-- Corey Moss, with additional reporting by Megan Hanley
Two years ago, Niomi Daley was an underground MC with a severe case of stage fright and an even greater fear of singing.
Today, as Ms. Dynamite, she's one of the hottest R&B stars in England and is poised to blow up (wink, wink) in America, thanks in large part to live appearances with Eminem and Destiny's Child and a debut album featuring mostly singing.
How did it happen?
"I am the type of person, if something frightens me or challenges me then I have to get over it," Dynamite said during a recent trip to Los Angeles. "I have to overcome that. And I think that is the kind of thing that keeps me going."
Ms. Dynamite overcame her stage fright by starting small on the U.K.'s red-hot two-step circuit and by convincing herself she had something worthwhile to say. Singing came much later. In fact, her first notes came out in the studio with producer Salaam Remi (Nas, the Fugees) after she had already signed a record deal.
"I was really intending to kind of make a kind of MCing album, but maybe with some garage beats, some hip-hop beats, some dancing beats," she explained. "And when I got to work with Salaam ... he just convinced me to sing somehow, and I hated it. I was like, 'No way.' But after a while it grew on me."
Ms. Dynamite's voice has since grown on a lot of people. Her album, A Little Deeper, garnered rave reviews when it was released overseas last summer and eventually won the prestigious Mercury Music Prize for album of the year, beating out David Bowie, the Doves and others.
The album, which features a diverse range of sounds from producers Punch (P. Diddy), Bloodshy (98º), Avant (Jennifer Lopez) and Steeley & Clevie (No Doubt), is due Stateside on March 25 and has already been plugged by Kylie Minogue on "TRL."
Not bad for a 21-year-old whose prior musical accomplishment was playing the recorder and violin for a few weeks.
"I was like 7 or 8 and I broke both of them and I was banned from my music lessons," she joked. "But I was always into music. My family is a really music-orientated kind of family. A lot of my uncles are DJs. My father is a DJ. My sister's dad is a DJ. They are all into different types of music, so I've always listened to different types of music."
Raised in North London, Ms. Dynamite is the oldest of 10 children, which she believes contributes to her need to write powerful lyrics, such as in the first single, "It Takes More," on which she sings, "Tell me how many Africans died for the baguettes on your Rolex."
"I have always kind of grown up as kind of a compassionate person with the need to protect others and to help and also to teach others," she said. "And I think that that comes across in my music."
Ms. Dynamite wrote socially conscious poetry for years before she finally took them to a mic at a party. Soon after, she rapped her way into the U.K.'s emerging two-step scene, where she scored with the hit "Booo!" in 2001.
"I started off MCing in clubs when garage kind of really evolved ... from an old-school thing to a really new-school thing," she explained. "All the older MCs and older producers, most of them kind of disappeared, really, and there was suddenly space for new, fresh, younger MCs with something new to say, something different to give to that garage music. And I just happened to be one of them."
Ms. Dynamite faced adversity from the beginning, but of course the challenge only motivated her.
"I started out as like the first female MC in terms of garage music. And there were a lot of people, women and men, who were like, 'That's a man's job, it's something that men do.' And I proved them wrong quickly."
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