On stage at Nashville Pride festival on a sweltering June afternoon, Big Freedia is her usual boisterously commanding self. She invites volunteers and the sign-language interpreter to join her and her dancers in getting down to bounce music, the relentlessly kinetic style of hip-hop for which she has become a figurehead in her native New Orleans. Then she pauses for a brief heart-to-heart with the audience. “I don’t know if y’all know this, but I started in the church,” she says.
Big Freedia’s forthcoming album, Pressing Onward, is a gospel record and she is keen to stress that she isn’t abandoning her core audience. The gay, gender-fluid rapper and reality TV star exhorts every kind of body to shake it and is unequivocal about her support for all marginalised people; her reputation led Beyoncé and Drake to sample her on some of their most successful tracks. “This album is for us,” she emphasises. “It is for people who are LGBTQ and who love God.”
