My LA hometown crush, Luscious Liz was asked to model for the line of NFL’s lady jerseys.  She herself is an avid football and baseball fan.  Unfortunately, she roots for lame teams – the 49ers and the Angels.  I’ll have to stick to Alyssa Milano when it comes to sports.  If you wanna see her rock a SD, SF, Denver, KC or NE jersey – click here.  By the way, JaMarcus Russell is the Shyne of the NFL.  Ayoooo!

Olivia has been on her hustle.  Roles on Greek, doing comedy shows, her AOTS gig, and now she’s written a book and has a one-off magazine dedicated to her. I’m happy.   Right now you can go to Mymag to vote for your fav poster before it goes to print and can order the book online.  Both done deals for me.

Vote and purchase for Olivia at Mymag here.

Pre-order her book “Suck it, Wonder Woman!” here.

While you are at it, visit her blog and tell her I said hi.  Remember KTL sent you there.

Penelope Cruz is posted on the cover of Vanity Fair.  I am there!  Yeah, she is little bit older than Alba but with her great photos and personality – how could I deny putting her on the options list? Plus, I will always have a special place in  my heart for her after her role in Vanilla Sky. If we can put Olivia Wilde on this list, I am putting Ms. Cruz on it, too! Viva la Espana!  I know its old man status but who cares. Full interview and more photos after the jump.

Ingrid Sischy writes:

The Passions of Penélope

With two new movies—Broken Embraces, her fourth film with director Pedro Almodóvar, and Rob Marshall’s big-name musical extravaganza, Nine—Penélope Cruz is mining both the Spanish roots that made her an actress and the hard-won Hollywood breakthrough that made her an international star. The author taps into the fierce passions of the Oscar-winning enchantress, whether for her directors, her leading men (including current flame Javier Bardem), or the cinema itself.

Some years ago, when Penélope Cruz was still on her way up the movie-star ladder, I had a behind-the-scenes adventure with her that gave me a chance to see what the Spanish actress is made of. I had arranged for her to do a cover shoot for Interview, the magazine I then edited, and on the day of the shoot I got a call from the photographer, who was freaking out. She had planned a bunch of fun setups, but the day hadn’t even begun yet and now Cruz’s minders were demanding that the photographer make it snappy: there wasn’t time to do anything but a few basic shots. The huffs and snits were about to spoil the shoot, so I headed over to the location, a nightclub on 14th Street, to see if I could fix things. I quickly sussed out the real reason Cruz’s people were trying to cut the shoot short: she had been summoned for a meeting later that same day with the other Cruise, as in Tom, who back then, in 2000, was still considered Mr. It. I got nowhere with her Spanish rep—apparently our rinky-dink photo shoot was chopped liver in comparison with a meeting with Hollywood’s top gun—so I marched into hair and makeup, where the actress was getting spiffed up for the first picture, and pleaded our case directly. She looked horrified that we’d been made to feel rushed and small, and asked me to tell our photographer that she was honored to be working with her and was committed to posing for all the images she wanted.

The shoot proceeded and the Cruz team backed off till many hours later, when they just couldn’t stand by anymore. “Penélope is very late for her meeting,” one of them complained, explaining that it was to be at the Carlyle hotel, all the way uptown. “Just one more picture,” begged our photographer. This was to be the money shot—an image of Cruz in a tart-yellow Cadillac convertible. Cruz’s people had had it. But still game, and in an effort to keep everyone happy, the actress suggested a bit of multi-tasking: she’d do the photo in the car while it was being driven uptown for her appointment. Perfect solution!

We all rushed outside, only to discover that the vehicle was a mere prop—it didn’t have an engine. (Our budgets were tight, so the photo editor had rented the cheapest Caddy possible.) Someone had the brain wave to put the car back up on the flatbed that had brought it there and drive the whole Rube Goldberg contraption up to the Carlyle. Anybody on Madison Avenue that evening would have caught the hilarious sight of Cruz languishing in a hot-pink Versace dress in the backseat of a car that had been jacked up on the flatbed, surrounded by flashes popping like fireworks. Some of us followed in a car.

The truck pulled up to the Carlyle and Cruz was set free. She flew through the revolving door and into the elevator—at which point I screamed, “You still have the Versace on—we need to give it back!” Penélope jumped out of the elevator and into the ladies’ room off the hotel’s lobby. There, in record time, she did a quick change into her own clothes, handed over the dress, and was back in the elevator with her agent, going up to the floor where her now historic meeting awaited. The whole scene was worthy of a film by her greatest director, Pedro Almodóvar.

