When Flau’jae Johnson helped lead the Louisiana State College girls’s basketball workforce to a nationwide championship final April, in her first season on the squad, she ascended to the highest of the game. The win, the college’s first title, additionally vaulted her as a hip-hop artist, lifting a profession that has discovered her teaming up with rap royalty.
At the very least twice up to now 12 months, Johnson staged rap performances inside 24 hours of a recreation or a apply, in a single occasion opening for the chart-topping rapper and singer Rod Wave in Atlanta after touring from Louisiana on a time 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 speculated to be doing,” stated Johnson, 20, a sophomore guard who averages 14.2 factors per recreation and over 62,000 month-to-month listeners on Spotify. “If you wish to be a legend at one thing, you’ve bought to do one thing no one has accomplished earlier than and execute it at a excessive stage.”
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. event, beginning with its first-round recreation on Friday. The identical day, Johnson plans to launch “AMF (Ain’t My Fault),” her new tune 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 is able to premiere on Snapchat by means of a partnership with the social media platform.
“She’s redefining and showcasing the renaissance and the revolution that’s potential in girls’s sports activities,” stated Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sports activities administration on the College of Michigan. “She’s exhibiting 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 supervisor, 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 cope with Roc Nation, and is coordinating a music video for an upcoming tune with Lil Wayne, who turned a fan in the course of the 2023 basketball event. 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 previous — a few 12 months after taking over basketball — impressed partially 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 beginning, however she stated she feels his presence day by day. Her first identify (pronounced FLAW-zhay) is derived from his stage identify, Brooks stated, and Johnson typically makes point out of him in her songs. She carried out a tune about gun violence when she competed on America’s Obtained Expertise at 14. In an introspective freestyle over the beat of the Fugees’ “Prepared or Not,” Johnson raps, “They killed by daddy whereas my mama was pregnant, how I’m speculated to really feel?”
“He’s positively my No. 1 inspiration,” Johnson stated. “I get my complete swag from him.”
Whereas 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 tune.
Her off-campus two-bedroom residence doubles as a recording studio full with audio system, a microphone and screens. 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. Followers 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 stated. “Now that they see me on completely different levels, they at all times ask, ‘How do you do it?’ But it surely’s like, I’ve been doing it. Flip 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 expertise. “Get within the health club,” is a standard quip, she stated. However she stated these jabs solely serve to encourage.
“You will be gifted at a number of issues and I don’t assume persons are used to seeing that,” she stated.