Paige Bueckers talks 40-point performance in UConn’s March Madness win
What Paige Bueckers said after scoring 40 points in UConn women’s basketball’s NCAA tournament Sweet 16 win versus Oklahoma.
On Sunday, Flau’Jae Johnson will lead her LSU women’s basketball team into an Elite Eight matchup with No. 1 overall seed UCLA in the women’s 2025 NCAA Tournament.
It’s a familiar position for Johnson, a junior guard who has made it to at least the Elite Eight in each of her three college seasons.
With one year of eligibility still remaining, she has crammed a lot of accomplishments into her yet-to-be-completed college career. LSU has won 96 games since she arrived on campus in 2022. After winning SEC Freshman of the Year in 2023, she added first-team all-conference and third-team all-American honors this season. Perhaps most memorably, she was a starter on the Tigers’ 2023 national championship team.
And those are just her accomplishments on the basketball court.
Johnson has been much more than an athlete over the past decade, as she has balanced her basketball exploits with a burgeoning hip-hop career that has drawn in much more attention as her on-court profile has grown.
Before she takes the court with her LSU teammates with a return trip to the Final Four on the line, here’s a closer look at Johnson and her rap career:
Flau’Jae Johnson rap career
Johnson found herself in the national spotlight as a rapper and performer long before she did so as a basketball player.
As a 12-year-old, she appeared on “The Rap Game,” a Lifetime reality show that followed five young aspiring hip-hop artists who showcased their talents to some of the bigger stars of the genre. Even at that young age, Johnson was turning heads, earning praise from the likes of Jermaine Dupri, Rick Ross, Fabolous and Da Brat on the show.
Her promise and potential was on display again the following year when she appeared on “America’s Got Talent” and performed a song, “I Can’t Lose,” about proving doubters wrong. If there were any doubts among the crowd and panel of judges before she rapped her first bar, those quickly vanished.
As a tearful Johnson finished the song, she received a standing ovation from the audience and the judges. Even the famously cold and snide Simon Cowell was in awe.
“I’m not an expert, but I think you, the lyrics, the tracks, everything feels real,” he said. “I don’t say that a lot of the time. I really like you.”
In the years that followed, she proved to be more than a wunderkind.
Johnson’s first single in her discography goes all the way back to 2017, five years before she got to college. Working under the stage name Flau’jae, her first album, “4 My Fans” (a nod to her jersey number at LSU), came out in 2023.
The next year, she signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label and came out with another album, “Best of Both Worlds.” That album featured several notable guest verses, namely from Louisiana native Lil Wayne.
Shortly after the album was released, Johnson performed at the 2024 ESPY Awards, with some of the biggest names and faces in sports nodding along to her verses.
Her rise in the hip-hop world hasn’t come without at least some controversy. In 2023, Johnson’s remix of Latto’s “Put It On Da Floor” received criticism for a line that referenced the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. She took the video down and posted a new one with modified lyrics.
“I learned that I have a wider audience and it’s a lot more people listening to my songs,” she said to USA TODAY in 2023. “So all I gotta do is show I’m not, you know, putting anybody in position to feel like I’m disrespecting them or something like that. But keep making music and keep being myself, but learn from that from like a social media side.”
Even as her stellar junior season continues, Johnson remains active musically. In February, she released her latest album, “Flau & B.”
Flau’Jae Johnson father
Hip-hop came naturally to Johnson, albeit under tragic circumstances.
Johnson’s father, Jason, was a Savannah, Georgia-based rapper known as Camoflauge who was a prominent local figure with an impressive catalog as an independent artist. In 2003, right as he was nearing a major-label deal, Johnson was shot and killed outside a recording studio. He was only 21 years old.
Less than six full months later, his daughter was born.
While growing up, she came across some of her late father’s songs and was inspired to follow in his footsteps. When she was only 8 years old, she and her uncle convinced Johnson’s mother, Kia, to allow her to perform a tribute song at a party commemorating her father’s birthday.
From there, a career was launched. Memories of her father help inform her art, including songs that have featured pleas to end gun violence.
“I feel like his legacy was cut short,” she said to ESPN in 2023. “It was taken from him. That’s why I sometimes feel like it’s my duty to finish what he started.”
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