Since then I’d run into Cruz a few times (even watched a flirty moment between her and Prince at an awards dinner in L.A.), but we hadn’t really had a chance to talk until we got together for this article. I reminded her of our crazy escapade together and asked her what happened that evening at the Carlyle when she finally opened the door and met Tom Cruise. Not that there was a direct cause-and-effect, but as anybody who follows the real-estate market in Los Angeles will recall, it wasn’t long before Tom was packing up his pj’s and the then Mrs. Cruise, Nicole Kidman, had the family house to herself; soon after that, Tom and Penélope were going in and out of their own driveway. Cruz already had a few American films on her résumé—she’d turned heads as a coked-up sexpot in Blow, opposite Johnny Depp—but the romance with Cruise made her something of a household name in America and put a whole different spin on her image. So I’d long pictured any number of scenarios unfolding on that first evening. Dim the lights. Music, please. Tom seducing Penélope with an invitation to race go-carts or learn how to pilot his plane? Penélope sliding the do not disturb sign on the suite’s front door and throwing Tom onto that big cushy Carlyle bed? Scientology honchos landing on the roof of the Carlyle with their e-meters to measure Penélope’s aura before anybody got any big ideas?

It sounds like Penélope herself was always something of a performer. When I asked Mónica if there was any incident from their childhood that might have foreshadowed what her sister would become, she replied, “Now, when we watch videos from when we were little we fall about laughing because it was so obvious. Whenever Penélope appeared in front of the camera she was acting or singing or dancing or all of them at once.”

By the time Cruz entered high school, in 1987, she was taking the bus or metro into the city at night to go to ballet classes. Sometimes she’d figure out how to finagle a ticket to whatever movie was showing at the nearby cinema (at 13 she was still too young to be allowed to see some of them officially). She was already an Almodóvar fan, having watched his earlier movies over and over on the family Betamax—“the darker they were, the more interested I was”—and one night in 1990 she caught his Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a loony kidnapping/love story/sex-and-bondage caper starring Victoria Abril. That was it. Epiphany time. “That was the day I decided to be an actress,” Cruz says. “I fell in love. I’d found what I wanted to do. I really didn’t want to have to be in an office. I was a good student, but not happy. I thought, I have nobody in my family and no friends who can make a living out of anything related to an artistic profession, but I want to try. I decided to look for an agent.”

Hound an agent is more like it. Apparently she was and is still a bit of a bossy thing—“In our family,” Mónica says, “all the women have a little sergeant in them.” Penélope did her research and looked up Katrina Bayonas, who remains her agent to this day. But after her first audition, Bayonas turned her away for the simple reason that Cruz was too young. “She said, ‘Go home and come back in a few years,’” remembers Cruz with a laugh. “I came back the next week and auditioned again.” A third try, not long after, did the trick.

Her first two movies, both released in 1992, were Belle Epoque, a costume drama, and Bigas Luna’s Jamón, Jamón (variously translated as A Tale of Ham and Passion; Ham, Ham; and, my favorite, Salami, Salami). The latter was a jaw-dropper—a wild and crazy concoction of camp, kitsch, melodrama, humor, class politics, and a whole lot of sex, starring a decidedly studly Javier Bardem and a va-va-va-voom Cruz, who turned 17 during the filming, having lied about her age to the producers to get the part, and lied again to her parents about the nature of the picture to win their approval. In the film, she and Bardem make the phrase “on-screen chemistry” seem mild. Call the fire brigade! (The heat seems to sizzle offscreen too: Cruz and Bardem are now very much a couple.) Her bold, unself-conscious embrace of a role that required her to show a lot of skin and schnog or schtup more than her fair share of the film’s men surprised a lot of people, including her idol, Almodóvar, who made a congratulatory call and brought her in to read for his 1993 film Kika. Cruz says she was very nervous auditioning a scene in the director’s kitchen, but that didn’t stop her from characteristically trying to convince him she was old enough to play the main character, who was supposed to be more than twice her real age. Almodóvar, no monkey, didn’t buy it, but made it plain he wanted to work with her in the future.

The next four years saw Cruz acting in a dozen European movies as well as spending a couple of years in New York City taking ballet classes, going to the gym, shopping at D’Agostinos (which she still loves), and taking English lessons. She had her eye on making it on the bigger American stage, but at the same time her anonymity in Manhattan must have been a relief after half of Spain had seen her nipples in Jamón, Jamón. Besides, how could anyone miss the charms of New York living opposite an old-time gay bar in the West Village called Two Potato, as Cruz did? Perfect training for the next Almodóvar call.

