There are very few realms that rapper and singer and performance artist SixSaidIt does not inhabit. When she steps, an hour and a half late, into the quiet, fluorescent domain of Outfitters Wig on Hollywood Boulevard on a grey Saturday afternoon in May, Six has already completed more tasks than many of her peers have faced in a month. She’s spent the last twenty four-hours working her day job as an ICU nurse; she woke up on this particular day and ran a couple of miles, then assembled a wardrobe, then washed and styled a wig for the shoot, then drove across Los Angeles to find parking for the hourslong endeavor. She’ll do her own makeup; suggest photo setups to the team; pose like she hasn’t spent the last week on her feet. Later, she’ll drive to Make Out Music to scope the space for her debut show on June 13th, for which she’s planned an intricate, involved performance that would hold its own in a stadium setting. Soon, she’ll release sweat-soaked single “Butta N Bread,” for fans waiting to grind, skin-to-skin, on a humid summer evening. For now, she sets down numerous heavy bags and heads straight for the makeup chair.

“Sorry, I’m late,” she grins. “Things have been hectic. I’m happy to be here”

It is precisely this sort of boundarylessness—that between performance and selfhood, that between music and art, that between private and public—that renders SixSaidIt one of the most interesting new artists in the industry. Her work (that is, her music catalogue in addition to her creative direction) is constantly in flux: Six interrogates genre, weaving elements of drill with UK garage, classic pop, R&B, and American hip hop; she designs discrete worlds with each new project and single, and does so because, above all, SixSaidIt has a penchant for storytelling.

The artist, now six years, two albums, and several singles deep, had been a straight A student and a scholar, deeply entrenched in the medical field for several years and on track to be a doctor, before she was plucked from a crowd at Trap Karaoke in NYC to perform “Take Yo Man” by City Girls. “There was this, like, supernatural feeling that overtook me,” she describes of her entrance into performing experience. “It was a happiness I had never experienced before.” Six found her path in the industry because—to put it simply—performing made her feel glorious. “When I was a kid, I would pretend I was Beyoncé. I couldn’t sing like her, so I just had to figure out a way to be able to perform.” Hence: rap. Hence, the inflection point for a longstanding dedication to doing things Six’s way.

Six’s way? It’s a hybrid endeavor—her visual direction is largely influenced by drag and ballroom, specifically rupture of hegemony accomplished via stage performance. “I’m trying to get [into ballroom] because of this act of performance,” she shares. I feel a very close allyship to the LGBTQAI community. Even in being an immigrant, you know, and being Black and being a woman, right? I want to speak to all those parts of me in my music, and I want all those people who are parts of those communities to feel and understand me.” As can be evinced from her nearly religious pursuit of the self, Six holds multiple things to be true at once: she wants to be heard, understood, by fans from disparate parts of the globe, of the internet, of all communities. At the same time—she’s not confident that her own understanding of herself is a requisite to making good art.

“I spent all my life assimilating,” she tells me. The artist grew up between London and Nigeria, before moving to Atlanta for high school and then New York City for nursing school. She eventually landed in Los Angeles. “Those old habits start to creep back in, when everyone's telling you to find a niche and to find a sound, everyone's telling you to put yourself in a box. And, you know, that’s what I’ve done all my life. Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to make sense of something that's not meant to make sense, you know?” It’s a privilege to speak to Six today, as she stands on the cusp of success that feels nearly tangible, and well within her grasp. At present, the artist is navigating a situation that well established musicians yearn to return to—that liminal time in which she is introducing to her audience the presence that is—and will perhaps be cemented as—SixSaidIt. It’s a precarious position, largely because Six resists definition.

“There was a point a couple years back at which I had to make the decision that, ‘Hey, if I'm going to do this, I can't keep having to fit into other people's spaces and cultures and other people's expectation of how I'm supposed to be,’” she continues. “I am this unique entity that has these different backgrounds and cultural influences, and I want to share all of them [with my audience], so that if there is somebody else out there, like me who has like, that cultural intersectionality, they feel seen, you know, instead of like, having to constantly code switch.”

If there is a nucleus to Six’s boisterous work—which oscillates between styles and even accents (see her uptempo 2020 “Code Switch” where she rides beats with a British accent, compared with her sultry, lilting, and distinctly American purr on 2025 single “Margiela (More Jealous),” it is an unquestionable and nonpareil drive towards full-throated artistic actualization. When we speak of her sonic inspirations (afrobeats and dancehall artists from across the diaspora; Missy Elliot; Tyler the Creator), Six speaks of music as its inextricable from performance: she loves the sound of these artists, but she admires largely for the liberated ways in which they’ve conducted their journey through the industry.

SixSaidIt has entered into the music industry with the shape of her future clutched like clay in her palm. It is a meticulous business, presenting yourself as a musician—a person—for the world to consume, but Six has, above all, a power that she alone is in charge of wielding. Months from now, or a year, or ten—however long it may take, Six will undoubtedly be sat atop success reaped from years of laborious sowing and careful planning—but she knows, even now, that this won’t be enough. That’s why SixSaidIt is so special. She’ll be a success. She’ll have laurels, and she’ll have a discography, and she’ll have multitude of fans, but she will look at herself and say: “We’re still not there. We’re still not there. There’s more, there’s more, there’s more.”

Buy tickets to SixSaidIt’s debut show here.

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SIXSAIDIT DEBUT SHOW