By Karev | Heritage Hip-Hop | Heritagehiphop.com
Every year there is one nominee whose story reminds you why the culture is bigger than any one sound. This year that nominee is from Brick City.
Janétza Miranda is a Newark artist who combines the traditions of Jazz, Soul, Rhythm & Blues, Bolero, Bomba y Plena, Hip-Hop, and more into a remixed sonic delight of vocalizations and rhythmic proclamations that transport you to a space that is suspended in time. Read that list of traditions again, because that is not genre-hopping. That is heritage. A Puerto Rican girl from Newark whose first language is Spanish, carrying the sounds of her people and the sounds of her city in the same breath. When we say the Heritage Hip-Hop Awards celebrates different parts of urban culture from different parts of the world coming together, Janétza Miranda is what that looks like in one human being.
Her story starts where so many Newark stories start — in a moment where the city needed something. Two months after 9/11, her school principal asked her to sing "The Prayer" at a fundraiser the school refused to cancel, because the community needed to gather and needed to reflect. She learned Italian for the performance. Her mother and father sat front row, and Newark's Mayor at the time, Sharpe James, commended her when it was done. A voice asked to console a grieving city before she was even grown. Remember that, because it tells you everything about what came next.
She went on to study Music Education with a focus on voice, trained in opera, and when college became unaffordable she did what Newark does — she kept working. She landed at Skippers, the legendary jazz spot in Newark, where she became known as "the singing waitress," bringing you your food and then stepping up to sing Billie Holiday. At Skippers she learned jazz in the room with giants — Amiri and Amina Baraka, Stanley Jordan, Charles Bradley, George Benson. From there came the bands, her own group Miss Pop and the Bad Touch, and stages most artists only dream about: Carnegie Hall, Gotham Hall, Cipriani, The Cutting Room, the Count Basie Theatre, NJPAC Sounds of the City, Milan in Italy, and International Jazz Day in Luanda, Angola two years running. She traveled the nation for NBC's The Voice and made the Top 18 out of 60,000 artists who auditioned. She is in the city of Newark's own tourism video alongside Mayor Ras J. Baraka. And once, singing "Contigo en la Distancia" with a 40-piece orchestra at the top of the Rockefeller building, Luis Miguel himself — the originator — came up to her afterward and told her that her voice healed his heart.
Healed. That word follows her everywhere, and she knows it. Janétza will tell you her brand is healing — not the brand she set out to create, but the one the times demanded. During the pandemic she picked up her guitar and sang live on Instagram at 3:33, giving her music away so people stuck in the house could get through it together. She sits with organizations like WhyHunger talking about feeding people through food and through music, because for her those are the same work. This is a humanitarian with a catalog, not a catalog with a charity line in the bio.
So do not let the album title fool you — earn it she did. Badmuthafucka is nominated for Solo Project of the Year at the 2026 Heritage Hip-Hop Awards, and the title is the story. A voice trained in opera and raised on bolero, seasoned in a Newark jazz room, tested on national television, blessed by legends on two continents — walking into a Hip-Hop awards show and standing in a category with five nominees. That takes exactly what the title says it takes. Newark has always produced artists who cannot be put in a box, and Janétza Miranda is cut from that same cloth. This show streams from the culture Heritage Hip-Hop was built in, and this year the culture gets to celebrate one of Brick City's own.
The Heritage Hip-Hop Awards streams live Saturday, August 29, 2026 at 8 PM on YouTube at www.youtube.com/HeritageHipHop, hosted by The Bad Seed, Johnny Dough, Karev, and DJ Big A. Have you sat with Badmuthafucka yet? Run it today, follow her on Instagram at @jane.tza, and catch her Voices At The Root conversation with WhyHunger to understand the woman behind the voice. Then pull up on August 29 and be in the chat repping Brick City when her name gets called. Salute to Janétza Miranda for carrying Newark, Puerto Rico, and the healing power of music every time she opens her mouth to sing. Hip-Hop is to be valued and able to grow representing God's people. God's people is his Heritage and his Heritage is Hip-Hop.
