How a high school student from East St. Louis turned TikTok success into a rap career

In a video released in March, Jordyn Powell, better known as Jaiimoni Starr, is seated confidently in the passenger seat of a car. Her edges are laid, her nails are done and she’s casually dressed. She looks as if she knows any viewer will be in awe of what she’s about to say.

Then, the music begins to play. She nods her head to the beat and plays with her blonde box braids before spewing roughly one minute’s worth of lyrical annihilation.

The 16-year-old East St. Louis native flaunts her hard-hitting flows and witty rhymes (“Rise over run, and they call me the slope/Writing this music the way that I cope,” she raps in one line) in the video, making the most of her time in a way that leaves listeners yearning for more. She commands your attention. The video, released on TikTok, was her response to the viral #BeatBoxChallenge, on which artists would rap over the beat to “BeatBox” by Florida rapper SpotemGottem.

“Not from the dome; this straight from my notes/But I’m spittin’ these verses so call me the pope,” she raps in the last line of the video.

Starr makes it clear that she doesn’t freestyle, but that works for her. And she has the metrics to prove it. Her video has garnered nearly 6 million views and over 1 million likes to date. The viral video laid the foundation for the East St. Louis native’s budding rap career, which launched this fall.

“Even though there are a lot of girls that’s coming out that are rappers, I feel like they’re not coming out young, so I feel like if I was going to do it, I might as well do it now,” Starr said about starting her career at a young age. “That’s different. It’s like ‘Oh she’s 16, and she’s a girl and she can rap’.”

A performer at heart

Starr grew up around music. When she was younger, she remembers watching one of her brothers perform as a singer and watching another perform as a rapper. Starr followed suit when she started singing and praise dancing at Gethsemane Church of the Living God in East St. Louis. She also took dance classes in ballet, tap, jazz and acrobatics, so Starr has been a performer all of her life. That background in music made it easier for her to perform her first rap, which happened by chance.

Starr remembers the moment clearly. She was a fifth grader at James Avant Elementary School in East St. Louis.

“We had a Black History Month program, but it wasn’t at our school,” said Starr, who currently lives in Belleville and attends Belleville East High School. “It was a big (program), so we had it at East Side. There was a boy that was supposed to do the rapping part of (the John Legend and Common song) ‘Glory’, but he ended up getting sick or something. Nobody thought a girl could do it, of course, but I ended up being the only person who knew the lyrics other than the boy who got sick, so they let me do it.”

She nailed it. In fact, Starr says she ended up performing better than the person who was originally supposed to perform it. That moment solidified Starr’s interest in rap, even though she was mainly used to singing and dancing at the time.

“I felt like rapping comes more easy to me,” Starr said. “(With) singing, you have to do vocal lessons. It’s just a lot to sing. Since I was able to rap, when I write, it comes out really good. I just felt that was something I was better at.”

And she continued to get better at it. She consistently posted videos of herself rapping on social media (and yes, all of those were filmed in a car, too), which eventually caught the attention of Allen Daugherty of Daugherty Entertainment, a St. Louis-based management company. Daugherty is also Starr’s maternal uncle through marriage, so he already knew about her talent.

He just never took it seriously until he saw the viral video on TikTok.

“ I didn’t even know anything about it, actually,” Daugherty, 50, said about the video. “My wife, she was the one who told me about it. She kept telling me to do something with her, but I kept blowing her off. I’m looking at it and was like ‘Wow OK,’ and that’s when I started paying more attention to it.”

That’s also when he decided he wanted to manage her and sent the video to his brother, Shamar “Sham” Daugherty. Sham is one-half of the legendary St. Louis-based rap production duo, the Trak Starz. The Grammy-award winning pair is most known for their work on Chingy’s classic debut album “Jackpot” (Jaiimoni’s latest single “Every Whurr” features Chingy). Like his brother, Sham was also aware of Starr’s talent, but didn’t really pay attention to it until watching the TikTok video. He instantly wanted to work with her.

Sham was able to secure a distribution deal for Starr with Equity Distribution, a company owned by Jay-Z. Along with producer Jordan Keys, aka Virus, Sham handles all of the production for Jaiimoni’s music with their production company Interstellar Muzik.

“What I was most impressed with was, number one, she had over 200,000 followers on TikTok, which is amazing because when you’re dealing with social media and platforms like that, it’s hard to get an organic following, especially somebody her age, and then the fact that she was writing her own music the way that she was at her young age impressed me,” Sham said.

He added: “She reminds me of a young Chingy. I always tell her mother that. The same thing I see in her is the same thing I saw in him. She’s got it.”

That “it” is Starr’s sheer effervescence in her rap delivery. She has a gritty style of flow, which is a delightful surprise considering she’s very soft-spoken in regular conversation. Starr says her East St. Louis upbringing influenced that rap style.