In 1996, when the director handed her a role in Live Flesh—a young prostitute with a big personality who gives noisy, painful, primal birth on a public bus on the way to the hospital—the result was unforgettable, and the beginning of a collaboration as essential to movie history as the hookup between George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn or Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Cruz’s knockout performance—so vulnerable and visceral and sad—takes up the first eight minutes or so of Live Flesh, and then she is gone, but she stays in the mind. Even Almodóvar got more than he was counting on. “She had a kind of strength that was earthy and eternal—surprising in someone so young,” he says. “Many people have told me that they called her after that because they were so impressed by those eight minutes. Eight minutes of real talent is a lot. Judi Dench won an Oscar for those eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love.”

This collaboration came to full flower in her next Almodóvar project, 1999’s All About My Mother, the director’s highly personal, contemporary version of an old-fashioned “women’s film.” Cruz’s ability to carry off the wild twists of plot and tone—the mark of any Almodóvar film—is absolutely convincing. She shows a perfect ear for comedy, but when her character, a young nun in training who is pregnant with the child of a sexed-up transvestite, weeps as she finds out that the oaf has made her H.I.V.-positive, it breaks your heart.

And then came her first foray into Hollywood, though it’s not as if Cruz turned her back on Europe. She remembers, “When I did my first movie in America, I already had my return ticket to Spain.” But the American films were a kind of test of how big a traditional Hollywood star Cruz could be. Whatever else they lacked, what those films did have were major leading men, which led to a sequence of major liaisons, reportedly including Matt Damon, Nicolas Cage, Matthew McConaughey, as well as Tom Cruise. The notion began to circulate around L.A. that she wasn’t safe with any leading man—or was it the other way around? She also struck up an enduring friendship with Salma Hayek; attempts by the industry to pit these two “spitfires” against each other for parts only strengthened their bond.

I asked Almodóvar what he thinks went wrong during her period of blah American films. While he’d rather not appear to be taking potshots at American filmmakers, many of whom he admires, he is a truth teller. He said, “It was bad luck for Penélope, because some of the movies were very ambitious, but this happens. They only saw her as a beautiful girl. It is the problem with the market, the agents, the studios, the film industry as a whole that labels actors in a way that is not very subtle at all. The problem is that it happened with 10 or 12 movies for Penélope, and it could have been the end.” Then he laughed: “But I was there to save her. I’m joking now.”

He may be joking, but in fact it was Almodóvar’s 2006 Volver that relaunched Cruz as an actress, not just a movie star. He has described his connection to Cruz during a movie’s shooting as if they “were bound together by a catheter.” Her performance as Raimunda—a daughter who is alienated from her mother and who, by the by, helps cover up her own daughter’s act of murder—was full of gravitas, humor, and surprises. Almodóvar even gave Cruz a prosthetic rear end, which was as transformative as the fake nose that Stephen Daldry gave Nicole Kidman when she played Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Volver earned Cruz a best-actress Oscar nomination—the first ever for a Spanish actress—and it also made other directors sit up and take notice, including Woody Allen, who wrote the part in Vicky Cristina Barcelona for her after seeing Volver. Cruz’s character in Allen’s film, Maria Elena, a painter who is a loose cannon as well as an irresistible temptress—she seduces her ex (Bardem; ah, him again) and then beds his new girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson)—really gave the actress room to show her stuff. She certainly did not hold back on the pheromones. Regarding her famous make-out session with Johansson, I asked who was better: Scarlett or Charlize Theron, whom Cruz smooched in the 2004 film Head in the Clouds. Cruz just laughed. “No matter how I answer that I will be in trouble. Both were pretty beautiful partners.”

Not only is Allen effusive in his assessment of Cruz’s ability, he also seems to have liked the woman herself, after his fashion: “I never thought about her as a person, because when I work I’m not interested in the person except as a performer. When she turned out to be lovely, that was nice, but I would have been O.K. if she had been a bitch.” Perhaps most consequential to Cruz’s career is the fact that Allen tuned in not just to her fieriness but to her fine comedic talent as well—the first American director to do so successfully. “She has a natural sense of humor,” he says. Because of Cruz’s looks and the fact that the camera loves her as much as it does, her comedic flair has often been left untapped. But she could just be the great 21st-century screwball talent, the Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard of our time.

