Gangsta by Kat Dahlia

Album: My Garden (2013)

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Songfacts®:

This song finds Dahlia attacking people who claim to be "gangsta" without knowing what it really means. The songstress also recounts her own struggles growing up when was forced to take waitressing jobs to pay for her studio sessions and living with her mom, grandmother and sister in one bedroom.
The song took Dahlia around three days to write. She explained during a Reddit AMA: "I started it and then one day, I got in a big fight with my manager at the time, and I sat down at the bar of the restaurant I was working at, and I pretty much finished the whole song. And then I think like, the third day, I really just fleshed it out and made sure everything was as I wanted it to be. So it probably took about three days, and then I recorded it all in one take."
This was released as Dahlia's commercial debut single on March 1, 2013 by Vested in Culture and Epic Records. Dahlia dropped a Spanish-language version of the song a couple of months later.

Comments: 1

Ian from NyFeatured on an episode of Law & Order: SVU in which a recently arrested gangster agrees to testify to the identity of the individual who "greenlit" a murder against a victim who was coming forward to testify to that same individual. The song is played over a montage of scenes /*spoiler*/ where the incarcerated gangster and everyone else who had knowledge of the murders were summarily executed, leaving the prosecution with no witnesses.

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