“The rapping you hear in East St. Louis, to be honest, is a lot of gang banging,” Starr, who grew up in the Emerson Park area of the city, said .“It’s aggressive. That’s really what it is. That’s why when I rap, I’m kind of aggressive. I’m a whole different person than I am on a regular day (when I’m rapping). I turn into a different person. I get more aggressive, like in your face. I’m not cocky, but (my music) sounds cocky.”

Although she no longer lives in the city, she doesn’t like how it’s mainly depicted for its crime.

“It’s violent, but it’s not as bad as people make it seem,” Starr said. “I lived a good life in East St. Louis. Schools were actually better, and I learned more in East St. Louis than what I do now. I’m learning stuff now that I’ve been learning in East St. Louis. The sports are always better, of course.”

And it’s likely that she wouldn’t have developed that aggressive form of rapping that led to her going viral on TikTok had she grown up elsewhere.

‘Her IQ is very high on remembering the songs’

TikTok virality is inherent of Gen-Z culture, and the app is rapidly becoming the barometer for a song’s popularity. It really just takes one song that TikTok users find catchy enough to use in their videos for that same song to become an instant hit. TikTok mainly influenced the budding music careers of artists like Olivia Rodrigo and PinkPantheress. The social media app can help an artist’s song peak at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Starr knows this, but she never thought she’d go viral.

“I was in my room, and I was looking and saw that there were a whole bunch of notifications coming through, and I told my mom I was like ‘OMG my TikTok got 100 likes’,” Starr said. “She was excited, but she wasn’t as excited (as me) because it was just 100 likes, but I was excited because I had never got 100 likes before. I woke up the next day, and it kept going up and up and up and up. After a week, it hit a million, and the next week, it’d be another million. It was like 100,000 (likes) each day.”

Transitioning from having that instant success to launching a rap career nearly six months later can be a lot, especially if you’re a junior in high school. But Starr says she’s been able to manage her time well without feeling overwhelmed. She often writes lyrics to songs while she’s at school.

“I write the most late at night, around 3 in the morning, 4 in the morning,” Starr said. “That’s when I think the best. Sometimes I do have a beat that I base it off of or sometimes I just start writing. Lately, I just think of lyrics in my head on a regular day, and I just have to write it down. During a school day, like today, I just thought of starting a song and I was thinking of lyrics in class, so I just write them down so I don’t forget.”

She isn’t the type of rapper who writes songs in one setting. She writes parts of a song as they come to her.

“Sometimes, I’ll hear a word like if we’re doing something in class or we’re going over words, I’ll be like ‘I should use that’,” Starr said. “Most of the time, it’s based on what I hear. Like if I hear a word, I’ll think of another rhyming word and make a scheme.”

One can hear that writing process on “Egyptian Goddezz,” which dropped on Oct. 15. The rap song mainly features Starr expressing why she shouldn’t be treated like anything less than the queen that she is, but the track shines for its fast-paced bars and taunting punchlines: “Sleepin’ on me, you gon dream lavish/Girl, you ain’t fly. You just bring baggage.”

It’s a style that’s partially inspired by one of Starr’s favorite rappers, Atlanta native Omeretta the Great.

Sham said he’s impressed at how easily Starr remembers those punchlines while she’s recording at Shock City Studios across the river.

“She went in the studio and she just knocked it out fast,” Sham said. “I’ve dealt with professional artists, and it took us hours to do a song and Jaiimoni comes right in there, she writes, she remembers it and she does it real fast, and at 16, that’s very impressive. Her IQ is very high on remembering the songs, writing them and that type of stuff.”

Starr wants to write more slower-paced songs that reveal her vulnerability, which is something she’s currently working on. She plans to continue working on her craft and find more ways to build her already impressive audience.

In a time where the music industry is experiencing a resurgence of female rappers (who are arguably making the genre more interesting), Jaiimoni knows her young age and work ethic will make her stand out among the rest.

Still, rap is a male-dominated space. And although Jaiimoni hasn’t been adversely impacted by that fact, she still has her critics. She remembers a time during the beginning of the school year when her teacher asked her to perform a rap in her class.

“A boy was like ‘Oh my God. I didn’t think she could rap because she’s a girl.’ But I can rap. Even though I’m a girl, it’s not much different.”

Visit the following link for listening to Jaiimoni Starr’s music: t.ly/7zlB

This story was originally published November 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.

DeAsia Paige

Belleville News-Democrat

DeAsia Paige joined the Belleville News-Democrat as a Report for America corps member in 2020. She’s a community reporter covering East St. Louis and surrounding areas. DeAsia previously interned with VICE and The Detroit Free Press. She graduated from The University of Kansas in 2020.