The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

The female rap game has always had its limitations, whether it’s behavioural issues (with leading lights Foxy Brown in and out of jail and Remy Ma definitely in), image issues (with Lil’ Kim’s face currently locked up in plastic restrictions), or the ubiquitous selling of sex, sex and more sex. Rap’s been desperately in need of a new star that’s willing to put the lip gloss down (sorry Lil’ Mama), put the ill na na away and put a little bit of fun back into the over-polished, under appreciated world of female hip hop.

Earlier this year, MTV got hit with ‘Pro Nails’, an ode to nail salons that features the entirely-too-massive Kanye West, world-champion scratch DJ A-Trak and a well-versed girl from Chicago who few mainstream heads recognised: the sassy, fresh-faced Kid Sister. The colourful video weaves in and out of chart-friendly and underground ideas, flirting between a chopped and screwed chorus and A-Trak’s housey banger of a beat, and there’s even a tease of ‘Switch Board’, Kid Sister’s all-out juke assault (a frenetic beat relatively unknown outside of Chicago’s 312 area code), at the end of the video.

It left a league of MTV viewers doing the switch board themselves and wondering who exactly Kid Sister is. The abridged answer: sister of Josh ‘J2K’ Young (half of club-tearing Chicagoan DJs/producers Flosstradamus), girlfriend of A-Trak (who happens to be Kayne’s tour DJ), and damn straight living proof that anything is possible. Just over two years ago, Kid Sister was a job-juggling retail manager. Now she’s hip hop’s queen in waiting - a fiercely witted rapper already touring globally and gracing red carpets, and she may soon be offered her own MTV show.

“Whoah, EGO TRIP!” she hollers. “My first show was Halloween 2005. So things are really, really crazy. Back then, I was working three jobs. I feel blessed. It’s completely surreal - I feel like I’ve won the lottery every single day.”

Kid Sister’s very appeal is that she’s not trying to appeal to anyone; she’s just being herself, and having a big old laugh while doing so. “I tend to do what comes naturally to me, and that means being real silly and acting a fool,” she says. “You should look on my MySpace page; you’ll see a picture of me at the Sex In The City premiere chunking up a DEUCE!” She creases up at the recollection of throwing the paparazzi a sideways peace sign. “I’m not trying to be the skinniest bitch, I’m not trying to be the sexiest bitch, I’m trying to be the girl who has the most fun.”

Kid Sister, known to her friends as Melisa Young, grew up on the southside of Chicago. It’s hard to imagine a girl as uninhibited and open-minded as her attending a predominantly Polish Catholic school and listening to WFMT (Chicago’s classical music station), but that’s exactly what she did. It wasn’t until she moved to a much more culturally mixed school that her ears and eyes took a dive deep into the underground. “I started getting into house music,” she says. “I went to my first club when I was 12 and that’s when I first heard ‘The Percolator’ [Cajmere’s Chicago booty house classic] and bought the Percolator mixtape. My two girlfriends back then were really bad. I was the good Catholic girl and they were the bad girls.”

In the nineties, house music and its various offshoots still reigned Chicago’s clubs and airwaves. In particular, around 1992, Roland 808s and 909s paired up with wild, sexually charged lyrics, and booty house and ghetto house (otherwise known as juke) were born as Chicago’s answer to Miami bass. Like every other teenage girl in the Chicagoland area, Melisa was hooked. In her songs today, the influence is absolute: references to Chi-town are glittered throughout her verses and juke party vibes ooze through each beat. But there’s a difference. “I feel like, out of the artists out there, I’m not as dirty,” she explains. “Even though I grew up listening to house music, booty house, ghetto house... I grew up with bang, bang, skeet, skeet, skeet, and that’s pretty dirty, you know?” She laughs. “It’s just one of those things where you may like something but it doesn’t necessarily reflect who you are.”

Melisa was born in 1980 to an Irish mother and an African American father. When discussing her upbringing, she scoffs: “People forget that African American is African A-MER-I-CAN. At the end of the day, we were a very American family - we went to the Carnival, had cable, watched America’s Funniest Home Videos on Sundays... And let me tell you - my dad, as black as he is, was in a Talking Heads cover band when I was little. I consider it a blessing to have been raised that way because I feel like I’m culturally connected to more people. There are a lot of people who haven’t had that experience. I think that’s why I’m as social as I am, because I can relate to a lot of different people.”

Perhaps that also explains how she managed to effortlessly enjoy slinging retail for as many years as she did and, strangely enough, she doesn’t feel like her job today as an MC is much different from her days selling lotions at The Body Shop. “The number one objective for me when I was managing retail stores was to meet the customer and establish a connection,” she says. “Every now and then, I’d get a really cool customer that I’d just hit it off with. I have one-time customers that are now good friends and I want my shows to be like that - how it was in my retail days. I’m trying to establish a connection with my audience, and it seems like my audience are all cool customers now - people I’d be friends with.”

