“Okay Cupid” is the latest offering from one of our favorite songstresses, Kitty Pryde, produced by one of our favorite producers, Beautiful Lou. Though this may seem like a strange combination at first, the pair offer a surreal little number about adultery, drunk dialing, and inner-lip tattoos. The young Princess presents her usual tongue-twisting, self-loathing raps, before she breaks down into song near the end, singing the chorus to Frank Ocean’s “Thinking About You”. Lou’s translucent beat allows Kitty to further flutter forwards, until the song abruptly ends with an adorable little giggle tacked on the end.
The lineup: Kitty Pryde (vocals).
The background: She's the hip-hop Taylor Swift, or Tyler, the Creator, if he were a teenage girl cloud-rapping about sexting, drunk dialling and pill snorting. She's this nano-second's viral sensation and by tomorrow she'll either be the biggest thing on the planet or the subject of enquiries about "whatever happened to that white-girl rapper named after that X-Men character?" The song that's causing all the commotion is Okay Cupid. It opens with her yelling at whatever parent happens to be in earshot to "Get out my room – bleh!" before declaring "It's my party" like a 21st-century Lesley Gore in the body of Kreayshawn. It's insouciant ("Read my lip – it's pouty"), it's sarcastic ("Your cigarette breath – well, I thoroughly enjoy it"), it's a Tumblr-age Mean Girls and Heathers condensed into three minutes of cloud rap perfection – the producer of the track was Beautiful Lou (who has worked with Lil B and A$AP Rocky), and the Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking, self-styled "freckly freak" in the Yeastie Girlz T-shirt has even got the same management team as the Main Attrakionz boys.
This chopped'n'screwed, slow-motion dream-crunk is so our thing we can hardly believe our luck. And we thought that even before we heard her rhyming "I used to be a pimp without emotion" with "singing the Frank Ocean". She's got another new track called Justin Bieber that confirms her potential status as the first post-cloud rap teen superstar. The music's in the same ethereal realm as Main Attrakionz et al, and you can tell she loves Danny Brown as well as Odd Future – she fantasises about marrying Bieber, but first she wants to run over Selena Gomez (twice).
Pryde, who may be anything between 17 and 24 and works at Claire's, the accessories store, has had tweets from Earl Sweatshirt, and her Odd Future love is most evident on her previous release and debut EP, the Lizzie McGuire Experience, where she matches their feat of making the music somehow at once unsettling and pretty. It's partly in the woozy off-kilter synths, and partly in the lyrics: on Charnsuka her obsession with some boy leads her to threaten to drink his bathwater. It's on He (Tommy Cantewell) that she becomes what we've been waiting for seemingly for years – a female rapper to match Eminem et al: here she wants to bone the boy and put him in the back of her trunk. She goes furthest on Sickfit (aka Tha First), on which she decides to chop her beau up into pieces while complaining about the stoner bores who "sit around all day looking at titties on the internet", those "fuckin' losers who'll never get their dick wet". Meet Tyler Swift.
The buzz: "Last year, Kreayshawn went viral. This year, we have Kitty Pryde" – ONTD.
The truth: Ladies and gentleman, we bring you … Talia, the Creator.
Most likely to: Become a viral sensation asap – or rather, A$AP.
Least likely to: Get a cameo on Lizzie McGuire.
What to buy: Okay Cupid and Justin Bieber are, like, everywhere.
File next to: Kreayshawn, Azealia Banks, Tyler, the Creator, Leslie Gore.
MRL : "Do you believe that « Influential blogs » in rap music are necessarily manipulated by Stevielike guys?"
Nicolas : "Sometimes it’s not completely conscious or as well thought out as Stevie did, so I don’t know if we can talk about manipulation, but there are definitely some artists that are being helped by some blogs. It can be explained by friendliness. As artists eventually get closer with bloggers/journalists for instance. There is this one blog of a skating clothing brand, talking a lot about rap music; this is exactly what I’m saying… Rappers they highlight always have a small success thanks to their support… And after chatting here and there, I realised that it’s just a huge friendliness network. Neither the rappers nor the bloggers are completely aware of it.
And there’s also some quite vicious stuff. Here’s a funny one. I’m part of a Facebook group gathering almost all the American bloggers, something like 10 rappers and a bunch of producers… One day we asked ourselves, if we all started to praise somebody at the same time on our different websites, wrapping up the whole thing well, like taking a beat from that well-known producer, a featuring with this hot cat and shit… Would we succeed in making believe he’s dope?
We took someone from the group who didn’t know how to rap, someone ghostwrited his lyrics and we made him rap on some beat from a producer everyone would know… One after the other, every blogger from the group wrote some stuff to explain why it was dope… It worked. But even more than everything we could have imagined. As this artist went highly praised by all the « tastemaker » blogs, for real. We found him in some year-end blog lists from bone-headed hipsters websites nearly interested in rap, some articles saying it was revolutionary, including some big players like Complex, Fader, Spin, Pitchfork… And now… well this artist has a career. Not amongst the rap audience, but amongst kind of retarded hipsters who love to believe that they listen to rap music, it’s a hit. This artist is touring now, hanging around with stars and shit… I think I won’t reveal his identity for now, but someday someone will, for sure.
Anyway, I don’t know if it’s a proof that these kinds of practices do exist, but it’s a proof it definitely works."
