is common, it’s an occupational hazard for women in the music industry. “Like if you care about health, let’s care about everybody’s health. Let’s care about the skinny people eating f**king McDonald’s every seven hours. Let’s not try to act like we care when we don’t. It’s fat phobia,” says the 26-year-old songwriter, annoyed that male artists don’t receive the same treatment.
Noting how an online presence and music are crucial to an artist’s assent, co-host Maiya Carmichael asks, “How has social media impacted your career?”
While Baby Take is one to follow on TikTok, she doesn’t make music to get noticed on the platform. “If it goes up on TikTok, thank you, that’s amazing. But I’m not in the studio like we’ve got to get a TikTok hit,” says the multi-hyphenate artist. “I make music for myself first. I make it for Black women. I make it for people who look like me. I make it for people who don’t look like me and just want to feel good, inspired, uplifted, and empowered.”
To hear more about Baby Tate’s thoughts on young’uns getting BBL surgery, self-love and why she left university, listen to the full episode below.