Laila is carving her own lane in music, but not without a word of caution from her father Mos Def.
In a recently uploaded interview with Nessa on Hot 97, the 19-year-old singer-songwriter was asked what the best piece of advice from her dad was.
“Honestly, it was kind of just like, ‘Stay away from the industry because it’s not good,” she said with a laugh near the 25-minute mark in the video linked above.
“I mean, this is what I wanna do with my life so I have to, you know, I can't stay away from scary things forever, you know? Like, things are scary, but you gotta have the right people around you and I definitely have great people around me that are supporting me,” she continued.
One of those people is her mom, Jessica Chong, who also doubles as her manager.
“She’s the one handling everything that has to do with everything I’m doing, not my dad,” Laila clarified.
Laila, who built her fanbase by “posting stuff on TikTok” before signing a record deal, also noted that her success has come entirely from her own grind—not because of her famous father.
“So a lot of people will hear that and they're like, ‘Oh, that's why she has this and that,’ and it's like, I work very hard and I just didn't want that,” she said further into the interview. “I just also didn't want that to be a distraction from everything that I'm working towards building for myself as an artist because you know, if it was true, if that's how I got everything, I would just say ‘Yeah, it's because of this,’ but it's it's not true.”
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