Music Issue: Rising rapper Tiani Victoria will make you believe.

As Dice Raw tells it, he was hanging out with Black Thought last year when a DJ friend sent him a link to a Tiani Victoria freestyle. They played it and Black Thought said, “Yo, she’s dope! Get her.”

“Some people are born stars and some people are made into stars,” continues Dice, now a mentor to the 23-year-old rapper sitting next to him in the live room of The Studio on Spring Garden. “She’s a born star.”

Born in Mt. Airy, Tiani started rapping at age 15; turning to rhymes as a means of expression and rebellion while her family was sundered by a turbulent divorce. She found, as many young people do, self-realization in the music. “It gave me an outlet. I would resort to it when I wanted to speak my mind,” she says.

 “That’s why I have a million pieces of paper lying around. … I would say first and foremost I’m a writer, so words are always developing in my head.”

At this juncture, I contemplate, with reluctance, asking “the woman question.” But women experience the world differently than men; partly because of nature, and partly, to our shame, because of the rod of misogyny we have built for our own backs. If to ask a female rapper what it means to be a female rapper is in some sense to perpetuate male chauvinism, it’s also important to resist pretending a system that privileges men does not exist, as if doing that could wish it away.

So I ask. Her answer is wonderfully dismissive. “I carry myself as a rapper. No femcee, or hottest female rapper, just an emcee period. Of course that’s part of life, so I do think about the fact that I am a female who has to hold her own in a male-dominated industry, but I just feel like I’m so good, that gender, in terms of skill, is irrelevant. … I like to think of myself as a great artist.”

Tiani insists on the freedom to express a range of experience. “To be a human is to be multifaceted. Sometimes you’re sad, sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you’re serious, sometimes you’re concerned, sometimes tragedy strikes.”

And she’s not carrying anyone else’s water, not in thrall to perceptions of what she’s supposed to be or can be. “I’m doing what I feel. That’s what’s great about rappers, we do what the fuck we want,” she says. “The nature of rapping is rebellious, it comes from a struggle. It’s about everybody being themselves, being who they really are.”

We go into the sound room where collaborator DJ Circuitbreaka and Dice invite me to listen to new music from Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me, Tiani’s upcoming project due out early next year (she’ll release a mixtape, Hard Candy, before the end of this year). As the beat of “Covered in Gold” comes on and its bassline fills the room with something like warmth, I take in the scene and realize that Tiani has the rare capacity to make you believe her in an instant.

Dice and Black Thought believed in an instant.

DJ Circuitbreaka and the rest of the people chilling in the studio, smoking and vibing and nodding along and mouthing the lyrics and shaking their heads in wonder and laughter at their favorite lines, they believe.

And I don’t even have to make it to the end of “Covered in Gold,” or hear the sumptuous, sparkling “Falling Star” (which samples Florence and the Machine’s “Cosmic Love”) or the more than half dozen other mid-tempo, soul-sampling, soul-searching, boom-bapping songs filled with dense story-telling bars that suggest a young emcee tapping the deep wellsprings of her talent to know — I believe, too.