Almodóvar uses this ability very much in his own way, in combination with her strengths as a dramatic actress. One sees Cruz walk a tightrope of emotions in Broken Embraces. Her character, Lena, is the girlfriend of a controlling bully with big bucks. She dreams of becoming an actress, so boyfriend finances a film for her. The only catch: she takes up with the director—with tragic consequences. Cruz plays Lena with a pitch-perfect combination of high drama and understated camp; it is one of the most demanding roles she has taken on. She says, “Pedro would push me to the limit. He really knows how to press all my buttons. You can only go into something like that when it’s somebody you really trust. I always feel like he’s my safety net. Like I can fly and go far, because he’s going to catch me. The biggest [panic] attack I had during the movie was the scene where, for the first time, Lena makes the decision to try to become an actress. I don’t know what happened to me that day, but before and after we filmed I could not breathe.” I wonder who she reminded herself of?

Cruz says the role she has always coveted is Carmen. I think of the moment in the opera when Carmen appears and the men ask her when she will love them. She replies, “Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.” It may be Cruz’s refrain, too. No one has yet stepped up to the plate to let Cruz have a go at her favorite heroine, but when Rob Marshall’s Nine comes out, in November, audiences will have a chance to witness Cruz’s skills as a hoofer and gauge her gifts as a vocalist when she belts out the number “A Call from the Vatican.” The film, an adaptation of the 1982 Broadway musical, is a distant relative of Federico Fellini’s film 81?2—same story, very different feel. The company Cruz keeps in this mostly female cast is nothing to sneeze at: Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Fergie, and Kate Hudson, with Daniel Day-Lewis holding it all together as the film director played by Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s semi-autobiographical original.

By all accounts Cruz fit right in with the international sisterhood that evolved during the shoot at Shepperton Studios, just outside London. In addition to bonding on set, the cast had its own evolving version of a sorority house—let’s call it Phi Beta Actress—with Loren, Cotillard, Fergie, and Cruz all shacking up in the same apartment building. Loren, for her part, is unstinting in her praise for Cruz. She says, “Penélope is very accurate in her work. She wants to be very precise about what the director wants. And she takes her career very seriously, which she should. I think she loves what she does and it shows on the screen. She has become a real friend. We talked a lot about life and our careers. I talked about De Sica, she talked about Almodóvar. When it was my last day she came to my dressing room. She was crying, and I was crying. This is the first time that I have left a film crying because we got so upset about leaving each other.”

Marshall says he considered Cruz for each of the female parts because of her range, but eventually he and she focused on Carla, the mistress—touching, loving, and a bit of a nutjob. Cruz seems to have wanted the filming to go on forever. Marshall remembers, “She’d be the last one in that soundstage working, and I’d have to say, ‘Penélope, it’s over.’ The day we were shooting her big song, ‘A Call from the Vatican,’ she was out there working so hard. In the middle of the number she does all this work with ropes—she was swinging on them and it was scary and she had formed calluses and her hands were bleeding. Daniel was screaming to her from the back of the soundstage that she is a warrior. We had told her she should wear gloves, but she was like, ‘No, no, no—I have to feel it.’ There’s this huge sheath of pink satin that she slides down on. When we finished the number she had disappeared behind the satin and was in tears. I said, ‘Are you unhappy with what you did?’ She said, ‘No, no. It’s that it is over, and I loved every second. I want to install ropes in my bedroom so I don’t have to let go of it.’?” The blisters were worth it. Cruz takes what could have been a generic tits-and-torch number and turns it into a highly personal tour de force.

‘Penélope was born to be an actress,” says Almodóvar, who knows her better than anyone in the business. “She is someone who is extremely emotional, and if she was not an actress it could be a problem for her. It’s luck she has chosen a profession that allows her to express something that would be too much for a normal person. Otherwise she would suffer a lot. And even now maybe she suffers too much.” Apparently this tendency goes way back. “I’ve always been a worrier,” says Cruz. “Since I was a little girl I’ve always felt that if I had a moment of peace I’d wonder: Are you sure you can afford to feel like this?”

