Bb Trickz, the trash-talking provocateur changing the face of Spanish rap

This story is taken from the spring 2024 issue of Dazed. Order a copy here.

Bb Trickz loves Spain. She’s proud to hail from Barcelona and loved growing up in one of the world’s greatest party cities. She has fond memories of her (still recent) teenage years in the coastal city: making cash as a child model or, later, as a babysitter, and spending it roaming the streets at night, drinking in city squares and playing ping pong at public tables. The Spanish way of life – “just good food and being in the sun” – is in her DNA. But, sometimes, loving something can make you one of its harshest critics, too. Halfway through our conversation, the 23-year-old drill rapper, musing on how Spanish culture is perceived in the rest of the world, offers a wry assessment: “I wouldn’t say we’re the best...”

Maybe that’s something of an understatement. Since releasing her debut single “Missionsuicida” in April 2023, Bb Trickz – born Belize Kazi – has proven herself a savage, acid-tongued lyricist, and icons of Spanish culture often find themselves directly in her crosshairs. “Fuck Inditex, I don’t wear Zara,” she quips with disaffected disgust on one track; on others, she rips into the Madrid trap hitmaker Yung Beef and the Catalan pop singer Bad Gyal. She got an offer to play Primavera Sound, the Barcelona festival that’s like a cooler, European Coachella, but she wasn’t “hella pumped” on the idea because she was in a bad mood when she went last year, so she turned it down. She thinks the beats Spanish rappers choose are, to put it lightly, trash, and there aren’t any Spanish rappers she’d ever deign to listen to. Thank God, then, that she’s arrived on the scene. “That’s why I’m here,” she says, “To make it stronger.”

Such is the life of an artist on the vanguard of their country’s culture: what’s the point if you’re not going to take a shot at the old guard here and there? Kazi, like history’s best musical renegades, is a provocateur and a troll, flipping the Law & Order theme and building one track around the delightfully juvenile, supremely internetty punchline “that wasn’t squirt, it was pee”. It’s a veneer of jokerdom that conceals a sharp creative and business mind. “I’m a perfectionist, and I’m very particular about my image,” she says. “I’ve learned to let go of little things now, I think, but I’ve always been a perfectionist since I was a little girl.”

Kazi was born to a Canadian mother – a Chinese medicine practitioner – and a Spanish father. Growing up, she spent a lot of time alone because her mum, who she lived with, was often working or studying. Her dad was a funk DJ, and time spent with him was “pretty wild”, in contrast to her protective mother; she describes him as “very peculiar”, and says he may be the source of her perfectionist instincts. Her upbringing wasn’t always easy. On “Lo Siento Mamà”, a plaintive highlight from her debut EP, Trickstar, that the rapper describes as the story of her life until the point at which she got famous, Kazi delves into her fractious relationships with each parent growing up: “I’m sorry mum, I know I’m the worst / I know you don’t like it when I smoke, but fuck my lungs... Fuck you dad, where the fuck you at?”

“For me, making music is my form of whatever... like, my diary. I was making music and I was having fun doing it, but doing Trickstar, I was remembering my upbringing, and how it had been,” she says of the EP, released in April last year. She was nervous to release a song like “Lo Siento Mamà”, which is almost unbearably raw, but was pleasantly surprised to find her parents were unruffled. “[Mum] gets it, she totally understands what I’m doing – she’s really cool,” she says. “She’s into the world, and the internet and stuff, so she totally comprehends, and my dad understands too, because he does music.”

It was Kazi’s mother who inadvertently gave her the name Bb Trickz. As a child, Kazi was always fascinated by her mother’s DVD copy of Kill Bill, and she eventually let her watch it as a birthday treat. (It’s a moment slyly referenced on “Lo Siento Mamà”: “When I was little they didn’t put on the Teletubbies for me / I watched real movies where I saw real boobies.”) She became enamoured with Uma Thurman’s character; when Kazi started making music, it was only fitting that Bb Trickz could work as a play on the name of Thurman’s character, Beatrix. “It’s a woman, she’s on the hunt, she’s independent, strong. It’s an action movie, but it’s also a very beautiful movie,” she says. “I think that’s just what I liked about it.”

“I’ve learned to let go of little things now, but I’ve always been a perfectionist since I was a little girl... I’m very particular about my image” – Bb Trickz

That kind of independence is something Kazi has always desired. When she was younger, she told her mother that she didn’t want a regular job when she grew up, and saw the entertainment industry as a way to escape the drudgery of cubicles and timesheets. Independence, of course, can be a double-edged sword. Since she’s become famous, Kazi has struggled to know who to trust; that sense of loneliness is chronicled on her November-released second EP Sadtrickz, a record that’s altogether more diffuse and melancholy than Trickstar. “Some people will take advantage – once you have something they can leverage off, their true colours come out, you know? And in the music industry, there’s always gonna be people who come up to you and talk to you nice and fake, but they have other intentions,” she says. “There’s been a couple of situations where it’s like, damn, I can’t hang with this person because they don’t know how to be cool about what’s going on. I get it – it doesn’t hurt that much [now]. It was just like, there was so much going on and everything changed. It hurt that people I knew switched up.”

Unlike many newly minted stars, she’s fairly zen about the fact that people in her life are hitting her up for money or opportunities. A born hustler, she can respect when others are just trying to get a leg up; if someone from her past asks to work with her, she’d always prefer to give them a shot. “I’d rather see what people do and how far they take it, even if they hurt me in a way. I’d rather do that than not give them the chance or open myself up to them,” she says. “I just like seeing how people are, and learning from them.”

Slightly less easy, but still seemingly small fry, is adjusting to being stopped out on the streets. “It’s weird getting recognised – being places knowing that people know me, they’re talking about me, but I get it. You have to know it’s part of the job, basically,” she says. “But it gets like, damn, I just want to buy some underwear, and they’re like, ‘Are you Bb Trickz?’”

It’s a disarmingly casual attitude, but you’d expect no less from Kazi, who sounds at all times supremely chill, perhaps even a blunt deep. That tenor extends to her humour, which is sharp but surreal, often making use of avant-garde one-liners like, “You’re tacky, you’re uglier than the back of the fridge.” Kazi says that she “never wanted to be a comedian,” and that her humour is just the result of trying to make her engineer laugh in the studio. Many of her favourite rappers, though, possess a similarly sharp wit: “RXK Nephew makes me laugh, and so does Chief Keef.”

RXK Nephew and Chief Keef, of course, make music that’s a far cry from Kazi’s – an indication of how far she wants her music to travel. Her list of dream producers is almost exclusively heavy hitters: Cash Cobain, The Neptunes, Kanye. “I want to do everything low-key; I want to surprise people and hop on whatever it is and still be Bb Trickz on any type of track,” she says. “Rap is always gonna be there, but I’m gonna branch off into different sounds that aren’t just drill beats.”

Kazi’s cool, calm, collected exterior hides a mind that’s clearly profoundly ambitious; although she might already be famous, her goals stretch farther than the underground celebrity she’s achieved thus far. Changing the face of Spanish rap, after all, isn’t an easy job. “I’ve made a lot of money, and I was like, ‘Oh, I can chill for a bit,’” she says. “But no, not really – I can’t be lazy.”

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Hair SONDREA ‘DRE’ DEMRY-SANDERS using BUMBLE & BUMBLE., make-up ERNEST ROBINSON using PAT MCGRATH LABS, photographic assistants BRANDYN LIU, ASA HARDING, styling assistant NOAH DELFINER, production SILVER TOOTH