Ten floors above the heart of Times Square, afternoon sunlight fills a Manhattan recording control room as Flau’jae Johnson sits in front of a bank of screens and soundboards, staring at herself in outer space.
It’s mid-May, more than a month before the release of Johnson’s debut studio EP, Best of Both Worlds, the cover art for which she has pulled up on one of the monitors. In it, her face floats amid a deep-purple scene of nebulas, galaxies, and planets, along with a headshot of her late father, Jason Johnson, better known as the rapper Camoflauge, hidden among the stars. Behind her, meanwhile, a pair of larger, globe-shaped objects loom: an orange basketball and a silver microphone.
“Man, it’s beautiful,” the 20-year-old Savannah, Georgia, native says, noting that she conceived of the cosmically themed design herself. “It looks like I’ve arrived.”
On the court, where Johnson stars as a smooth-scoring, slick-handling shooting guard for perennial college powerhouse LSU, her public arrival into the basketball world already took place when the Tigers won the 2023 NCAA tournament during her freshman season. A bid for back-to-back championships fell short with an Elite Eight loss against Caitlin Clark and Iowa this spring, but thanks to the ensuing departures of teammates Angel Reese (WNBA draft) and Hailey Van Lith (transfer portal), Johnson appears poised for an even bigger role when she soon returns to campus for her junior year.
Behind the mic, meanwhile, Johnson has been making her name, too. At 12, she appeared on a Jermaine Dupri-hosted reality TV show for young rappers. Two years later, at 14, she reached the quarterfinals of America’s Got Talent. (Among the original songs she performed on the latter program was “Guns Down,” which she wrote in honor of her father, who was shot to death in Savannah months before she was born.) And her streaming audience is steadily growing, with a Spotify follower count that has nearly tripled over the past year, to 37,000-plus as of earlier this month.
“This project is going to be my introduction,” she says of the nine-track EP. “I’m going for Best New Artist. I want to put my foot in the door.”
And yet Johnson — who performs onstage simply as Flau’jae — bucks the image of a typical industry freshman in many ways. Start with the independent distribution deal with Roc Nation that she first signed in 2021, which allows her to tap the agency’s strategic resources while employing her own internal management team and retaining the rights to her masters through her personal label, Flauge Entertainment. (“After my daddy,” she says of the name.)
Altogether, between the Roc Nation contract and numerous brand sponsorships that Johnson has inked in the wake of a landmark 2021 Supreme Court decision allowing college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness (NIL), her personal net worth is currently around $3 million, according to her publicist, Des Dickerson. As Johnson raps on “Came Out A Beast,” the fourth track on Best of Both Worlds: “I’m a millionaire and I don’t got a degree.”
But to understand what really sets Johnson apart, one need only look at the EP’s title.
“This is me trying to show that I am the one that can do both,” she says.” I just want to shut people up, like — boom, get it? This is the new norm, this is the new precedent. I do two things.
“I really have the best of both worlds: basketball and music.”
COMPARED TO HER PAST mixtapes and singles, the relative musical diversity found on Best of Both Worlds is a big reason Johnson feels confident about the EP’s profile-boosting potential. In “Legendary Flows” and “Who Really Make It,” she showcases the rapping skills she’s been honing since she wrote her first lines at age seven in a school composition notebook. But the song list also contains tracks she describes as “super up-tempo” (with 2Rare on “Karma”); “melodic, touch of R&B” (on “Damaged”); and “mellow-turnt” (on “Pop It”).
“Best of Both Worlds is like a meal that you were preparing with a long, long time of hard work,” she says. “It’s the full plate of what you can expect from me as an artist. … You get a taste of everything.”
Another reason for her optimism is the backing she received from more established artists as the project took shape over the past year. Not just vocal collaborations with fellow Gen-Zers like 2Rare and NLE Choppa (on “AMF”), but mentorship provided by industry legends. Last fall, for instance, a few months after meeting Johnson at the 2023 Essence Music Festival, Wyclef Jean popped into a recording studio near LSU’s campus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and spent a few hours offering notes on her work.
“I played a lot of music for him, and he loved it,” Johnson says. “He always says we’re like Phil and Kobe — he’s the coach, and I’m Kobe.”
Each of these exchanges provided “validation,” Johnson says. “People that I look up to in the industry are telling me that I have the ability to be something.” Out of them all, though, none meant more than the featured artist on “Came Out A Beast.”
Queuing up the track in the Times Square studio, Johnson leans back and rolls her hands with the hard rap beat as the voice of Lil Wayne fills the room, not only shouting out Johnson by name in his guest verse but also calling back one of her earlier lines: “[I’m] a billionaire and I don’t got a degree.” The song closes out with a wailing electric guitar solo from Weezy (who isn’t really a billionaire) that Johnson didn’t know he was planning until the audio file landed back in her inbox during production.