This anxiety is fascinating, coming from someone who is so fearless on-screen. One senses it in the way she clams up when asked about Bardem. I knew she’d been mum about her high-profile assignations for years, so I was expecting her to forget her very good English when I went anywhere near the Pratesis. Still, I was surprised by her mantra-like response: We can’t go there …we can’t go there … It’s not that she pretends the relationship doesn’t exist—one can’t really do that successfully these days, not when everything ends up on the Internet, true and false. It’s more that she is protective of her privacy to a point that is striking, even for performers who don’t like to kiss and tell. (Her wariness of the press may date in part from the early notoriety she earned for Jamón, Jamón.) Her discipline about not even confirming what she knew I already knew—and what I knew that she knew I knew—was both touching and almost comic. There were long pauses and big eyes. (She slipped up only once. I brought up a U2 concert that she and Bardem had attended in Paris, mentioning that I’d heard she was playing air guitar during some of the songs. She squealed with delight, saying, “Javier is even better at air guitar!”) My most nosey Parker question—one that I felt it was my duty as a reporter to ask—was whether the widespread rumors that there was a wee Cruz-Bardem on the way were true. (The blogs have been a riot with their speculation about baby bumps and “strategically placed pleats.”) Here, unlike before, there was no telling silence from Cruz. Instead she answered in the negative but in a rather baroque, roundabout way, detailing how Almodóvar had tried, to no avail, to put that rumor to rest when a journalist asked him about it recently on a red carpet.

She and Bardem, who is famously private, are probably Spain’s two greatest living actors and they’re spicy, which makes them fodder for many a paparazzo’s long-range lens; they seem to be trying hard to figure out how to have a lasting relationship with each other, and not with the world as the third party, as so many Hollywood couples do now. But that doesn’t mean Cruz locks herself up in a tower. For our talks for this piece, she suggested we meet at the Boathouse in Central Park, a very public venue. I imagined her being pursued by tourists and us having to get in a boat to be able to talk in private. So instead, we ended up sitting in my back garden in Greenwich Village. But the boat capsizing would have been a perfectly Almodóvar-esque sequel to our adventure years ago with the flatbed. Penélope making a splash yet again.

Do I even need to write anything here? If you are even reading this, maybe you should close the browser window.

Olivia has blessed the world with a follow-up from last year’s “48 Hours w/ Olivia” when she was at Comic-Con. The best segment from last year is when she asked a supernerd out on a date and made some advances to him and almost blew up from the awkwardness and those fuzzy feelings in his pants. This year she’s taping all that she can for 48 hours straight. Check out her site for more postings. I need an Olivia in my life…

Just because I wanted to… Thanks, Snicka.

WUH ROH, not only was cassie’s computer hacked, but pictures that were meant for puffy are now able to see for everyone’s viewing pleasure. Is this some sort of publicity stunt? Because that last song that you released kind of sucked ballz.

You can read more about it on her twitter. But why would you when you can just look at the picture above.

Or maybe you did it because what you did to your hair is the worst. I am to lazy to post a picture of her hair right now, but if you want to see what her hair looks like you canclick on her twitter link. Hey double whammy.

You know cause we don’t post neked pictures here, we just link to them.

Chicago’s best “halfie” spends sometime with Format Mag while shopping at Tarjay and discussing her move into music.  Some cool personal facts about Melissa are disclosed here, like what she would if she wasn’t in music, her degree, and her dream date would be.  On a random observant note, does she have a likeness to Kira from the “Dark crystal” or is it just me?  Full interview after the jump.

Richard Cruz writes:

If you haven’t noticed, it’s paradigm-shifting time. Regime change, if you will. Popular culture is undoubtedly feeling its share of growing pains, but there are some who are beginning to emerge and champion this new culture, new thought, and quite frankly, new musical styles. Enter one bouncy Chicagoan: Kid Sister. Despite how unlikely it may seem (she might not see it yet either), Kid Sister (née Melissa Young), is at the head of the class. She’s blatantly honest, like Abe Lincoln, but also suggestively progressive, like Barack Obama. As intelligent as she is fly, she speaks with a certain “of-the-people” eloquence that only she could pull off. After a two-year campaign of tightening her grip on the underground, Kid Sister is finally readying the release of her debut, the inspirationally titled Dream Date (Downtown), available in March. Ironically, the woman who single-handedly breathed life into long-ass nails being relevant also provides some of the most subjective insight into contemporary society.

Format: What’s going on in the world of Melissa Young?
Kid Sister: You actually caught me in the middle of buying underwear and bras for my dancers.

Format: Nice!
Kid Sister: [Laughs] I’m like “So, is it a 32 or a 34? Now it’s a 36?” And I don’t really know about these tiny bitches [laughs]! But anyway, I’m trying to get it done for my show that’s tomorrow. Hopefully I can get it together, but I think I’m good though.

Format: Are you in NY? Chicago? Where you at?
Kid Sister: I’m in a Target in Chicago – my favorite place! You can find me here several days out of the week. Target is so addictive!

