Kid Sister on the DX

I heard my homegirl rocked the Nat Museum in LA recently. Wish I could’ve been there. Glad to see she is finally getting some shine. I am just doing my part to get her there. HipHopDX is a little late with their interview but they get props for putting her on the site finally. Cool words about her hip-hop sound and love the fact that she and I love 90’s R&B. (Stop hating - you know you got Jodeci on your ipod.) Full interview after the jump…

Alex Thorton from HipHopDX writes:

It’s hard for a new artist to ask for much more than having one of the hottest artists in the industry jump on your lead single and video, and that’s exactly what Kid Sister got when Kanye West ended up doing a guest spot on “Pro Nails.” The track and its inclusion on West’s Can’t Tell Me Nothing Mixtape gave Kid Sister’scareer a huge boost in its early stages, but despite what you might assume, the assist wasn’t the result of the usual label politics andback-scratching that typically makes these things happen.

“With the Kanye thing, I never asked for that. When I saw him, I wasn’t like ‘Hey, what’s up on a collaboration,” she explains. Instead, Kanye heard
the song, liked it and wanted to be on it; that was that. The extra
hype for his deejay’s new artist really was just an extra benefit.
While Chi-town emcees may not be represented on the national scene in
the same numbers as those from the east, south and west, Chicago emcees
stick together.

The Windy City has a deep history both in Hip Hop and House music and Kid Sister will follow in those steps with an album that has her rapping over tracks by both Hip Hop and Dance producers. Kid Sis largely attributes her wide range in tastes to her mixed heritage, and while her favorite music is mid/late
’90s R&B, she also mentions that she grew up listening to Capone-N-Noreaga and started sneaking into clubs at the age of 12 to cop mixtapes and hear the latest records. “I had a couple of girlfriends who would get me fake IDs.”

These days, most emcees of either gender are more concerned with
proving how tough they are than just having a good time, so the humor
and energy that Kid Sister shares with earlier rappers makes her rare in 2008. Her range might
make her difficult to categorize, but her ties with the past make her
the future. Whatever you call her, Kid Sister is next.

Hailing From: Chicago, Illinois.

Current Works: Recently released the video for “Pro Nails” with Kanye West, plus singles “Switch Board” and “Control” from forthcoming debut.

Connects: A-Trak, Flosstradamus, Chromeo and Kanye West.

Life before music: “I was riding my bike between three different jobs working at a Reggae bar, a baby clothing store and at Bath & Body Works putting lotion on old ladies’ skin. It wasn’t even the mall! It was
like a strip mall with a golf store, a check-cashing place and a Chuck E. Cheez’s.
At least I got some lotion out of it… When I got to college, I tried
and tried and tried and tried and tried to get the desk job with the
health insurance, but it wasn’t quite that simple; I was letting that
get in the way of what I really wanted to do.”

Debating whether or not to pursue rap: “I’ve been
performing all my life. I did some work with community theatre and was
in choir since I was seven or eight years old. It was something that I
always did and enjoyed but never really thought of as a traditional
skill; it was definitely not strategized or planned. I have a great
aunt who was kind of like my mentor and she had been successful in her
life as a performer. She would tell me, ‘You’re such a great performer
and it would be a shame if you didn’t get back into it,’ and I’m like,
‘Yeah yeah yeah, that’s easy for you to say, you’re not the one
starving, you’re not the one working three jobs.’ Still, she kept
telling me, ‘Get into it, get into it.’”

Beginning to perform: “I was a little depressed
one day thinking about it and I was like, ‘I’m already poor, so let me
see what I can do because I’ve got nothing to lose.’ I saw my brother [J2K of Flosstradamus]
traveling a lot and I saw them having so much fun. When I started my
thing, they had just started out maybe two months before that and I
would go to their parties to support them. It wasn’t that no one came,
but it was just our friends and people like that so I thought, ‘Let me
get up there and give it a shot.’

On coming up so fast: “It’s been a warp-speed
ascension out of nowhere; it’s crazy. I can’t really understand how it
happened so fast. It’s nothing but a gift from God dropping out the sky
and falling in my lap. I never even asked for this, it’s just something
that I feel that I’ve been favored for. Still, you have to be hungry
about your shit; you have to be passionate.”

On the competitive nature of female rappers: “It’s
so silly… if you look at it for what it really is, we need to all bond
together and lift each other because there aren’t that many of us.
We’re always gonna be pulled apart and scrutinized and turned on each
other in a way that men can never be because there’s so many of them.”

Mixing her Hip Hop and Dance roots for the album: “It’s
gonna be right in the middle. I’m biracial, so I’m used to working
right in the middle because my whole life has been a balancing act. I
don’t look at that as a bad thing though; I’m not the kind of person
who ever tried to give up one side or the other of my culture, so what
you hear in my music is a direct reflection of who I am; it’s a blend.”

To the fans: “Thank you so, so much for the love
and I can’t wait to see you on the road. The gratitude I have is
indescribable. I just feel so lucky and so blessed, so what can I say
other than ‘thank you’?“