Ice Spice Means Business

Of all the LinkedIn-endorsable skills the rapper Ice Spice boasts about in her music, her ability to effortlessly drag a bitch — that is, to insult someone so colorfully their humiliation is matched only by their surprise — is among her most treasured, up there with having a “phat butt” and being able to take your man. And on a Friday night at Sei Less, an Asian fusion restaurant in Manhattan beloved by many a hip-hop star and NBA player, I witness this particular gift firsthand when I mention to Ice Spice that I am a spendthrift incapable of leaving the house without immediately opening my wallet. Sitting beside me in the restaurant’s conference-room-sized private suite, she widens her eyes in shock. “People that aren’t good at saving scare me!” she exclaims, her voice rising a few degrees above her usual measured rasp. “That means if we were stranded on an island together, and we only had one ration of food, you would let me starve because you wouldn’t know how to save it!”

I assure her that I would never let the artist responsible for such nonsense-brilliant masterpieces as “Munch (Feelin’ U)” go hungry in a hypothetical Lost scenario. I would obviously put her in charge of the rations. But this only elicits another horror-giggle. “Oh my God, you really can’t save!” she continues. “You don’t even trust yourself to ration off your own food!”

Ice Spice can lecture me about financial responsibility because, well, she has a lot of money and came into it very quickly. We had been deep in conversation about all the unpredictable ways your life changes when you suddenly become the toast of the music business, and eye-popping bank statements rank high among the perks — if only, according to Ice Spice, for the stability they bring, and if only you know what to do with them. “I haven’t even invested into any bonds, and I am just getting into that now,” she says. “I feel like I’m a little behind because of that.”

Ice Spice rests easy knowing she can afford to take care of her family. She can afford to live where she wants. A Bronx native, she briefly moved to New Jersey after her career blew up but has since returned to this side of the Hudson after realizing the Garden State was “even more not low-key.” And while she’s not above a splurge — “I also like luxurious things too, which is nice that fame sometimes unlocks cool stuff” — she prides herself on keeping her expenses to “simple sh*t.” “I feel like I’ll be OK my whole time here on Earth because I’m just so good at saving, no matter what happens,” she says sagely. And she has been thinking a lot about what happens next, because she is planning to stick around for a long time.

In contemporary American pop culture, Ice Spice is the closest thing we have to a Cinderella story — if Cinderella had arrived at the ball wearing a pistachio-green tube top and sporting a spectacular head of Fanta-orange curly hair. It’s not even much of an exaggeration to say her career took off overnight if you were alive and online in August 2022, when “Munch,” a brief yet belligerent swaggerfest, ran over algorithms and attention spans with the force of a bulldozer. Suddenly, the artist born Isis Naija Gaston (“It sucks, because I can never find my keychain”) went from being an aspiring rapper of modest online virality to an instantly recognizable New York City mascot. Drake was playing her song on his radio station. Taylor Swift was hitting her up to recruit her for the “Karma” remix. Kim Kardashian was flying her out to make TikToks with her brood of chronically online Kardashian kids. Her fanbase spans Gen Alphas who just started high school to 40-something white guys who form their rap opinions by listening to The New York Times’ Popcast. She collaborated with Nicki Minaj, her rap idol, not once but twice before she even released her debut album, Y2K!, which is named for her birthday: Jan. 1, 2000.

“I’m still a regular person. Me and my bestie always talk about this. She’s always like, ‘Bro, people don’t know how normal you are!’” Ice Spice says, dressed casually in a Betty Boop I♡NY tee, bejeweled cross necklace, and denim cutoffs. Earlier during our dinner of noodles and chicken satay, I inadvertently taught her about lore, aka the internet narratives that inform a pop star’s output, and she delights in reciting the term back to me. “I literally am the girl next door. That’s not my lore — that’s my swag!”

“People were trying to say that I’m not a lyricist. But I figured I’d let you know that I definitely knew I was. The whole time.”