Format: Now, from what I’ve seen, your personality has many layers: artistically inclined, a bit tomboyish yet playful, and always witty. Were you always this way?
Kid Sister: I’m a tomboy that loves to shop. I can’t explain it, but I have to say, ogres are like onions, they have layers [laughs]. I just want to take this opportunity to quote the great movie Shrek ‘cause it has a lot to do with my personality. I’m just kidding, but I do feel that it’s important to have a lot of different aspects to you personality, not to keep any one of them hidden. [Not] to enhance your career, or for any other reason. I think it’s important to be yourself, ya know? I don’t want to use the term “spread out,” but you appeal to a wide range of people. Not to compare myself to Barack Obama – but since he’s the most visible and obvious example – but biracial people… we’re black and white, and have both of those sides going for us, so I think a lot of people in the same position are able to relate to both sides just as well and make connections with both communities. Know what I’m saying! [Laughs.]

Format: Imagine if you were tri-racial, that would be crazy!
Kid Sister: Well I kind of am! My dad is black and my mom is white, but my dad has some Native American, so I look a little bit Asian. [My dad] looks straight up like one of his parents is Filipino. I just feel that it puts me at a unique advantage to be able to reach more people and it makes me happy because I’m doing something positive.

Format: Have you had this perspective since you were younger?
Kid Sister: Yeah, absolutely. I had to go through the motions – go through school, and figure out what my place was socially. Once I did that, it was easier for me to be more confident, and easier for me to vibe with more people. Like going to college, there were a lot of other events in my life that helped shape me.

Format: You were a choir member during your Catholic school days.
Kid Sister: [Laughs] I was in choir, used to be bustin’ all kinda notes, yeah! I mean I was a choir dork, in musical theatre, all of that.

Format: If I’m not mistaken, you also studied musical theater and have a degree in film, so you must have always had an inherent interest in the arts since childhood. Has being in the music industry helped that interest expand, or has it hindered it?
Kid Sister: Yeah it’s helped for sure. It’s helped me figure out where I want to go and where I want to be [artistically], because I’m really immersed in it now. I didn’t used to be. Then, I was interested in arts, but when I was working three jobs, I really didn’t have time to do anything artistically related because all my energy was being put into those stupid ass jobs. I hated them so much! Now that this is my full-time thing, I just feel blessed. I feel like “Wow, its finally my turn.”

Format: Funny you say that, because it works out for you in this way: due to the way the music scene has evolved over the past 2-3 years, artists with your originality and freshness have become a novelty. What is your stance on the way things have changed?
Kid Sister: Well yea of course, I’m helping give hip-hop a much-needed facelift. Hip-hop got so gosh darn boring after a while and so formulaic, its almost like hip-hop became a victim of itself because for so long people that made hip-hop music wanted it to become mainstream and it wasn’t. It was this fringe music that was only okay for people from urban settings to like. Like, only Puerto Rican folks and black folks [laughs]. If you liked hip-hop and were a white boy from the ‘burbs you were called names and looked at a certain way. Now, hip-hop has finally gone completely mainstream, which happened in the late ‘90s, with Missy Elliott, and Timbaland, and of course Diddy. Puff was the main reason all that stuff went pop, and it went so far pop that I think people were like, “What the hell is this gimmicky bullshit radio commercial cheesy…this isn’t even edgy anymore.” It used to be cutting edge groundbreaking shit and it wanted to be mainstream so much and make the ever-powerful dollar that something was compromised at the end of the day, and it was the edginess of hip-hop that was compromised.

Format: It definitely has lost a lot of its integrity. But do you consider yourself a hip-hop artist first and foremost?
Kid Sister: Not really. I don’t consider myself anything. I consider myself someone who likes music so much and got lucky. I’m not trying to be like, “Come on man, you can’t put any labels on me” [laughs]. I’m trying to take the cheesiness out of professional music. Everyone is so full of themselves, with the egos, and it’s so silly! I think only a woman can do that! A woman is going to be the one to put a new face to things because with you men – and I love you all, so much – but with all the egos, come on! It kinda has to be a woman to make that pivotal change.

Format: Are you that woman?
Kid Sister: I am that bitch [laughs]! I don’t know, could be, maybe, hopefully!

Format: I think so.
Kid Sister: Well, thanks!

