White Girl Mobb: The Rise Of White Female Rap

Think white rappers and most people still say Eminem. Think white female rappers and after a pause, and some serious chin stroking, you’re normally met with the response “eerh…Ke$ha, DEV, oh that Uffie girl she’s cool”. This isn’t a criticism of the your average music fan, trust me ask me the same question in 2009 and I’d struggle to see beyond Uffie.

Today however the tide is turning as White Girl Mobb, and it’s two leading lights, lesbian film student/cinematographer/ producer/ rapper/designer and all round wunderkid Kreayshawn, and the freshly freed from incarceration V-Nasty, lead the charge towards both the charts and mainstream credibility.

The Oakland natives have already made waves in the US, whether your simply tuning in to laugh, or whether your jamming to their stream of consciousness stoner verses, they’ve grabbed the internet’s attention. The excellent “Gucci Gucci” garnered two million views on Youtube within a week of being uploaded and while the mainstream caught up, a wave of intrigued viewers were shocked to find these seemingly gimmicky girls plugged into US Hip Hop’s most intriguing brain trusts.

Kreayshawn, twitter fiend.

Firstly, Left Brain from Odd Future appears in the “Gucci Gucci” video along with Jasper Dolphin who have both been outed as Kreayshawn fans and collaborators. This connection certainly makes sense, from detailed rape rhymes to jokey lines like “Groupies Follow Me Like Twitter, I’m Rolling Up My Cat Nip, And Shitting In Your Litter” it’s not hard to image how Kreayshawn and V-Nasty could sit alongside the shock-rap of Tyler and Hodgy Beats, they even throw in some homophobic slurs of their own.

The other partnership is both more surprising and far more exciting. Kreayshawn has been producing and directing music videos for the sublime Lil B (more on him later), even appearing as a Barbie doll-esque video girl in the ludicrously brilliant clip for “Cook”. The connection between rap virtuoso and director was most apparent on the bizarre clip of Lil B and Kreayshawn dancing and smoking (what else) in another dance instruction video, this time to cuts from Pretty Boy Millionaires.

V-Nasty, Lover of Lollipops

Kreayshawn certainly doesn’t have the skills or vision of Lil B (Kreayshawn flow is, at its lowest eb sub-Lonely Island), she sticks to stoner and sex rhymes, but she does have a brazen cocksure image, and a genuinely unique (and incredibly squeeky) voice, as well as an ever changing wardrobe that sits somewhere between the streets and a Hoxton art studio.

Simply put she stands out. Sticking out like a sore thumb in the hip hop fraternity, she represents an alternate vision for a female rap, she’s quirky, and while she has her male followers, her looks are always obscured, almost radically so, and she appears to be on a different planet to Nicki Minaj.

Perhaps unsurprising, Kreayshawn and the more technically skilled V-Nasty often turn their attention to Barbies and to designer labels, willfully embracing the streets and free form arty sensibility. V-Nasty may be too brutal for indie kids, and Kreayshawn’s hooks while undeniably addictive (seriously DEV would kill for “Bumpin Bumpin’s” hook, let alone V-Nasty’s flow) will probably prove too commercial to be cool.

Whether White Girl Mob have any artistically validity remains to be seen, but their famous friends certainly seem to think so, and if “Gucci Gucci” is anything to go by they may just crack the charts yet. So rejoice, we have legitimate white girls who can rap, and we can add another layer to the contemporary feminist and homophobic critiques of Odd Future and their peers, but we’ll save that for another column.

Unsurprisingly “Gucci Gucci” is my Single Of The Week, it almost certainly won’t be released in the UK, so you can check the video out online and download all the white girl mix tapes you could possibly want from Datpiff.

Lil B: Rap’s Odd and Liberal Future

Odd Future may have captured everyone’s imagination but somewhere between the release of the underwhelming Goblin and the string of cringe inducingly morose interviews, the world seemed to realise that Tyler, The Creator is not the future of rap. Instead, he was a dinosaur, an incredibly talented dinosaur, but a creaky old brontosaurus none-the-less.

Grotesque imagery, constant and continued homophobia, derogatory slurs and violence toward women, this is nothing new for hip hop, but Tyler’s failure to understand the poisonous potency of his lyricism highlighted his artistic shortcomings. In his eagerness to express his anger, and in his “Fuck School” petulance, he not only failed to provide a valid rationale, but he exposed the hollowness of Odd Future’s art. Their highs were high, but with the exception of the fantastic Frank Ocean, it was now apparent, Odd Future are highly skilled practitioners of Hip Hop olds ways; their sound is seductive but dated, their lyricism and themes are incomprehensively bleak but well covered.

Lil B on the other hand is hip-hop’s future. He continually challenges every one of hip hop’s neeanderthal stereo types, whether he’s claiming to be Paris Hilton, Toucan Sam, Miley Cryus or J.K Rowling he constantly toys with gender roles. The based God happily labels himself a pretty bitch, switching from effeminate poses and verses to strikingly serious tones and maudlin reflections on life and the streets (see The Evil Red Flame Mixtape).

He touched a nerve by naming his forthcoming LP I’m Gay, shockingly in the year 2011 he’s been subject to not just a string of abuse but death threats. Unflinching, he continues to strut around on youtube and he continues with business as usual. Lil B is forcing everyday hip hop fans to ask questions of themselves and their heroes, and to evaluate the lyrics, messages and themes of the music they enjoy and the culture they participate in. It’s not a revolution, but the stark reaction to his music is forcing the debate to happen, not among Guardian readers but between Lil Wayne, Jay-Z and Odd Future fans.

