Before Latto achieved status as an A-list rapper, she was known for winning Jermaine Dupri's The Rap Game in 2016 as “Miss Mulatto.”
Dupri spoke about the "Big Energy" rapper with HipHopDX, and defended himself against people who say he should've kept working with her.
“People keep saying, ‘Jermaine, you dropped the ball on [Latto],'” he said. “But what people don’t understand is, I put Latto’s record out. The deal was, if you win on The Rap Game, you get a single from Jermaine Dupri. So that single came out.”
“The problem was, was that Latto was 16 years old, and the outlets didn’t support it," he added. "And nobody was like speaking on it. Nobody talked about it. If you watched the TV show, you saw it. But people didn’t really start talking about Latto until she started making more vulgar records, dressing more sexual, and being more adult.”