Hit the Jackpot

Rapper Latto on breaking into hip-hop, representing Atlanta and making her next big move.

- By Devon Preston

In hip-hop, a rapper’s name is everything. History won’t remember Jacques Webster II or Calvin Broadus Jr., but it will remember Travis Scott and Snoop Dogg. On the other hand, sometimes changing your name is an essential part of your artistic growth. At the start of 2021, only a matter of months after dropping the album that put her on the map, Latto chose to change her name from Mulatto as a way to move on from the negative connotations of this word and start fresh. “I was in a mindset of wanting to change my name,” Latto says. “I felt that it wasn’t being perceived in the right way and I wanted to address the name change, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to address it yet. I was like, ‘I could do a mini-documentary, I could make an Instagram post, I could do an Instagram live.’ But I was like, ‘Nah, fuck all of that. I’m a rapper and I need to address this in music.’”