Jermaine Dupri has finally cleared the air about not securing Latto under a record deal after she won season one of his reality show “The Rap Game” in 2016.
“People keep always saying, ‘Jermaine, you dropped the ball on [Latto].’ But what people don’t understand is, I put Latto’s record out. The deal was, if you win on ‘The Rap Game,’ you get a single from Jermaine Dupri on So So Def. So that single came out,” he explained during an interview with HipHopDX.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee continued, “The problem was that Latto was 16 years old, and the outlets didn’t support it. And nobody was like speaking on it. Nobody talked about it. If you watched the TV show, you saw it. But people didn’t start talking about Latto until she started making more vulgar records, dressing more sexually, and being more adult.”
Latto, who went by “Miss Mulatto” at the time, competed against four other teenagers in various challenges such as battle rapping, live performances, as well as writing and recording a full song in-studio for a chance to win a contract with Dupri’s So So Def Recordings. According to an interview she did with Vlad TV back in 2016, Latto said she turned down the deal because the contract wasn’t offering her enough money.