Lisah Monah, a pioneer of self-innovation in the rap game

Los Angeles native artist, songwriter, and producer Lisah Monah push the boundaries in a manly-dominated industry by learning how to produce her own music and alleviating her knowledge in the sync licensing business. The music industry has been a push-and-pull tug of war toward Lisah Monah’s style of music. However, when the doors closed, she broke it down and made a way for her music to be heard.

“Who is Lisah Monah” is a bio from her website that describes her style to be feminine with an edge. Her recently released album, “Are You Still Rappin?” proves this to be true. She said this album is more versatile because of the influence of the beats she had pulled from other types of genres and her mix of genuine MCing.

“I’m super proud of it. I think each album has gotten better and evolved somewhere,” Lisah Monah said.

“A lot of people don’t know or may not know, but I produce all my beats, so everything is done in-house,” she said.  “So, it is a lot of work to first make all the tracks and you know, everything doesn’t make the album. And then, you have to write all the content. Then, kind of picking and choosing. My other ear most of the time was my husband…I had to make a lot of decisions of what fits and don’t fit.”

According to Spotify, her carefully constructed album, which was released on March 17, has reached over 2,000 listeners on average per song. From beginning to end, “Are You Still Rappin?” shows Lisah Monah’s character and Floetry in the various dynamics of storytelling.

Lisah Monah explained that she had to take a break from music for a while because of the policies in the music industry. A lot of deals or offers didn’t fit her best interest at heart, they were looking for what could they gain versus a genuine partnership.

“I’m thinking ‘I finally made it’, and it was an underlying plan behind that, and you know just depending on people, people saying they are going to do something and don’t do it. There’s a lot of cliques in the gang [industry]…after a while, it eats you, and it’s like I can’t keep dealing with this, it’s too much,” she said.

“Like you don’t love it anymore, it takes away from what brought you there in the first place. Took a break, but I decided-well, my husband actually noticed that my attitude was different. I couldn’t listen to music, I didn’t want to hear beats, I didn’t want to watch any award shows like Don’t Talk to Me…I was just done.”

“But, it was eating at me, and I wasn’t doing what I was passionate about.”

Lisah Monah decided that when she did go back into music, she was going to rely more on herself and less on others, which fueled her drive into making beats. She studied learning other avenues on how to make money in the industry. Her skills to license songs connected with the NFL Network from 2022 to the 2023 year on her single “Good”.

“I spent the summer just reading and studying how to be an independent artist, so here I am,” she said.