Rye Rye: One tough Baltimore cookie {thanks, Interscope}

On a hot summer afternoon, Ryeisha “Rye Rye” Berrain — wearing turquoise-and-black leggings, gold hoop earrings, fake lashes — walks along her East Baltimore neighborhood, holding a bag of Cheetos and a blue drink.

She passes the store where kids buy candy and sodas; the public housing units where her sister Elisa, 12, hangs out; the steps where the guys used to chill at night — until they got shot up.

“Before I started touring, I really used to hang on the corner all night until 3 in the morning,” Rye Rye, now 18, says.
That was before the shy dancer became an underground dance darling and the protégé of Grammy-winning indie-rap artist M.I.A. Now Rye Rye is on a path to become Baltimore’s ambassador of club music — a frantic blend of hip-hop and house.

“Bang,” the first single from her forthcoming debut album (via M.I.A.’s N.E.E.T. label under Interscope Records), began ricocheting around the blogosphere in March. And mainstream hip-hop outlets have started noticing Rye Rye.

“She’s definitely on our radar, and we’re just waiting for the right moment to break her into our audience,” says Rob Markman, music editor at XXL, a hip-hop magazine. “If anyone can do it, Rye Rye can.”

Fame could be just around the corner for Rye Rye. But when you live in a neighborhood where 13-year-old girls push their babies in strollers and .45-caliber bullets punctuate sultry summer nights, sometimes life gets in the way. Rye Rye found that out the hard way.
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Two years ago, Baltimore-based DJ Blaqstarr, 23, who’s known Rye Rye since they recorded “Shake It to the Ground” when she was 15, called her to the studio; someone wanted to meet her.

It was M.I.A., the Sri Lankan-British musician and tastemaker, accompanied by her then-boyfriend Diplo, a DJ. M.I.A., in an e-mail interview, says she was impressed with Rye Rye’s tone and rapping ability. They booked her shows and introduced her to a new scene. “We were just interested in taking her out of her environment to show her a way to get out of Baltimore,” M.I.A. says. Rye Rye was then a high school junior.

M.I.A. invited Rye Rye and Blaqstarr on the 2007 Kala Tour. Rye Rye took along her schoolwork and e-mailed assignments to teachers.

“I was kind of worried because I couldn’t go with her,” says her mother, Diana Ross (no, not that Diana Ross). But after speaking with M.I.A. over the phone, Ross felt her daughter was in good hands.

M.I.A. exposed Rye Rye to new scenes and music styles, but Rye Rye says there’s one thing she didn’t inherit from her famous mentor: “A lot of people say I make M.I.A. music, but that’s really the Baltimore club sound.”

In “Bang,” the tough-talk lyrics are sweetened by Rye Rye’s candy-pop voice and kid-sister persona. “Here in Baltimore, some people look at ‘banging’ as gangbanging. Some people look at it as rocking out in the club. And some people look at it in a nasty way,” she says. “So I just addressed ‘banging’ different ways.”

Rye Rye’s lyrics revolve around typical teenage concerns: showing off for boys, dancing crazy in the club. “It’s all about fun,” she says. “It’s not me trying to deliver a message to people. I feel like I’m young. And there’s not really much I can say to people right now.”

DJ A-Trak invited Rye Rye to be an opening act on his 17-date 10,000 Lb. Hamburger Tour that kicked off July 5 in Tampa, Fla. But two days before the opening show, she pulled out. On July 9, she posted an explanation on her blog: She was six months pregnant.

“At first I was teary eyed and my first thought was to get rid of it. I asked God for guidance and I went to the hospital 4 times and each time I had a breakdown and I knew what direction God was pulling me in,” Rye Rye wrote. Her boyfriend, Evan Battle, 20, though not in favor of an abortion, worried that keeping the baby would derail her career. Rye Rye worried Interscope would drop her from its roster. (A label representative confirmed that she’s still signed but the album release date has been delayed.)

What Rye Rye didn’t divulge on her blog was the other reason she pulled out of the tour. On June 23, she flew to Norway, the first stop on a short European tour. Before the show in Oslo, she received a call from home.

Battle had been seriously injured in a quadruple shooting in East Baltimore. Four bullets landed in Battle, piercing his shoulder, back, arm, lungs, backside and spinal cord — paralyzing him from the waist down.

Still, she got dressed and went on with the show. “I could be sad or I could be angry before I get onstage, but when I get onstage you can’t tell. I just cover it up,” she says. “I got through it like that — smiling.”

The next morning she flew back to Baltimore.
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“He alive and he still here. That’s the main thing,” Rye Rye says, sitting in the spinal cord injury unit of Baltimore’s Kernan Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation.

Battle sits beside her in a wheelchair, his face boyishly handsome. “I told him I’m not gonna leave him, but it’s still hard because he thinks I am,” she says. “I’m always stick by his side because [that’s] the type of person I am.”

Battle says he thinks the shooting was mistaken identity, but he accepts his lot: “I was really not full headfirst in the streets, but I was there enough for something like this to happen.” The baby is due in October. Battle hopes that all that has happened may somehow add up to a blessing.

Rye Rye “has a lot of integrity,” he says. “Career, money, fame — none of that came between what she thought was right or wrong. And a lot of people, when they see that, they’ll know she’s a real person for real.” THE WASHINGTON POST

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