Format: As someone who identifies with both the electro/new wave scene…
Kid Sister: Oh for sure, that’s from living in Chicago. It comes part-and-parcel with living in this city, no matter who you are, even if you’re the hardest ass dude, you will have some house, maybe even a mixtape! I found an orange-ass mixtape the other day in my tax files, and I was like “What is this?!” It was from when I was like 18. Show me the hardest ass dude, and I guarantee that you will find either a radio recording, or mixtape.

Format: Well if you go to DC, it’s a similar dynamic – hard ass dudes that listen to go-go.
Kid Sister: It’s a little different than DC, but I do know that in Chicago, you can be a convicted gang member, like convicted of killing someone, it doesn’t matter. You will like the gayest house ever. All that neck poppin’ stuff. It’s a very strange phenomenon but it’s part of living here.

Format: Do you think that hip-hop segments (two distinctly different sets), do you feel that they can coexist?
Kid Sister: HELL YEAH! That’s what I’m saying. I think a woman needs to be the one to do it ‘cause there’s no ego. I’m not going to take anything anybody says personally, I’m just going to keep doing what I do. I’m not going to be deterred or affected by anything anyone says, I’m going to do what comes naturally to me and, like I said, I’m bi-racial, and I think that has a lot to do with showing that there’s only one side to things no matter what. [Long pause.] I’m sorry I just saw some polish that would look really good on my nails. I got sidetracked!

Format: Are you that bridge?
Kid Sister: That’s my life mission; to make sure that [different genres] can coexist. Then the challenge of growing up bi-racial is seen on either side, black or white, people currently have these preexisting notions that maybe they can’t coexist, or that there always has to be tension. For them, I’m here to say, “That’s not true, and quite the contrary!” That’s what I’m here to prove to people.

Format: How long do you think that will take to accomplish?
Kid Sister: After your first album… I don’t know, I mean it’s not even about albums, to me it’s my life’s work. If I wasn’t doing it through music, I’d be doing it through something else. If I was working at Bath and Body works still, I’d be preaching this stuff there. [Laughs.] That’s how I feel. It’s always been a passion of mine. I think that if I weren’t doing music, I would be studying for my Master’s in Sociology and trying to become a professor. ‘Cause that’s just what I like to do. I will never tire from it, but if I ever do, I don’t know what I’d like to do.

Format: That being said, it’s apparent that it adds a certain depth to your music.
Kid Sister: Well yeah, and thanks. People think that all she does is talk about partying and while that’s true, I don’t pretend to be anything else other than that. There’s a reason why I’m doing what I’m doing, and it made me… [sidetracked again]. Hell no! I bought all this shit and now it’s on sale. I’m sorry! I’m like, “What is this red sticker?” I really feel that, um, I feel that… I lost my place again because I’m at Target. The most distracting place in the world.

Format: All good! I’m still here with you!
Kid Sister: I’d probably work in film again, and would be writing scripts about this experience that I’ve had and how its enlightened me in this society. I feel like I have this heightened understanding of the key to relating well with others and it’s not something that’s hard to learn. Let me ask you – are you a Halfie?

Format: Um, yeah! I’d like to say that I’m happy!
Kid Sister: No not happy, I said a “Halfie.”

Format: Oh a half-breed. Well, I’m Puerto Rican, so I’m like a thousand different things.
Kid Sister: [Laughs] you’re like the ultimate Halfie! And it’s not half-breed, Halfie! Let me chill, I’m not trying to offend anybody in Target tonight. So yeah, the music is obviously important, and I do it because it’s fun, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night and be at peace with myself if there wasn’t another reason behind me getting these ideas out.

Format: You’ve seemingly taken a minimal approach to promotion, and haven’t saturated the web or mixtape circuits with an immense amount of music. But from “Pro-Nails” to “Switchboard” to “Family Reunion,” we’ve seen three different styles – electro, juke, “feel good” hip-hop – as interpreted by you. Are you going to continue to experiment?
Kid Sister: Well it’s not really experimenting, it’s what comes natural to me. It wasn’t, “Let’s experiment writing to this kind of song,” or, “This is what I should write to this.” It just comes naturally to me. So as long as I keep getting beats that I feel, I’m going to let whatever comes out come out! And what’s great about what I’m doing is that on the album, all of these songs can not only coexist… It’s the same philosophy I have about people that I have throughout my album. Not only do these coexist, but also they complement each other. It’s going to be the new thing, the new wave approach. The way it’s going right now is pretty sad. It’s boring, and it’s been boring, but I think it’s taking a turn for the better.