With her great warp-speed rise, however, came great warp-speed hostility, and Ice Spice’s detractors have polarized around two main gripes. The first contends that she is a flash-in-the-pan viral curiosity, which Ice Spice consistently addresses with the same nonchalant charisma that made her a star in the first place. “Everybody was tryna be like, ‘Ohhhhhhh, she a one-hit-wonder da-da-da-da-daahhhh.’ But it’s like, ‘Now what? Two-hit wonder?’” she said in a video interview with the lyric annotation site Genius in 2022, just after releasing follow-up single “Bikini Bottom.” The clip became its own hit on social media; one user even set it to a beat, showcasing in one fell swoop her can’t-help-it attitude for rap fame. (And for the record, she currently has four Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits to her name.)

“Such a silly girl,” Ice Spice says, shaking her head when I remind her of this moment. She occasionally watches her old interviews, she tells me, and they inspire the blanched horror that only a newly minted 25-year-old can summon for their primordial 22-year-old self. “Clearly, I was always just feeling, like, ‘Oh my God, I need to be better than my last time,’ you know?” Not that her drive is a bad thing. “Honestly, the pressure’s great,” she says. “I think the girls [in rap] also enjoy the friendly competition amongst each other. I feel like that’s what keeps the spark.”

Still, she wishes she hadn’t taken everything so seriously from the jump. She had only been making music for a matter of months, after meeting producer RIOTUSA — son of longtime Hot 97 personality DJ Enuff — while attending the State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase College, and she acknowledges that underneath the grinning brashness of the video, there was still a young woman shouldering incessant internet vitriol and struggling not to show it. “I think it’s so sweet, and you can tell that I’m so excited and grateful to be here, and I’m so happy to have proven people wrong. But I can read that all over me in the clip! I’m, like, ‘Damn, girl, relax! It’s OK!’”

The second gripe from the commentariat is that she doesn’t seem to try hard enough. Or hard at all. That her tossed-off lyrics take streaming-era rap’s penchant for vibes over storytelling to an unbearable conclusion. That the woman who once dubbed herself “Ms. Poopie” has an overreliance on scatalogical metaphors to convey her excellency, peaking with the gastrointestinal genius of “Think U the Sh*t (Fart),” on which she taunts an enemy for adorably assuming they have the structural integrity of a solid stool when, in fact, they are merely flatulence. Never mind that in today’s I-don’t-dream-of-labor pop cultural landscape, appearing agnostic to work (regardless of how much labor you’re actually putting in) is downright aspirational: Dua Lipa, the originator of go-girl-give-us-nothing memes, is beloved by her fans for perpetually being on vacation. Videos abound of Blackpink’s Jennie seemingly phoning in choreography on the group’s recent stadium tour, and somehow this defiant streak only makes her cooler. Making an effort? In this economy? Please.

“I don’t want to sound toxic, but I feel like if you crash out at a point, that just means you’re really in love.”

Ice never really engaged with the criticism about her rapping ability. She wonders now, however, if her refusal to acknowledge or participate in the discourse allowed her online haters to have an outsize influence. “I think my mistake was basically... What’s the word? Letting people feel like they were right a little bit,” she says. “Like people were trying to say that I’m not a lyricist, and I just kind of went in with the attitude of ‘Yeah, they’re right. I’m not.’ But it’s just not true.” She sounds almost somber as she relays this. “I didn’t really feel like having to prove that. But I figured I’d let you know that I definitely knew I was [a lyricist]. The whole time. I just let them say what they want and be happy with that.”

Besides, in their dismissals of her lyricism, the purists had missed an obvious key to her massive popularity. Remember fun? People like fun songs. And if there was ever one nonnegotiable truth about an Ice Spice song, it was that they are simply overflowing with it: her many guttural grrraahhs that reject polished perfection; phonetically contagious hooks that seem designed to be lip-synced to; and her banger one-liners that deliver ugly truths about sex, ambition, competition, jealousy, and infidelity with the same naked clarity as Nietzsche talking about staring out into the abyss (see: “Oh you cheatin’? Then I’m cheatin’ back,” from the Central Cee collaboration “Did It First”).

