On the heels of Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future’s quick rise to ubiquity, you would think the last thing the world needs is another hype-fueled, underground West Coast rap collective. But Kreayshawn and her White Girl Mob are here offering just that.
The 21-year-old Kreayshawn (a play on the word “creation”; her real name is Natassia Zolot) hails from the Bay Area and now lives in L.A. In May, she uploaded a video to YouTube for a song called “Gucci Gucci.” In the song, Kreayshawn raps in a deadpan voice over a swirling organ and stuttering high-hats about “basic bitches” whose unimaginative, label-centric fashion sense offends her. In less than two months, the song garnered 3 million views.
Though she has only performed live six times and has one official mix tape out, she recently signed a $1 million contract with Columbia Records and is making famous friends quickly. “Snoop hit me up on Twitter,” she explained. “He was like, ‘Yo, DM [direct message] me. I really love your song.’ So we met up, hung out and recorded a song with my sister, V-Nasty.” Other fans include Diddy and, puzzlingly, MTV comedian Andy Milonakis.
“All of the attention is a big surprise,” she said. “I’ve always had eyes on me before. Growing up, I was just a crazy, little white girl in the ’hood, so I was always dealing with that, but this is definitely different. There’s a whole bunch of eyes on me.”
A recent LA Weekly article described Kreayshawn’s style: “If [Lady] Gaga is the coolly elegant Madonna from ‘Vogue,’ Kreayshawn is the gritty downtown Madonna with a girl posse from ‘Borderline.’ ”
This is true, except “Gucci Gucci” is far from “Borderline” in content, sound and attitude. Madonna, for instance, never had a lyric about “swag” pumping out of her ovaries. And members of Kreayshawn’s girl posse proudly tweet photos of themselves drinking “syrup” (a mixture of prescription cough syrup and soda). And at least one of Kreayshawn’s girl posse, East Oakland’s V-Nasty — not Kreayshawn’s actual sister, but a friend she met when they were both 15 and who recently served time in jail — repeatedly uses the n-word in her occasionally coherent raps. Since their rap collective is known as the White Girl Mob, this has caused some consternation in some Internet circles.
When asked whether or not the controversy surrounding V-Nasty’s use of the racial slur is taking attention away from “Gucci Gucci,” Kreayshawn sighed.
“Yeah, it definitely has. I mean, I don’t use it,” Kreayshawn said. “Because of [V-Nasty], I have to answer all of these uncomfortable questions.”
“There’s stuff that V-Nasty does that holds her music back, and we all know what that is. And we all know that if she can work on that she has great potential to be just as big. I don’t think it’s holding her back to the point where it’s going to affect her in a negative way,” she added, then trailed off, “... even though it is.”
“I don’t know what I am trying to say,” Kreayshawn, now a bit flustered, added. “We’re definitely different. I love V-Nasty’s music. I was one of the people who forced her to rap and forced her to make her mix tapes just so I could listen to her music.”
The girls met in East Oakland, where they both grew up in tough neighborhoods. Kreayshawn is the daughter of Elka Zolot, a former guitarist and vocalist for many ’90s punk-surf bands, most notably the Trashwomen. “She used to take me to all her shows,” Kreayshawn said. Still, according to the LA Weekly story, it wasn’t a completely placid childhood. Kreayshawn dropped out of high school, had her own apartment and worked at Ikea by age 16, before a stint in film school. V-Nasty is a mother of two young children, and the third member of the White Girl Mob, Lil’ Debbie, is also from the East Bay. She deejays and, according to numerous posts on her Twitter feed, is attractive to people of both genders.
All the real-time criticism has forced Kreayshawn to become more articulate about who she is, and how it might affect who is listening to White Girl Mob music.
“I hope, like, girls like me who probably felt like they may have never had a voice before [and] can look at me and be, like, ‘Oh, you know, maybe I should be more confident.’ I’ve had girls hit me up on Twitter and tell me, ‘You’ve given me the confidence to walk around my school proud,’ and that makes me feel happy. I’m not trying to force anyone to like me by saying this stuff — this is just who I really am.”
And who she is today might totally change tomorrow. “One of the big things I wanna do is make a punk band,” she added. “I wanna do everything. I wanna make all kinds of music. I grew up listening to all kinds of music, so it’s not like I’m perpetrating or anything.”