Format: Well I think there are some exceptions to the rule, Kanye being the most apparent, but I agree that where we’re at isn’t the best representation of what hip-hop is. How long before we make that turn?
Kid Sister: A month, a year, I don’t know I couldn’t tell you. All I can tell you is that I can’t make any promises. I’m going to do what makes me happy and hopefully I’ll make other people happy too. Seriously, that’s the great thing about my story and my case is that I feel like I’m the girl who just didn’t try. I did what came completely natural and made me feel good, and it came across and that people just got it. It was just me and my friends getting together making music that made us happy and that we felt was cool, and people were like, “They really don’t give a fuck. They’re doing some crazy shit and something that’s never been done before.” I mean, look at my album. I have David Banner and Kanye on these tracks, and on the next track I have this obscure French electronic producer. That has never happened in music yet! People look at it and are like, “Wow!” To us, it’s just about chemistry, because everyone that’s working with us is so invested in the project that we’re working on, and it’s not fake. It’s friends helping friends and I think that comes across.

Format: Being affiliated with Kanye and even more closely affiliated with A-Trak, how has being surrounded by talented, forward thinking individuals affected you and the creative process?
Kid Sister: It’s always encouraging to have Kanye saying, “That’s dope.” It’s always encouraging to hear those things. It’s a boost to your ego, and I must say that my ego is not crazy. I only have one, but before the Kanyes and the David Banners and Pharrells, it was me, my brother and my boyfriend, and they influenced me the most.

Format: I’m sure their opinions hold the most weight still.
Kid Sister: Of course they do! It’s because we do what we do! It has nothing to do with outside influences. We started this by ourselves, but of course Owen and Josh and Kurt and Dave from Chromeo are the opinions that matter most to me. And everything else is like adding a cherry on top of the sundae. It’s true!

Format: You, Janelle Monae, Santogold specifically have ushered in such an empowering new perspective on women not only in pop music, but pop culture in general. How do you feel about that?
Kid Sister: We’re like it’s okay to be weird, and it’s not even that weird. It’s okay to be smart and strong, and decisive, I think that’s how we look at things. Well let me just speak for myself.

Format: What’s your forecast on what’s going to happen with this onslaught of female talent?
Kid Sister: I can’t tell you! I worked at bath and body works two years ago, and this music thing is very new to me. I can tell you where I hope it goes! I can say that I hope I continue to work and continue to have opportunities and go all the way to the top. But again, if its not music it’s the sociology professor job, I’m going to be able to do me and do what I have to do regardless. But yeah, it would be good if this could keep going on. But nothing’s forever. I only plan on doing this another two years and then do something else.

Format: Because you get bored with things quickly?
Kid Sister: I think that life is all about change and you need to change it up, at least I do. I’d like to do television and film and stuff, in the future.

Format: Not to put you on the spot, or ask the generic question, but the album’s name is Dream Date. Why did you title it that and what does your Dream Date consist of?
Kid Sister: [Laughs] Oh! I haven’t gotten that question at all before. Um, I titled it that because I was out to dinner with one of my friends and we heard the WWE wouldn’t let us use [previous album name] Coco B. Ware. Which for the record totally crushed me because I had my heart set on that title, but we were sitting around this bar talking, thinking what we should name the album, and thought, “Let’s name it something silly from our childhood, reference something funny, something girly.” Super electric mall madness [laughs]? I was like, “That’s cool!” But it was too long. And then it was like “Girl Talk,” but that’s the name of the MP3 player guy. But we just kept thinking of girly board games, and then it was, “How about dream date?” Yeah! At the time, it was supposed to come out on November 4th, so it was like “Yeah! Barack Obama! Dream Date! My Dream Date,” but to make a long story longer, my dream date would be with Barack Obama on November 4th. He’s my husband! But I feel like my real dream date would be with my real husband, DJ A-Trak. We never get to go out because we’re so busy, and we would go to Six Flags or something like that. Something real trashy, like, “Baby, take me to Magic Mountain!”

Format: That’s what it is. Pleasure chopping it up with you!
Kid Sister: For sure! Chop it up all the way! Ginsu fever! Take care!

Olivia wanted to get the attention of the KTL readers since we gave her the most votes to replace Alba as our KTL girl.  What did she do? She sent me a text message with her new revamped site and then asked me over Twitter if I posted it yet. I told her that I’ve been busy but would get to it.  Since I had some free time after practicing my Coachella set, I decided to give you all the link.  Let me know what you think of the site and got some pics for Anthony after the jump.  Thanks to Ego for the info.

Oliviamunn.com

* All of the above is not true, except that her site is revamped and I had free time today.