“That’s the biggest co-sign you could get, from the GOAT,” she says. Though it might not have happened at all without an assist from one of the greatest of all-time in Johnson’s other world: “Shoutout to the OG, Sue Bird,” she says, referring to the retired WNBA legend, who asked Wayne during an ESPN alt-cast of the 2023 NCAA Final Four whether he was planning to collaborate with Johnson. “She threw the alley-oop.”
It’s far from the only example of hoops brokering connections to the benefit of Johnson’s music career. Her music manager, Zak Wilson, first caught onto her talents when a friend and then-assistant Division I college basketball coach called to tell him about a potential recruit who happened to rap; he met Johnson in person a year later when she was a high-school senior playing in the 2022 McDonald’s All-American Game. “Been working with her ever since,” Wilson says.
But the game has also played an integral role in fueling Johnson’s dedication to her craft in the studio.
“Basketball has made me have a certain discipline in my life that helps me demolish the music side,” she says. “It’s taught me that you work at something every day, you put the hours in, you just fall in love with the process.”
A COUPLE MONTHS AGO, with basketball and class at LSU finished for the school year, Johnson retreated to her current home base of Atlanta and held what she describes as a “writing camp.” Over two days at a West Midtown recording studio, more than half a dozen producers swung by and dropped off beats for Johnson to freestyle over and feel out as potential future projects.
“I did 40 songs — four zero,” she tells me. “Now I’m working on re-recording and completing those songs, so that’ll take me through this year and next.”
Together the advance planning and furious pace reflect a core question facing Johnson in her quest to make it as an artist. “Because I’ve got to get back to school, got to get back focused on basketball, I’m trying to figure out, how can I kill this window I have and make the most music I can?” she says. “When it’s basketball season, music is like the side chick, ya know? Like your side boo. Outside of the season, music is the main piece.”
Down at LSU, music often helps Johnson unwind at the end of a long day of academic and athletic obligations. “I wake up at 5 a.m., get my workout in, then class, then study hall, then another workout, then practice, then lifting weights,” says Johnson, who is majoring in business administration with a minor in marketing and communications. “That’s 6 o’clock, now I got another two hours in the studio.”
Other times she’ll write lyrics on her phone while sitting behind the wheel of her parked Jeep, or lay down samples on the recording equipment in her apartment, or squeeze in a studio session amid another packed off-day of filming NIL brand content. “I know I have to be so locked in on basketball that I try not to submerge myself into that life, because I can’t control myself when it comes to music,” she says. “So I have to give a healthy dose here and there.”
Of course, when music is the main piece, basketball is never fully sidelined. (“When I leave New York, I’m about to start labbing with my four-a-day workouts,” Johnson tells me.) But generally she is free to submerge herself as much as she desires in the offseason: Aside from some light sightseeing and shopping, Dickerson says Johnson has barely left this Times Square recording room during her few days in town so far, often returning to their hotel well past 3 a.m., after another marathon session of polishing up tracks from her Atlanta writing camp.
As for what types of music Johnson wants to make next, her influences run the gamut. On the 2000s: “That music was what I grew up on, that’s what my mama [and personal manager, Kia J. Brooks] was playing. I just watched a lot of Andre 3000 yesterday and was like, ‘Wow, this is what I want to tap into.‘” On the 2010s: “I’ve been telling my producers, I want to take music back to trap, Gucci Mane, Jeezy.” And, while staying in New York, she found herself inspired by hearing homegrown rappers Ice Spice and Cash Cobain and recorded another new song in the “sexy drill” style they popularized.
“I believe I’m gonna be one of the biggest artists in the world — period,” she says. “But I also believe that I’m going to be one of the greatest in terms of getting better at the craft.”
Johnson dreams of one day expanding Flauge Entertainment to include an agency business that represents “the next generations of athletes and musicians,” who in turn will hone their respective crafts at satellite recording studios and performances centers “all across America,” she says. “It’s way down the line, but this is part of my iconic journey.”
Before that, though, she will soon come to the inevitable crossroads that is the end of college. A likely top pick in the 2026 WNBA draft, Johnson doesn’t bite when asked how she anticipates the rigors of professional basketball affecting her studio schedule. “I try not to force things or even think about things I can’t control now,” she says. “I assume it’ll be a lot different. Or maybe similar.”
As it is, Johnson knows one thing: She has no intention of joining the significant percentage of current WNBA players who headed overseas last winter as a means to supplement their income in foreign leagues. “To visit, sure,” she says. “But to live and go play basketball in another country? Absolutely not. I think that’s one of the perks of doing two things.”
Whether Johnson will ultimately be forced to decide between those two things remains to be seen. Just don’t count on that day coming soon. Despite what the title of her EP suggests, despite what others may think, basketball and music never existed in separate spaces for her. They’ve always been intertwined in the world of Flau’jae.