Who Did The Body?

As a native Texan, I have a natural affinity towards the Houston rapper girlies, and Monaleo is no exception. Her music displays her smarts, wit, and incredible wordplay. Her storytelling is captivating. And what she shares about her own personal story regarding mental health challenges, including her openness about depression and suicidality, shows a vulnerability that is just as powerful as her confidence.

When I listened to her latest release, Who Did The Body?, I immediately knew I wanted to unpack it. The album covers existentialism, mortality, legacy, grief, identity, and humanity. Listening to it felt like being a fly on the wall in a therapy session. Every track carried the weight of a real conversation, the kind that happens when someone finally stops performing and starts telling the truth.

What makes this album special to me is that it is a young Black woman tackling existentialism and some of the darker questions about life head on. In the Black community, these topics are often left alone. Conversations about death, doubt, what happens after we die, and whether any of it even matters can feel off limits. That is not because people do not think about them. It is because the cultural expectation is often to lean on faith and keep moving. And there is real beauty in that meaning-making. But there is also room to question. There is room to sit with the uncertainty and not rush to resolve it. That existential process, the willingness to ask and not immediately answer, is where so much healing actually begins. Monaleo opens that door on this album, and she does it without apology.

I sat with this album for a while before writing this, and I kept coming back to five moments that stopped me. Five lyrics that felt less like bars and more like breakthroughs. Here is what I took from them.

"It's a lot of people wondering, but they scared to ask it / When it's all said and done, what the f*ck happens?"

Life After Death - Monaleo

This is the opening line of the album, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Monaleo is naming the thing most people think about but will not say out loud: what actually happens when we die? In many Black households, faith provides a clear answer to that question, and that answer is a source of comfort, community, and identity. That is meaningful. But what Monaleo captures here is the reality that some of us also wonder. Some of us sit with doubt alongside our faith. And that wondering does not have to be a betrayal. It can be its own form of honesty. In therapy, I see how powerful it is when someone gives themselves permission to hold both: the faith that sustains them and the questions that make them human. That is not weakness. That is depth.

"You gotta cook and clean and wash everything / You got a roof over your head, what more do you need? / For the longest those words have been following me / So much so as an adult I forgot I had needs"

Diary of an OG - Monaleo

This lyric is Strong Black Woman Syndrome in four bars. And what makes it so sharp is that Monaleo is not just naming the harm. She is also naming where it started: someone telling you that what you have should be enough, that needing more is ungrateful. That message becomes armor. It teaches you to be capable, self-sufficient, and unbreakable. And there are real strengths in that. The ability to hold things together, to lead, to show up when no one else will. But the other edge of that sword is that you stop recognizing your own needs. You forget that you are allowed to want something for yourself. The work is not about throwing away the strength. It is about redefining it. Keeping the parts that serve you, letting go of the parts that were never yours to carry, and trying new ways of being that do not require you to disappear in order to be valuable.

"Just 'cause you turn the other cheek, ni99a that don't make you no hoe, listen"

Tamron Hall - Monaleo

This line reframes something that so many Black women have been taught to feel conflicted about: choosing not to react. There is a cultural narrative that says if you do not clap back, if you do not match someone's energy, you are being weak or letting people walk over you. Monaleo flips that. She is saying that restraint is not submission. Choosing not to engage is not the same as being unable to. That is emotional regulation, and it is one of the most misunderstood skills there is. It is the ability to feel the full weight of a moment and still choose how you respond to it. For Black women especially, who are constantly navigating environments that provoke, dismiss, or disrespect them, the decision to turn the other cheek is not passive. It is strategic. It is protective. And it takes more strength than most people will ever understand.

"What about everything, that I did in my life? Will it be forgotten, as soon as I die?"

Dignified - Monaleo

This is the question underneath the question. It is not really about death. It is about whether your life mattered on your own terms. For Black women who pour themselves into their families, their careers, their communities, there is a quiet fear that none of it will be remembered the way it was lived. That your complexity will be flattened. That the version of you people carry forward will be the convenient one, not the real one. This is where legacy and mental health intersect. So much of the anxiety, the perfectionism, the overextending comes from trying to build something that cannot be erased. The therapeutic lesson here is that your worth is not determined by what survives you. You do not have to earn the right to be remembered. You are already enough, right now, in the living of it.

"These Black-ass roots go beyond me"

Sexy Soulaan - Monaleo

After an album full of heavy existential questions, this line feels like the anchor. Monaleo is claiming her cultural traditions, her spiritual practices, her ancestry, and she is saying they are bigger than her individual story. That is the heart of post-traumatic growth, and it is also the heart of collective healing. Trauma does not just happen to individuals. It moves through communities, through families, through generations. But so does resilience. So does wisdom. So does love. The healing is not just about what you survive on your own. It is about recognizing that you come from something, that the people who came before you carried knowledge and strength that lives in you whether you are conscious of it or not. For Black women, reclaiming those roots, the traditions, the spiritual practices, the cultural knowledge that colonialism tried to erase, is not just personal healing. It is collective healing. It is saying: I am not starting from scratch. I am standing in something that was always mine.

The Body Remembers

Who did the body?

That is the question Monaleo asks across this entire album, and the answer is not simple. The body was done by expectations that never asked for your consent. By silence disguised as strength. By systems that saw your circumstances before they ever saw you. By the fear that nothing you build will outlast the narrative someone else writes about you. But the body was also built by something deeper. By roots that go beyond you. By the kind of resilience that is not just about surviving but about remembering where you come from and choosing, on your own terms, what you carry forward.

This album is not a therapy session. But it does what the best art does: it gives you language for the things you have been feeling but could not name. And sometimes, that is exactly where healing starts.