The First Time: Megan Thee Stallion

Megan Thee Stallion was called a stallion, she wasn’t exactly pleased.

“I was 15 and I was leaving a football game, and this dude — he was way older — he was like, ‘Dang, little mama, you a stallion!’” she recalls to Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘Uh-uh, go to jail, I’m 15!’ I had to go home and ask my uncle what being called a stallion meant. He was like, ‘It means you tall and fine.’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I am that.’”

The Houston rapper graces the cover of Rolling Stone‘s Women’s Issue this month alongside SZA and Normani, but in the latest installment of “The First Time,” she describes feeling like the underdog in music for much of her life. “I had to be like 13 or 14, and I didn’t even tell nobody I could rap…I’d be watching the music] awards and be like, ‘Man, that need to be me. I should be up there, I should’ve won that!’ None of these people know me.”

Megan first got into rap after her mother played her music by the classic Houston hip-hop group UGK; while listening to Pimp C’s bars, even at a young age, she thought, “This would sound really cool if a girl was saying it. And from there I started thinking, ‘I’m gonna rap like this when I get older.’ And…I do!”