“Ice Spice has always been so iconic. She took over the world a couple years ago, and I think everybody — especially the six of us — were such big fans of her,” says Lara Raj of the girl group KATSEYE, which teamed up with Ice Spice this year for a remix of their single “Gnarly.” Considering that “Gnarly” is, at its core, a tribute to the culture-shifting power of young people adopting a random word and repeating it in until it means everything and nothing, Ice Spice made for an ideal partner. “We were like, ‘What the fuck? Ice Spice? That is just so crazy,’” Raj says. “It really added so much to the song.”

“Taylor said, ‘As long as you keep making music, everything’s going to be fine.’”

It is so easy to get swept up making TikToks to Ice Spice songs that you can miss their accidental profundity. “Bikini Bottom” opens with a line that could be the basis for another Mel Robbins self-help book: “How can I lose if I’m already chose?” (“Sometimes I just think about that line,” Ice tells me.) The duh-duh-da flow of her verse on the PinkPantheress collaboration “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” a song in the time-honored tradition of two girls coming together to cuss out a worthless man, is so mesmerizing that it almost disguises her anguish elsewhere: “But I don’t sleep enough without you / And I can’t eat enough without you / If you don’t speak, does that mean we’re through? / Don’t like sneaky sh*t that you do — grrah!”

It’s an anthem that could only have been written by someone who understands that love and pain are often deeply intertwined. Ice Spice — a romance-novel reader who just embarked on Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses — thinks a lot of her songs are secretly love songs, even if the characters in them are in an escalating arms race of infidelity. “I don’t want to sound toxic, but I feel like if you crash out at a point, that just means you’re really in love,” she offers. Has she ever been in love? “I’m pretty sure I have been, I think. Because if that was not love, I don’t know what that was.” But on the prospect of falling in love again, she is not bullish. “You know what literally sucks about dating me personally is that I genuinely do care about my career and my craft, just so much more than I do about my love life. And I really hate that for whoever’s dating me. Because I’m just always going to put those things first. My career, craft, family, me, then maybe somebody else.”

She’s also skeptical of a potential partner using her for clout. “You know what my fear is? An ex attaching themselves to a story, like, ‘I’m the one she’s talking about there. Here’s a thread of how,’” she says. “Just waiting for me to start talking, so they can get their viral TikTok moment.” That kind of behavior is beneath her: “I do believe everything is a butterfly effect and a domino effect. Everything’s connected, so I wouldn’t even want to talk down on anyone because who knows who might bump into each other later.”

“I think the girls enjoy the friendly competition. That’s what keeps the spark.”

Up until the release of her debut album in July 2024 and her first tour that followed, Ice had worked at breakneck speed for three whole years, hell-bent on maximizing her moment, knowing full well that what the internet giveth, the internet also taketh away. But this year, she has allowed herself to finally relax a little and step back from the grind of keeping herself in the zeitgeist. “I have not dropped a music video in a year. Which I have never done,” she says, laughing. She went upstate to Lake George with her family. (Does she drive? “I’m a passenger princess.”) She went to Las Vegas with her best friend and her producer. (“Just having fun, playing Ping-Pong and drinking wine.”) A brand deal with Mercedes-Benz meant attending an event in Rome, so she took a friend with her and “had gelato and pizza until we were so f*cking bloated, it hurt.” She even went to Germany to visit the company’s factories and see how the cars are made, which she recounts with the guileless enthusiasm of a first-timer at Disneyland: “That was crazy! I got to test out cars and the professional drivers were taking us around the track.”

Behind the scenes, she was also kicking a spot of writers’ block with the aid of Roger von Oech’s classic manual, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative. “It’s helpful for any profession, any age,” she says, then summarizing her takeaway: “No matter how successful you are or what you have achieved, you should just kind of be grateful for why whatever it was that you did worked, but then also try to evolve it.” So, as she hit the studio for her next body of work, she took a different approach — one that might actually prove some of her haters wrong. If her previous material sounded too casual, like she was making it up as she went along, that’s because she was. But now, “instead of constantly freestyling and punching in only,” she says, “I started writing on the writer’s pads that they have at the studio. I’ll just write and then record it. Or play the beat, write, then record. Or sometimes I’ll even stop the beat, which is new for me.”

