The Times Magazine Feature (2002)

"Single White Rapper"
It's not quite what you'd expect the daughter of white, middle-class hippy therapists to end up doing… but New York-born Concetta Kirschner, aka Princess Superstar, has been hailed the female Eminem, poised for mainstream success with her funny, X-rated brand of rap.

Bawdy bottle-blonde rapper Princess Superstar is holding court with The Times in the tearoom of a chintzy luxury hotel off London's Oxford Street. At first the 28-year-old New Yorker hides behind her Gucci shades and complains about being a little the worse for wear as she orders her first coffee of the day. Its 3pm. Looking a bit out of place among the assembled upscale tourist tea-takers in her adidas tracksuit top, Nike trainers and the Harry Winston diamond "C" pendant that rests in her buxom cleavage, she rips through a racy anecdote from the night involving a "thugged-out guy" and what's known in some circles as dining at the Y. Her Y. Perked up by the coffee and the thought of her own bad behaviour, she pops the glasses on top other blonde mane. And then she winks. "If a Princess sees what she wants, she's got to get it," she states. This is all delivered in a brassy NewYork bellow that fills the annexe. The tourists look a little shocked - this wasn't their idea of genteel English high tea. Even a Japanese couple seem to have understood enough of it to blush.

Rap, hip-hop... whats the first thing you think of? Great tunes to shake your booty to, but then what? Guns and drive-by shootings. Men boasting about their endowments and what they're going to do with them. The F-word and the MF-word. Drugs and gang violence. Women casually described as bitches and hos. Uzis. Glocks. From whichever way, it's not a world that you'd be expecting the female, Sicilian-Russian-Polish-Jewish, middle-class offspring of two hippy therapists to be thriving in. But this is what Concetta Kirschner, aka Princess Superstar, is doing. Her self-produced, written and performed, X-rated, hilarious album Princess Superstar Is features collaborations with way-credible hip-hop luminaries such as Kool Keith and Bahamadia.

The rap community accepts and respects Princess Superstar because she's not trying to be something she isn't. She's been described as the hip-hop Debbie Harry, the white Lil' Kim, the blonde Pink, the female Eminem ("All hail the real Slim Shady!" crowed the NME), but prefers the ironic moniker the "black Shirley Temple". But, like Eminem, she isn't trying to be black. Her take on hip-hop is an outsiders take. Which is maybe why Britain, unburdened by the rigid politics of the US music business, is turning out to be a sanctuary.

Not only has she won the respect of the hip-hop underground here but the arty fashionista set are hot on her sneakers. For one, Jarvis Cocker likes what he sees. Last November he brought her over to London to perform at his occasional club night Desperate at the officers' mess at Pentonville Prison. Here she wowed the moody crowd with her rap repartee, butt-grinding beats and Union Jack bra. So much so that Jarvis invited her to support Pulp on a few dates.

Fellow Hoxton darling and fash-mag-folkie Beth Orton struck up a friendship with Kirschner and appears on Princess Superstar Is in a duet. Turbo-gobbed Radio 1 breakfast show DJ Sara Cox is another fan and made her fruity single Bad Babysitter her record of the week. In fact, you could describe Princess Superstar as a rapping Sara Cox. That is, if Cox had been born in Harlem and been president of her school Latin society. More of that later. Other notable fans include Sarah Jessica Parker whose Sex and the City shoe'd-in one of her tracks, Wet! Wet! Wet!, and William Orbit, who left her a long, rambling voicemail praising her "complete brilliance".

He's right, and what's most brilliant are her lyrics, which are laugh-out-loud funny. For where other female rappers do super-explicit sex rhymes, and mirror the witless bravado of their male counterparts, Princess Superstar spins an altogether more playful, ironic line of tease. If her turntables ever seize up, a career in stand-up beckons.

A few weeks later at her local Italian corner cafe in the East Village of New York, a more demure Kirschner is grazing on a salad and explaining how she got mixed-up in rap. Perceptive, quick to agree and always sharpening her punchlines, she's a great lunch date. She's joking that being born in Spanish Harlem is where she gets all her street cred: "I was on the streets in my diapers. I was in a little baby gang, sitting on the stoop drinking a 40oz of milk."

When she was three her parents upped and moved to rural Pennsylvania. "I had no friends, so I used to go to the woods and talk to my imaginary friends." After a while her parents' psychiatric practice began to thrive and they moved to the suburbs: "That's when I made some real friends." The best one was a born-again Christian who convinced her she'd burn in hell if she didn't pray to Jesus. So at a county fair when she won a prize at a shy she chose a mirror with an engraving of Jesus. Every night she would kiss the mirror and pray, until one day her father saw her and asked her what she was doing. "I'm kissing a mirror of Jesus," she said. "That's not Jesus that's Jim Morrison," he said. It was too late. This deviant mould had been set.

