Gangsta Boo Essentials

Gangsta Boo was a foundational member of Three 6 Mafia and the prototype for the boss-babe MCs who live to get buck. Born Lola Chantrelle Mitchell, and hailing from the Whitehaven area of Memphis, Boo was hardly old enough to drive when she recorded her contributions to 1995’s Mystic Stylez, the Three 6 Mafia project that got the group some of their earliest acclaim. It wasn’t long before she had staked a claim as the “Queen of Memphis”, going on to contribute to all of Three 6 Mafia’s most essential projects (Chapter 2: World Domination, When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1, Choices: The Album) and carving her own name even deeper into M-town lore with her solo debut, 1998’s Enquiring Minds. Boo’s rap style, aggressive yet feminine, hyper-sexual and graceful, shined with the gleam of freshly polished gold teeth and worked well against the voices of anyone lucky enough to share a track with her, including hip-hop GOATs like Outkast and Eminem. She died in January 2023 at the age of 43, having left an undeniable mark on Memphis and hip-hop at large—and her catalogue reminds us that if there is, as Master P once posited, a heaven for a gangsta, we at least know what it sounds like thanks to Lola Mitchell.