Kreayshawn – review

This article titled “Kreayshawn – review” was written by Kitty Empire, for The Observer on Saturday 17th September 2011 22.31 UTC

Several dozen of Shoreditch’s most extravagantly plumed scenesters are banging on a closed door in a pub. Behind the door is a stairway to the room where the second-ever UK gig by Kreayshawn – the west coast’s hottest new rapper – is due to start. Juddering bass leaks down the stairs. The shoving doesn’t quite degenerate into violence – one disappointed girl hurls a glass on to a nearby couch – but this display of spectacularly turned-out pique doesn’t exactly dampen the heat around hip-hop’s newest enfant terrible.

Rappers thrive on controversy; Kreayshawn offers more than most. As a pint-sized 21-year-old white female film-school dropout, one whose rapping style is more playground taunt than classic flow, Kreayshawn has a CV guaranteed to provoke accusations of fakery, cultural theft and worse from the hip-hop community.

Now that her track “Gucci Gucci” has had over 17m views since it went up on YouTube in May, everyone on the internet, it seems, has an opinion on her. The former hip-hop video director – born Natassia Zolot, to a punk guitarist mother – has recently signed to Sony; an album is promised next year. Record labels have long been searching for that mythical beast – the female Eminem – and have failed to find her in rappers such as Lady Sovereign. There’s something of Lady Gaga, too, in Kreayshawn: a self-made, visually literate artist who pulls no punches.

If anything, she has more in common with fellow outrage-merchants Odd Future. But Kreayshawn is much funnier. Her songs are bratty, expletive-laden celebrations of thrift-shop fashion and copious drug-taking. “Let’s hear it for my hoes/ Hoes/ In the second-hand clothes/ They use they dollar bill to put the powder in they nose,” runs “Rich Whore”, the opening salvo of Kreayshawn’s all-too-brief public appearance tonight. She arrives onstage late, without her hype woman, Lil Debbie, or a DJ: a blur of two-tone hair, eyeliner out to here, gold door-knocker earrings, a sleeveless top showing off the tattoos running down one arm. Somewhere, historian David Starkey – who tendentiously ascribed the recent riots to a ghetto takeover of “white” culture – is having a fit. She slaps hands like a star several times her stature. At the end, she is mobbed by girls.

She may not be as sharp as Nicki Minaj – her closest correlative, thanks to the dearth of female rappers – but Kreayshawn’s displays of swagger (hip-hop’s version of chutzpah) and verbal mischief make her more than just a strikingly dressed irritant. Tonight’s second track, “Bumpin’ Bumpin“, is more club-oriented, downplaying Kreayshawn’s motor mouth in favour of an Auto-Tuned chorus.

“Gucci Gucci”, though, just gets better and better. “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada/ Basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother,” runs the chorus, performing the clever trick of listing labels while standing up for DIY values. Elsewhere, Kreayshawn’s claim that she has “the swag/ and it’s pumpin’ out my ovaries” gets the biggest screams of the evening. It doesn’t take a gynaecologist to confirm she’s probably right.

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