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By Karev | Heritage Hip-Hop | heritagehiphop.com
Ladii Girl is double nominated at the 2026 Heritage Hip-Hop Awards — Artist of the Year and Solo Project of the Year.
Some voices are trained and some voices are inherited, and Ladii Girl's voice is both. Born Johanna Hampton in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Worcester, she did not have to go find music because music was already in the house waiting for her. She grew up listening to her mother's band play, and her uncle Harold Hampton sat her down at a keyboard and taught her how to play simple notes. She spent nights in the basement creating music with her brothers while their mother's Stylistics and Delfonics records filled the room. That is not a backstory made up for a press release. That is a foundation, and it is the same foundation so many of the greatest voices in Black music were built on.
The church. Ladii Girl sang in the choir at the AME Baptist church in Worcester where she was raised, carried that into the all-city choir in high school, and had been writing poems and songs since elementary school. When you hear her sing today you are hearing all of it at once — the choir, the basement, the Stylistics, the Delfonics, and the notes her uncle taught her. Soul does not come from nowhere. It comes from somewhere, and hers comes from Worcester, Massachusetts.
She earned her name the old way too, stage by stage and crowd by crowd. The Dublin House in Boston. Pufferbellies out in Hyannis. And the Worcester rooms that raised her — The Lucky Dog Music Hall, Club Oasis, and the Raven where she became a crowd favorite. Records like "Where Did The Love Go," "Shorty Rock," and "Hydraulics" featuring Josh Brown of TDM showed her range, and her reach even crossed the water when artists in the UK met her music with warm responses. Then came the EPs that made her impact on the music industry undeniable, Secrets Of A Woman and Entanglement. No machine behind her. No shortcut taken. Just work.
Right now Ladii Girl is running back-to-back singles and the records speak for themselves. On "Sweetest Taboo (High Off You)" she delivers a smooth, soulful R&B anthem that captures the intoxicating feeling of being completely consumed by love. Heartfelt lyrics, rich melodies, and that signature vocal style — it is the sound of an artist who knows exactly who she is. Then on "Entanglement" she goes somewhere most artists are afraid to go, into the blurred boundaries of love and attraction, the confusion and vulnerability that arise when emotions become intertwined before you can name them. She turns real-life experience into music that resonates because that is what real songwriters do. They tell the truth and let the melody carry it. The radio campaign is in motion and an album is on the way. The moment is now.
At the 2026 Heritage Hip-Hop Awards, Ladii Girl is nominated twice. Artist of the Year. Solo Project of the Year. Read that again, because double nominations are not given out for participation. And if anyone asks why an R&B singer belongs at a Hip-Hop awards show, they do not know the culture. Hip-Hop and R&B grew up in the same house, the same neighborhoods, the same church choirs, and the same basements. The hook that makes you feel a record and the melody that stays with you long after the verse ends — that is the R&B thread running through Hip-Hop's whole story. Ladii Girl represents that thread and she represents Massachusetts, a corner of the culture that does not always get its shine. This is exactly what the Heritage Hip-Hop Awards was built for. Different cities. Different sounds. One culture.
The Heritage Hip-Hop Awards streams live Saturday, August 29, 2026 at 8 PM on YouTube at www.youtube.com/heritageHipHop, hosted by The Bad Seed, Johnny Dough, Karev, and DJ Big A. Have you pressed play on "Sweetest Taboo (High Off You)" and "Entanglement" yet? Run them today, learn the name if you do not already know it, and then show up on August 29 and be in the chat when Worcester's own hears her name called. Salute to Ladii Girl for carrying her family's music, her city, and the women of this culture with her every time she touches a microphone. Hip-Hop is to be valued and able to grow representing God's people. God's people is his Heritage and his Heritage is Hip-Hop.
#LadiiGirl #SweetestTaboo #Entanglement #HeritageHipHop #HeritageHipHopAwards #HipHopAwards2026 #ArtistOfTheYear #SoloProjectOfTheYear #RnB #SoulMusic #WomenInMusic #WorcesterMusic #BostonMusic #MassachusettsMusic #IndependentArtist #RnBSinger #NewRnB #IndieRnB #WomenInHipHop #SupportIndependentArtists #HipHopCulture #HipHopBlog