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Before Ro$ama had a studio, he had a PlayStation, a cassette recorder and a circle of childhood friends in Paris, Texas, where the 2009 game 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand supplied the instrumentals and imagination handled the rest.
“Once you beat the game, they give you all the instrumentals,” he told Newsweek, recalling how he positioned the television beside the recorder, pressed play and began freestyling at nine years old. “It really didn’t matter what beat it was.”
Music quickly became a family ritual, since reunions included informal freestyle battles and relatives expected the young rapper to perform whenever everyone gathered.
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“They knew we would freestyle on the cassette tape, so they would make me rap during the family reunion,” Ro$ama said, laughing about the requests, which have followed him into adulthood.
A Family Name Finds Its Sound
Those early rooms now echo through My Forte, his newly released solo album, whose title connects musical ability with maternal lineage.
“Forte is my mama’s last name,” Ro$ama said, explaining how the word’s musical meaning and its association with a person’s strongest skill opened a path toward a deeply personal concept. “Music and my mama’s last name correlated,” he added, and the coincidence gave him a framework broad enough to carry varied subjects while foregrounding his range.
The album’s 20-song scale gives Ro$ama room to move among reflection, flexing and regional storytelling, which mirrors his stated purpose: “I was trying to do different types of topics and skill-based songs to show I can do a lot of things.”
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Writing Backward, Landing Forward
Ro$ama’s ambitions were shaped by artists who treated rap like a proving ground, among them Lil Wayne, T.I., DMX, the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Nipsey Hussle and Ludacris. Wayne’s wordplay became an especially demanding benchmark because, as Ro$ama put it, “I love how he played with words and how he made you think,” and the admiration sharpened into a competitive urge: “I always wanted to do or be better than him doing it, to show he ain’t the only one who could do it.”
His process begins with a beat, whose tempo suggests the emotional route, though his bars often emerge from the destination and move toward their origin.
“I write backwards,” he said. “I find my last bar of the four-bar setup, and I work backwards.” Once the final punchline exists, he builds the preceding three bars so every phrase increases its force; because the ending is fixed, each setup can tighten the approach. “So long as I got this last one, I can make it set up, and it’ll hit you,” he said.
The method explains why his verses can feel architectural, since his similes, metaphors and layered meanings are arranged around impact while the narrative continues to move.
“Rap was always storytelling, lyricism, double, and triple entendres,” he said, and, although his influences span regions and eras, the East Texas perspective remains the structure holding those techniques together.
Two Sides of the Story
On “E.T.,” one of the album’s clearest displays of craft, a beat switch allows Ro$ama to carry a personal story across two energies without losing its thread. The opening offered a slower canvas, so he could “build up” through storytelling; when the production changed, he recognized an opening to accelerate while preserving the narrative. “When the beat switched, I was like, I can pop it and keep the story going as well,” he said.
Another track, “93,” turns toward the conditions surrounding his hometown, while “E.T.” captures “my current stage in life, and then my ups and my downs.” Together, the songs reveal how Ro$ama can move between close autobiography and community observation, and, even when he insists the album is primarily a showcase of skill, his strongest examples remain rooted in lived experience.
That instinct has also carried him into film music: Ro$ama appeared on “BEAST MODE (Godzilla x Kong),” and he approached the assignment by previewing the movie, visualizing its scale and answering the energy of BigXthaPlug’s verse. “I really just came on there trying to beat his verse and talk about the movie too,” he said. The friendly contest suited a song attached to a clash of cinematic giants, while it also revealed the competitive logic driving his solo work.
From the Room to the Center
The collaborative project 6WA gave Ro$ama a wider platform, and its arrival changed how audiences recognized someone who had already been present. “I felt like I was in the room, but people didn’t notice me,” he said. Once the project landed, listeners began connecting the voice with the artist: “Oh, you’ve been here, but I didn’t know it was you.”
Released in February 2026, 6WA brought Ro$ama together with BigXthaPlug, MurdaGang PB and Yung Hood under the 600 Entertainment banner. For Ro$ama, the project worked like a tryout whose success created expectations for the season ahead. “6WA was like the preseason, like trying to make the cut,” he said. “Now I finally got y’all attention. Let’s see what he’s gonna do in the regular season.”
A headlining set at Rolling Loud made the shift visible onstage, where Ro$ama reversed a familiar arrangement and brought BigXthaPlug into his own performance. “Instead of X bringing me out, I brought him out,” he said. The moment carried gratitude, while its symbolism fit the larger arc, since an artist once overlooked inside the room now controlled the invitation.
With My Forte, Ro$ama wants listeners who know him through collaborative records to hear the full range he has been developing since those cassette-tape sessions in Paris, Texas.
“I just want to let them know I can do everything,” he said. “I’m coming for everything.”
Listen to My Forte now.
Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Mark Muir and Anthony Murray.
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