She’d only taught at the school briefly in her 20s (Shameika remembers her teacher as a hip young adventurer who shared photos in class from her travels to the Taj Mahal) but Kunhardt always kept a file of the literary magazines she created with her students.
FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS ARCHIVE
Kunhardt jumped out of bed and went to the garage of her home in New Hampshire, where she currently works at a domestic violence shelter and teaches poetry at a prison, and located her archive of memories from her St.
(In addition to being a teacher, Kunhardt is a poet, and her work has appeared in the magazine.) And while Fiona was unsure if Shameika was real, Kunhardt remembered her clearly. Koony”-she says she first learned about the song “Shameika” from a March profile of Fiona in The New Yorker. When I reach Kunhardt by phone this fall-Fiona and Shameika call her “Ms. And it’s not just ‘Someone wrote a song about you.’ It’s ‘Shameika said I had potential.’” You can’t believe that someone would honor you like that. “And I see the song: ‘Shameika’! I was screaming!”-she demonstrates her shriek-“It’s such a humbling thing. “I’m literally sitting there in shock, like: Are you telling me that Fiona wrote a song about… like, is that what you’re saying!?” She typed Fiona’s name into Apple Music, followed by her own. “At that point my mouth is, like, unhinged,” Shameika continues, gleefully animated by the memory. With everything that’s going on now, everybody is realizing that time waits for no one.” “A lot of us are guilty of putting time on the shelf. “I love people and I get to talk to people about time,” Shameika says. She works at a vacation timeshare company, selling properties. Shameika is now thriving in Virginia Beach, where she relocated with her family years ago (though she’s hung onto her 212 accent). “I’ve been around celebrities my whole life,” Shameika says, “and that shit is wack.” She’s nonchalant about these past musical experiences-she doesn’t like to dwell-and, like Fiona, she loathes celebrity culture. She also rapped on two songs from Blackstreet’s final album, 2003’s Level II. By the latter half of the 1990s, she had gone on to collaborate in the studio with the likes of Jodeci’s DeVante Swing and the rapper Kurupt, and for a time she was signed to a production deal with Bryce Wilson of R&B duo Groove Theory. But Bloodshed died in a car crash in 1997, and Children of the Corn broke up. “He graduated and called me and was like, ‘We bout to get signed to Def Jam! I’ma put you on my tape!’” Shameika remembers. In high school, she became close friends with a classmate and rapper named Bloodshed, who was a member of the group Children of the Corn alongside future stars Cam’ron, Ma$e, and Big L.
FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS MOVIE
“It literally is the backdrop for the movie Paid in Full.” They were conscious.”) Shameika says her own style as a young woman artist was unique because she wasn’t rapping about sex or her body-in her words, she rapped about “gangsta shit.” “My neighborhood was no joke,” she adds. Blige, Wu-Tang, and especially the radical underground sounds of Dead Prez. Her rap moniker has alternately been Dollface or Chyna Doll (long before fellow New Yorker Foxy Brown used that name for her second LP, she says), and her formative influences were Nas, JAY-Z, Lauryn Hill, Mary J.
Shameika has been rapping for more than 30 years. And in Shameika’s lines, which evoke an eclipsing of place and time, her stirring flow is one of a seasoned pro. She penned these charged lyrics one day this summer, in response to the song her onetime childhood schoolmate Fiona Apple wrote about her for this year’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters: “ Shameika.” Echoing that song’s pep-talk chorus, the new track is called “Shameika Said.” Fiona, who recently reunited with Shameika for the first time since they were kids, contributes freshly recorded vocals.
“Every time I hear this, it makes me cry,” Shameika tells me over FaceTime on an October night, a rush of emotion in her voice. She unspools each bar with cool conviction: “ It’s Sha from the mecca, the holy place/Fi gave you the name, now you know the face.” Tears well beneath her long lashes. Shameika Stepney is sitting in a parked car outside her Virginia Beach home, rapping along to a song she wrote.
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