Who Is Kreayshawn?

Kreayshawn (pronounced “cray-shon”) is a rapper (slash cinematographer, slash variety of things and non-things) whose video “Gucci Gucci” hit the internet last week, and which I turned off after 20 seconds because it was annoying (see above). Then all weekend my cooler friends on Facebook and Twitter kept talking about it (oh no, I just called young people I’ve never met “friends”), so I watched the video again and it’s kind of as amazing as it is annoying. Plus “one big room, full of bad bitches” is a genius hook.

But who is Kreayshawn? She’s a 21-year-old Bay Area Berkeley Film School dropout named Natassia Zolot who embraces her thin, white-girl voice and her flail-y, spindly arms, and who’s sort of like Ke$ha and Amy Winehouse (aesthetically at least), and also Die Antwoord’s Yolandi Vi$$er, and Nicki Minaj (kind of?) and Odd Future and Lil’ B, and basically that whole crop of young people who look and act like cartoons, and where you can’t tell how much of the joke they’re in on and how much of the joke you just don’t get because you’re old, or if everything is just stupider but funner-looking now. “You should see my crew, we’re like Bratz dolls,” she says in this half idiotic, half entertaining video interview. “Like one of every race. And then, like, two different girls with different hair colors and shit, you know what I’m saying? It’s tight.”

From the same interview, and in response to the question “What makes a bitch real?” she explains, “Can’t have no quiet bitches on the team. She has to party, she has to drink, she’s gotta smoke weed. Because if you don’t, we’re not even on the same plane.” Kreayshawn looks so fragile and sounds so silly sometimes, but she never seems nervous, which is hypnotic to watch.

Here’s her first video, “Bumpin’ Bumpin’” from last summer. It’s goofy and scrappy, but it features a great Fred Flinstone hoodie. And if we’re throwing out names and actually trying to consider Kreayshawn as a real musician, which who even knows, there’s also debts paid to Missy Elliot and Lady Sovereign — insofar as they’re all non-hypersexual female rappers — and … ahh, I give up. Here’s that video.

“I am a piece of shit, but I am raw talent,” she says on her website.

Do these kids know how blurry and terrible those tattoos will look in 10 years? Kreayshawn’s also on Twitter (17K followers) and Tumblr, and she’s part of the White Girl Mob — a crew consisting of her, Lil Debbie (a DJ), and fellow rapper V-Nasty (who I believe is the girl in the chunky glasses in “Gucci Gucci”), and is it possible for people to be so young and colorful that you can actually feel yourself dying? They have a show on May 27 in San Francisco if anyone wants to report back.