What makes The Based God special is his incredible versatility, the man has released tens of thousands of tracks, hundreds of mix tapes and is continually pushing himself to be more creative. The beauty of Lil B’s work comes from his ability to win over hardcore fans with his straight up street based raps (“Myself Alone”) while impressing hip hop officandos and indie kids with beautifully produced goading half way houses (“So Stubbern”). Then there’s his ability to layer his vocals, creating smoky staggering swirling swagfests (“Wonton Soup”) and of course his infamous in character raps, where he not only shows off a flair for creating controversy, but he actually finds away to make the self aggrandizing rap interesting again (I know I didn’t think it was possible either).

Ultimately Lil B may well be at his best when he conforms, the swirling minimalism of “Cocaine Killer” is gorgeous and irresistible as he tackles drug dealing with an intriguing multi-perspective narrative that urges people to think twice before they deal death.

It’s not all good, Lil B is as prone to some pretty vile sexism, but at his best he pushes boundaries and showcases a conscious that his peers often lack. He’s a rapper for the internet age, releasing more material than you could eve hope to hear. Lil B’s output can dramatically vary in quality and style, he will never be Kanye West or Jay-Z, but he can be the most progressive and intriguing voice in 21^st Century hip hop, or not, it depends which one of his 6 billion tracks you stumble on, but that’s part of the fun, and that’s why he’s so damn exciting.

Album Reviews:

Emmy The Great – Virtue

Nothing inspires great art quite like heartbreak, there’s been plenty of brilliant euphoric cheerful music over the years, but when one is truly heart broken a certain artistic impulse is unleashed within us. An urge to clarify, to express, to vent and to share prevails. Each artist expresses him or herself in different ways whether it’s psychotic ramblings and bellowing howls or soft cries and the magnanimity of acceptance, we continually renew our collective expressive capacity through art. Each tearful lament and each vitriolic rant becomes an empathetic tome or healing cry to help the rest of us deal with, and comprehend, our own grief.

Emmy The Great was a faced with an unfathomable (although not entirely unprecedented) circumstance, when she sat down to pen Virtue. Since the release of First Love, Emmy was left by her fiancé, not for another woman, not as the result of some mutual decision, not even via a brutal dumping in the traditional sense, instead her husband-to-be heard the call of God. He abandoned Emmy, dropping his past life like an outdate travelcard, and set sail for South America to become a missionary.

It’s a complex situation, one that is told with a majestic sense of understated beauty on heart wrenching “Trellick Tower”. As a ballad, it plays to convention; it stays contained and doesn’t break out. It speaks to an everyday misery, of being left, not simply alone, but with a half-life, a void, filled by mere existence. Emmy is left to tidy up the everyday affairs, and to just continue after such an incredible fractious event. Spite is evident, Emmy makes it clear that he is above, he looms, he looks down, overshadowing her existence, but the beauty not comes from the depth of misery but the tragic continuance.

Getting on, resuming, overcoming is traditionally seen as a remedy but here it is her sentence for being unworthy, a shallow half resolution, and yet it is the only resolution. It’s a heartbreaking, show stopping moment that Emmy is incapable of topping. Wisely she saves this moment of prayer and reflection for Virtue conclusion, for fittingly, it overshadows Virtue, it could have no other place.

Outside of “Trellick Tower” Emmy has plenty to offer, drifting between moments of engrossing brilliance and standard singer songwriter fare. “A Woman, A Woman, A Century Of Sleep” drives forth dramatically mixing Ringo rolls and psycheldia flares with choiral cries as Emmy melts into emptiness of day-to-day life in her Aunt’s vacant house. “Paper Forest…” is top end mainstream confessional folk where Emmy unravels her own catharsis before arriving at a kind of spiteful acceptance. The search for, journey to, and denial of, some kind of idyllic spiritual haven consumes Emmy on “North”, a wonderfully understated study of exclusion and the value of every day human existence set to pangs of Radiohead-ish guitar. The post-break up reflections are poorly disguised and are hardly subtly in the first place, but it’s hard not to be struck by “North’s” piercing punch line (“And Don’t I Love Enough, Isn’t Holiness Where It Falls”) especially as it directly feeds into “Trellick Tower”.

Sadly Emmy cannot consistently maintain the chilling brilliance of the album’s stark standouts (similar to the way in which “24” was inescapable on First Love). Emmy also falls foul of cliché arrangements and predictable (albeit seductive) melodies, and certain tracks, even the highly enjoyable lead single “Iris”, often don’t surpass the standard singer songwriter archetypes that have flooded the market in recent years (particular in the wake of the folk revival).

Strictly Our Opinion: Put in the most patronising terms possible, Emmy is too smart for her own good. When she’s not soaring high above her peers, she suffers from Kate Nash syndrome, also known as twenty year old know it all syndrome. Some times her detailed exploratory word play is simply too conclusive, too probing and too assured. Where Lily Allen found brilliance in holding her hands up and being swamped in confused apathy, Emmy strikes out definitively, and at times it becomes tiresome. Sometimes clumsy uncertain expression over powers intellectual interpretation, where one provokes empathy the other distance.

Still while this criticism is harsh, it is constructive; when Emmy’s clarity of thought, word play and analysis ignite they burn brightly, and they burn brilliantly, sadly the spaces in-between, the valleys that lie alongside the peaks only serve to delay gratification, adding distance between artist and audience. Regardless, Virtue is thoroughly satisfying listen, where Emmy is often great, always enjoyable and for one brief, wholly singular moment, she is peerless. [3.5/5.0]