In the music video for her song “Celebrate,” Divinity Roxx is living an ‘80s baby’s dream: having your likeness turned into an action figure.
On stage, Roxx’s custom doll — rocking her signature gold dreadlocks, gripping a bass — is flanked by other figurines of color. The hands moving the dolls, spurring them into dance moves, are all Black and brown.
“Celebrate” — which features Atlanta’s Genesis Innovation Academy cheer team — is the drumline-heavy lead single from Divinity Roxx’s new hip-hop family party album, “World Wide Playdate,” which hits streaming platforms on Aug. 9. The new release is a follow-up to 2021′s Grammy-nominated “Ready Set Go!” Both albums, like her video, are geared toward children of color.
The globe-trotting, Atlanta-born bass player, rapper, singer, producer and former musical director for Beyoncé is finding her own success. Despite a noted lack of diversity in the genre, and traditionalists scoffing at original rap and R&B songs growing in popularity, Roxx sees it changing.
Credit: Courtesy Divinity Roxx
Credit: Courtesy Divinity Roxx
“This genre is not a folky genre anymore. There is not just an old white man with a guitar singing Americana nursery rhymes,” she said. “There’s so many other genres where we should have the opportunity to express ourselves to the children of the world as we want them to expand their minds on what music is.”
Divinity Roxx knows about genre-hopping and racking up passport stamps.
She grew up on the city’s east side, on the line between Atlanta and Decatur. As a teenager who went to North Atlanta (then North Fulton) High School as part of the Minority-to-Majority program, she was falling in love with hip-hop. She formed a rap group called DATBU, which stood for Divinity and the Breakfast Unit.
In pre-Outkast, early ‘90s Atlanta, she and her group were regulars in the hip-hop community. DATBU opened for De La Soul and the Roots. At one point, OutKast’s manager Ian Burke invited Roxx to meet the Dungeon Family in East Point. She remembers rapping for them, before getting an offer to leave DATBU and join the likes of Andre 3000, Big Boi, Goodie Mob and Organized Noize.
She said no.
“I didn’t know these new cats. If I could see into the future, I would’ve jumped in with them,” she recalls, laughing about it now. “Loyalty was everything.”
As Outkast and Dungeon Family began their ascent, taking Atlanta and the south with them, Roxx headed off to University of California, Berkeley, to study journalism. She spent time interviewing and being around musicians who encouraged her to play bass.
Her love for bass led Roxx to the Tennessee camp of music legend Victor Wooten. There the bass guru found a new pupil in Roxx who spent the next few years touring with her mentor. Wooten promoted her as solo act, rather than a backup to his own. “Touring with Victor changed my life because it really bolstered and boosted my reputation as a bass player,” she said.
Credit: Ogata Photo
Credit: Ogata Photo
While touring with Wooten, Roxx started recording solo records where she was rapping, singing and playing bass at the same time. She started selling her first demos in 2000 before releasing her debut, “Ain’t No Other Way,” in 2003. The album featured production from Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am.
“It was so left of center of what anybody ever saw a little Black girl doing that I wasn’t getting the traction that I wanted,” she said.
Roxx caught a break when she landed a gig on stage with Beyoncé, who set out to build an all-female band in 2006 for her solo tours. She spent five years playing bass and serving as musical director.
She thought touring the world with one of its greatest living entertainers would help bring more ears to her own solo efforts. “Once I got in there, I realized that I was just a bass player,” she said, adding that the experience did make her better in that aspect.
“You want more, especially when you’re an artist and you are a writer,” she said. “You want to be able to express more of yourself. After the Beyoncé thing, I really just jumped back into what I was doing before.”
In 2016, Roxx released what she thought would be her last album, “Impossible” (pronounced “I’m-possible”). She was reeling from her band’s breakup and the death of her father. “I was having all of these personal tragedies, and I was really trying to figure out how to put myself back together, trying to figure out who I was in the world, who I was as an artist,” she said.
Three years later, she got married. She started taking online productions classes with Berklee College of Music. She wanted to finish her degree, and was intrigued by the idea of being a music educator. She did some voice-over work and even toured with Fantasia before a pandemic shut down live music. That’s when she got a call from a friend working on a children’s music project with Scholastic.
The original artist dropped out last minute. The friend knew Roxx had written songs 15 years prior, but was in desperate need of seven songs to fill a gap. She sent in a few demos and Scholastic asked her to develop more records.
Scholastic eventually turned two of her songs into full children’s books. She took that momentum and released the songs as “Ready Set Go!” on her Iroxx Entertainment label, which went on to be nominated for best children’s album.
Going from sharing a stage with Beyoncé to performing in front of kids, moms and dads reminded her of humbling days coming up in Atlanta’s rap aughts. “The kids don’t care that I’m considered a really great bass player. They just want the interaction, song and engagement,” she said.
Meeting other musicians such as DJ Willy Wow is encouraging. “World Wide Playdate” is comprised of voices from Roxx’s musical community, and also features Wooten, a spoken word performance from Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Mumu Fresh and Tarriona “Tank” Ball.
“There’s a rich community of independent children’s music artists of color who are all friends and in community with one another as we navigate this space that has traditionally not been represented with our images,” she said.
Roxx dubs “World Wide Playdate” a nod to ‘90s hip-hop classics with catchy hooks and heavy bass lines, joined by lyrics about finding joy games, toys, birthdays and being young. Tracks such as “Make A Friend,” featuring Afrobeats artist Teemanay, fuse a Caribbean bounce with lyrics about stepping out of comfort zones to find new experiences.
After the album’s release, Roxx, who has lived in New Jersey for the past seven years, hopes to use “World Wide Playdate” to connect with her hometown. As a product of Atlanta Public Schools, she wants to bring her live show to classrooms. Having written and performed the theme song for PBS’s “Lyla in the Loop,” she wants to find other avenues to bring her voice to younger folks.
“A lot of those kids grew up the same way I grew up, and so I really want them to experience this music, experience, this vibe, because it is going to be relatable,” she said. “They’re going to hear themselves, and see themselves in it.”
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