RIOTUSA says that while her ambitions haven’t changed — “We only want to continue creating amazing art that will last and live beyond ourselves” — the thought she puts into her work has. “She is more self-aware of her creative choices, from the tempos, the sound selections, topics, down to which words she uses,” he says. “I want them to know she really does care about her craft and is prideful in staying true to herself.”

“What sucks about dating me is that I care about my career and my craft so much more than my love life.”

The first new single from this phase, “Baddie Baddie,” samples M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” and takes stock of her career thus far: “They said they wanted a bop, I was just poppin’ my sh*t / I ain’t even really mean to go pop.” She had just finished mixing the song a week before our dinner, and she promises that the accompanying music video is going to have plenty of her signature brand of chaotic overstimuli. “I do love a chaotic visual,” she says. “They send it to me a little chill, and I’m like, ‘Chop it up more!’ That’s why I’m very excited to drop a visual more than anything, and I’m going to pace myself. When I drop this visual, I’m going to let my fans soak it up. I’m going to soak it up.”

By the time you read this, Ice will also have made her cinematic debut. Typically, when successful musicians cross over to the screen, they choose one of two paths: a prestige project with an auteur of a director and Oscar-winning co-stars or big fun blockbuster IP. Ice is doing both. In the same year. She’s currently on Apple TV+ in Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee’s A24-produced remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic High and Low. She has a brief role and just a few lines, but she does share screen space with none other than Denzel Washington. It’s a momentous thing for her short career, the kind that some actors wait their entire lives for. “Well, I waited my whole life too, a little bit,” she says shyly. “My dad is so proud of me for landing this.” Did Denzel know who she was? She didn’t ask. “But I did not look like myself, so he might’ve not even known! If he does know who I am, he probably didn’t know that was me. I swear!” (I try to persuade her to stunt-cast him in one of her music videos, the way Rihanna did with Mads Mikkelsen for “Bitch Better Have My Money.” “Oh my God,” she giggles, “why do I feel like he would be down?”)

Her other film project is much more on brand for the “Bikini Bottom” hitmaker: Voicing a character in the The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, which hits theaters in December. The second she found out they were making a SpongeBob movie and wanted her to have any association with it? She was in. “I went to the studio and they had my cup of tea ready for me, and they were like, ‘These are your lines. This is your character.’ And I just fell in love.”

“I literally am the girl next door. That’s not my lore — that’s my swag!”

A rapper’s myth and empire are incomplete without their many side hustles and business ventures — no matter what form they may take (selling liquor, sweatpants, or the Fyre Festival). It’s easy to wonder if Ice Spice’s forays into acting are an early start on this portfolio diversification, preparing her for a potential second act as a hip-hop personality — like how LL Cool J still occasionally makes albums but probably makes more money hosting awards shows and popping up on NCIS. “I mean, my dream is to be retired by 35, but is that even realistic?” Ice Spice says. “Probably not. I’m American. We work until we die.” Even if you’re good at saving.

But then she remembers some solid life advice that she received from one Taylor Swift. “The thing about Taylor is that she keeps it so real. Not even kidding, but one of the biggest things that I always think about that Taylor said is ‘As long as you keep making music, everything’s going to be fine,’” she recalls. The two of them don’t always talk shop — “Every time we hang out, she’s not just giving me advice, you know what I mean? We’re talking about the food we’re eating or whatever’s going on in the moment” — but “whenever I’m feeling doubtful or not as confident, having writer’s block no matter what it is, things like that really, really stand out to me,” she adds. “She said that to me a few years ago, and it still stood with me.”

That bit of wisdom reminds her of another story. Before she had made a single song, Ice got a job working retail at the Gap and introduced herself at a new-hire orientation: Hi! My name’s Isis, and I like music! “Sometimes I sit and I think about that and I cringe so f*cking hard,” she says. But Ice Spice is trying harder to honor that girl in everything she does now. “When I’m watching something back of mine, I’m like, ‘Would young me think she’s cool?’ You know what I mean?” She pauses to think. And then answers: “Young me would be kind of obsessed.”

Top image credit: Dsquared2 shawl, Stylist’s own top and shorts, Talent’s own jewelry, belt, and shoes