Next they moved to a Philadelphia suburb, where Kirschner was enrolled in a private school: "It was like Beverly Hills 90210 - awful but I got the most incredible education. I was even president of the Latin club." But around this time she also got her first taster of hip-hop. Her music-mad parents would go dancing at a gay club because it had the best tunes, and ask the DJ for names of hot records to buy their daughter. They bought her a breakdancing compilation but it didn't make much impression. It wasn't until she heard Kurtis Blow that her appetite got whetted. "To me it was just weird. This guy just talking over his beats. It didn't make any sense, but I was fascinated by it."

Back at school she wasn't having much fun. "I was a little bit smart and nobody smart is popular," she says sipping on tomato soup. At 17, she graduated early, packed her bags and headed for New York to study drama at NYU. Music began to muscle out acting as Kirschner's ambition and she became the guitarist in an all-girl psychedelic pop band called the Gamma Rays. She started to write songs but the band's singer wouldn't let her sing them. She told her she'd have to start her own band if she wanted to sing. "So I did." And then Princess Superstar was born.

Soon, she made a demo tape, psychedelia on one side, her inaugural rhymes on the other. It caught the attention of the College Music Journal, they printed her phone number and "next day I have all these major labels calling me, sending limos to my house, being taken out to fancy restaurants". They wanted to change her act, stop her rapping, they wanted her to do a duet with Bryan Adams. "They would have turned me into some weird cheesy white girl rapper - and eventually I would have been dropped." She puts down her soup spoon.

But at that point Kirschner, who was a waitress in a jazz restaurant at the time, took things into her own hands. In 1995 an independent label offered her a budget of $10,000 to make an album. That became Strictly Platinum, her first album. The Village Voice hailed it "hilariously cool". Then that label ceased trading: "I was exasperated. I thought I'd start my own label. In '97 I called everyone I knew for advice, put it all on my credit card and did it. I'm happy I did."

The result was her second album, CEO, which came out on her own A Big Rich Major Label, and then 2000s Last of the Great 20th Century Composers ("fresh and funny as hell", said Time Out New York) on her by now renamed the Corrupt Conglomerate label (Kirschner never wastes an opportunity to make a point). All these albums got great press but her distribution and marketing infrastructure - she was running the label from the stationery cupboard of the Financial Women's Association and doing her own flyposting - ensured sales were humble.

Then hip independent label !K7 offered to make music her day job. On her own terms. And her fourth album, Princess Superstar Is, should be the one that ensures her reach goes beyond the artsy raparazzi to the record-buying masses, "the kids". Yep, mainstream success is only a few curse words away.

Back in Philadelphia two old hippies will be beaming. Although they scrimped to put her through private school, her parents dig having a rapping daughter. "My parents are huge fans. I try and give them the clean versions," she points out. "My father loves music, so I guess I'm living out his dream - although I guess he never thought he'd produce a rapping daughter."

On her fourth album, with a record deal, it looks like she might be rapping for some time to come. Even when she's drawing a pension. "I always think about that, getting old, having a walker and being like, 'I'm a Bad Babysitter'. If I can be like Charo [think Margarita Pracatan meets Eartha Kitt] then sign me up!" she whoops. "She's like 60, her tits are always out, she wears gold-lame bikini bottoms and she entertains seven nights a week in Vegas." She's cranking up the volume again, filling up the room, but here at her friendly local, where she gets her morning muffin, they are used to it.

Later we're in the limo rumbling down to Manhattan's location numero uno, the fashionably drab meat-packing district. Sipping on a Diet Coke while she gets her make-up touched up, Concetta ponders her journey from Pennsylvania to "Downtown royalty" (Time Out New "Kirk) via the stationery cupboard. "I'm not exactly sure how I got here either. All I know is I love to play with words - so that's why I chose to rap. Rap is reinvigorating the English language because you can rhyme words that shouldn't really be in a sentence together. To me its like Shakespeare when its done right. There, I think The Times will like that." Kirschner is nothing if not media savvy.

Not everyone "gets" her, though. "I've been pretty lucky, the press understand the irony and the humour, but sometimes that irony will go over peoples heads and that's when I get into trouble, because they think I'm just talking about sex, sex, sex, all the time. I know I shouldn't be surprised: Americans aren't supposed to have irony," she smirks, "but I'm a very strange American." It would be impolite to disagree.

Published in The Times Magazine on February 16, 2002
Interview by Ian Tucker
Photographs by Mike Persson

 
Article reprinted without permission.