So how did she end up making the move from clipping tags to ripping mics? Fed up with riding a bike to her three jobs during the Chicago winter (weather comparable to the Arctic) and tired of watching her brother hustle more dollars through music, she decided to give it a go herself. “My first song was called ‘Crush On You’ and it was really, really bad,” she says, laughing. “I played it for my brother and he said it was good but he was ly-ing. He lied to me until he felt he could actually tell me the truth.”

The truth is that it wasn’t long before her developing style became flawless. She spits fire between melodic Southside drawls and an unmatched double-time flow, using shit-hot delivery and rhythm as an outlet for her hilarious hood-linked musings. Her attitude and lyrical flair turned out to be the perfect companion for Flosstradamus’s no-holds-barred DJing style, and it soon became the norm for her to jump on the mic at their gigs in the dingy Town Hall Pub. Each month, Melisa would pump up the volume as the wildest range of people (even for Boystown - Chicago’s diverse, rainbow-covered neighbourhood) got down: hipsters p-popping to Ludacris, hip hop heads getting buck with Weezer, art school geeks jumping on each other to the tune of Alice Deejay... A few months later, shortly after she’d lent her vocals to the Flosstradamus-produced ‘Let Me Bang’ (a DJ Deeon remake), Melisa found herself pictured between her brother and Curt Cameruci, Flossy’s other half, on the cover for Urb magazine’s ‘The Next 1000’ issue.

Her fateful meeting with A-Trak at the Pitchfork/Intonation festival in the steaming hot summer of 2006 was round the corner. “I was very shy,” she confesses. “We met and got talking for a minute and he was like, ‘I want to work with you!’ I was like, ‘Hey, look at that dog over there! Isn’t that a nice dog?’ I was saying the worst things possible. But eventually I overcame my shyness and we made ‘Damn Girl’ ...in my closet. It was in my CLOSET, because we didn’t have a studio.”

They went on recording what would become ghetto gold on the underground, in the middle of the “dog days” of that scorching Chicago summer. “We only had one window air conditioner!” she remembers. “But we got it done and then that was kind of the beginning of everything.”

Beyond being a starting point for Kid Sister, ‘Damn Girl’ also brought A-Trak out of the pervading pigeon-holed title of scratch DJ and straight to the forefront of the buzzing club/Bmore/electro house scenes, à la Ed Banger and Mad Decent, as both a producer and record label owner (he co-runs the Brooklyn-based label Fool’s Gold with the Nick Catchdubs). The track additionally cemented the relationship between Kid Sister and A-Trak, a blogger’s dream come true. But wining and dining isn’t always easy for the two international-bound trendsetters. “Touring together isn’t really ideal because we’re working,” says Melisa. “Sometimes we’ll do shows together and that’s always fun, but it’s not exactly quality time - we’re always running around doing interviews, trying to get to soundcheck, to dinner, to see all of our friends... So we like to go on vacation.”

Living by today’s pace, where her relationship with A-Trak is perpetually idolised and scrutinised, and her tracks are picked up by blogs around the world the second they’re finished, it’s often difficult to keep up. Moreover, Kid Sister is trying to navigate a sensationalised world in which women are continually trapped in a persona - be it a girl-gone-wild substance abuser, a posh-girl-turned-street, a skin-baring lesbian. But, refreshingly, Melisa’s innate star power is strong enough to break any shackles. Onstage, her natural charisma is overpowering - even more dazzling than her sparkly outfits - and if each performance looks as though she’s having the time of her life, it’s because she genuinely is. “I want my whole show to just be me having fun and joking onstage,” she says. “I don’t want there to be some weird aesthetic or some impossible ideal to aspire to. Really, it’s not about that.”

The sense of something special has buzzed around Kid Sister since her very first show: a blink of the eye and she was touring Europe’s club circuit, with only four songs to perform. Now a mainstream takeover seems to be inevitable, especially considering she’s nominated for a BET Award for ‘Best Female Hip Hop Artist’ alongside Missy Elliott, Eve, Lil’ Mama, and Trina, and she hasn’t even released an album yet. The highly-anticipated album, which features producers as widely ranged as Trackademicks, A-Trak, Diplo, Spank Rock’s XXXChange, and Infamous and Develop (the Miami duo behind the Dipset beat), is out this summer in the States, autumn here. “It’s called Koko B. Ware,” she proudly says. “It’s named after my favourite wrestler on WWF - Koko motherfucking B. Ware. He’s like this big black man drag queen.”

From now until the album’s release, the name Kid Sister sits on everyone’s lips, from club freaks (her re-take of The Count and Sinden’s ‘Beeper’ is still blowing up the underground radar), to MTV fiends, to pop royalty. “I went to go see Kanye on tour the other day, and Chris Brown came up to me, like, ‘I’m so honoured to meet you!’” she divulges. “Chris BROWN!? And then, a couple hours later, Rhianna, separately, comes up to me and is, like, ‘Oh my god, is that Kid Sister?’” She stops for a breath. “I’m freaking out!”

But with the future looking so bright - it’s near blinding - at least she’s still at ease. “I’ll just keep cruising through,” she laughs. “With nails on.”

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