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FUR^ BY^ THEIVY^ SHOWROOM.46 | Rolling Stone | March 2020
I
F MEGAN WERE to direct a movie of her
life, she knows how it would open: “It’s
me in the back seat of my mom’s car, on
my way to school, listening to some UGK
shit.” Megan remembers exactly how her mom
introduced new music. “Every time she put on a
new song, [she would say] ‘Put you on some real
shit right quick,” she says.
Megan’s mother, Holly Thomas, was a bill
collector and early-aughts Houston rapper
known as Holly-Wood, who raised Megan on
UGK and Biggie; she was also Megan’s first
manager. Megan characterizes her mom’s music
as “hardcore gangster.” “When I started rapping,
and cussing and shit, she was like, ‘I don’t know
where you get it from,’ ” Megan says, and laughs.
“She was a potty-mouth, worse than me.” Me-
gan’s father was a “full-time hustler,” imprisoned
for the first eight years of her life.
Hailing from Houston’s South Park, Megan
describes her neighborhood as a place split be-
tween “hood shit” and a “family environment.”
In middle school, she was the captain of the
cheerleading team and co-cap-
tain of the dance team; in high
school she was on the drill and
dance teams.
By her freshman year of
college, though, she knew she
wanted to be a rapper. Her
moniker was inspired by grown
men calling her a “stallion”
— Southern slang for a volup-
tuous woman — in high school.
“Believe it or not, I used to be a
little shy,” Megan says. “I never
wanted anybody to know that
I could even rap. Even when I
got to college and I told my best
friend I could rap, she’ll be like,
‘OK. Well, then rap.’ She wanted
me to rap and I wouldn’t do it.
But then we went to a kickback
and I just started rapping.... I
was confident in myself, but I
didn’t really know how people
would react to how I thought
about myself on the inside.”
Over the next few years, Me-
gan’s confidence began to pay
dividends. By 2016, her hometown freestyles
started going viral and, not long after, Megan
quickly went from regional star to national
brand. But as Megan Thee Stallion’s dreams
finally came to fruition, the core of Megan Jovon
Ruth Pete’s life was taken from her. In March
2019, Megan lost both Holly, to brain cancer, and
her great-grandmother, with whom she was also
close. In person, she tears up mentioning the
two women who helped get her to this moment.else can. “I just want the movements to match
the beats,” she says, exasperated. She shows
them how it’s done. She has them try again.
At one point in the afternoon, the rehearsals
taper off and Megan disappears. It’s not until
later that it becomes clear where she went: to
the parking lot, to rap. Upon her return, a new
freestyle over Biggie’s “Hypnotize” is uploaded
to Twitter, to the delight of her 2 million fol-
lowers. It’s the sort of thing she seemingly does
reflexively.
Megan took the rap game by storm last year.
At five feet 10, and with the quick wits of a hip-
hop veteran, she went from holding her own in
YouTube cyphers to proving herself one of the
best lyricists of her generation on projects like
2018’s Tina Snow and 2019’s Fe ver.
All the while, she was becoming as well-
known for her rapidly expanding digital foot-
print as she was for her impressive bars. When
Megan wasn’t slipping away for a freestyle, she
was persuading a rotating cast of celebrities
(DaBaby, Lizzo, Fabolous) to let her “drive the
boat” — a juvenile but entertaining exercise in
which Megan would pour expensive brown li-
quor into someone else’s mouth — and dropping
twerk videos that forced the collective con-
sciousness of the United States to marvel at the
strength of her knees.
It’s that combination of viral-ready charm
and a willingness to rap everywhere and any-
where that made Megan a new kind of star — a
rapper’s rapper who no one could ignore. When
she dropped “Hot Girl Summer,” an anthem
featuring Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign, the song
became both a chart-topping hit and a catch-
phrase that inspired Hotties (Megan’s stan army)
and non-Hotties (everyone else) to scorch every
hater in their path.
And she accomplished all of this while losing
her mother — her first manager and the woman
who introduced her to hip-hop — and chasing
a health care management degree that she still
refuses to give up on, even as the demands
of stardom make finishing coursework a near
impossibility.
For Megan, rapping comes easy; it’s navigat-
ing the minutiae of her new life that’s proving
more difficult. A week before her hometown
show, Megan found herself presenting at the
American Music Awards in Los Angeles. “I was
like, ‘Oh, my God, am I going to have to read
this, or is it something I could memorize?’ ” she
said of the challenges presented by the tele-
prompter. “That was really the only time that I
got nervous.”
Later that night, she would be caught on
camera confidently freestyling in the parking
lot, wearing the same crimson gown she wore at
the ceremony.
“This year, I lost my mom and my grandmother
in the same month,” she said in a since-deleted
Instagram video. “Although all these positive
things have been happening to me and I’ve been
trying to do good, been trying to keep a smile
on my face, stay strong, to stay happy for me
and my other grandmother and the rest of my
family, it’s pretty hard.”
After the deaths, Megan put on a brave face;
her searingly painful spring would soon give way
to her “hot girl summer.” It was a phrase she
created “talking shit” on Twitter, an evolution
of the way she’s come to describe her fans (“Hot-
ties”) and her clique (“Hot Girls”). It soon went
viral. “I didn’t even know it was going to be this
big of a thing,” Megan recalls. “People talking
about ‘Let’s be us. Let’s be free.’... I was telling
my manager, ‘Can y’all believe this? Jada Pinkett
[Smith] is having a hot girl summer.’ ”
For many, the idea of a hot girl summer was
a positive force that transformed as their needs
did — it’s a catchphrase that means whatev-
er you need it to. Months later, when Megan
decided to capitalize on her cultural touchstone
with an actual song, it soon went platinum.
Predictably, brands like Wendy’s, Forever 21,
and Maybelline co-opted the message; it also in-
spired a “No Pigeons”-like remix called “Hot Girl
Bummer,” and so much bootleg merchandise
that Megan would eventually
trademark the term.
For Megan, the phrase came
to describe her own resilience.
“[The losses] weigh on me, but
I know what my mom and my
grandma would want me to do,”
she says. “My mama is a very
strong woman. She raised me
to be super strong. If I got the
platform to spread positivity,
I’m gonna do it.” LIKE RHYTHM, ASS, or genera-
tional wealth, a vision is some-
thing you either have or you don’t. And back
before Megan Pete remade herself as Megan
Thee Stallion, she was a freshman at Houston’s
Prairie View A&M University and a filmmaker
of considerable, if provocative, vision. Megan
and her two best friends, Kelsey and Daren,
became campus celebrities off the strength
of short twerking videos that they would post
online. As their filmography grew in popularity,
so did their notoriety. Inevitably, their exploits
caught the attention of school administrators —
nonvision havers — and the trio were called into
a meeting.
“The ladies were super uppity. They didn’t
want us to wear shorts,” says Megan. “It was
fucking summertime in fucking Texas. But, youMegan’s late
mother was
a rapper who
made “hardcore
gangster” music.
“She was a potty-
mouth, worse
than me,” Megan
remembers.