The question I expect to be asked from today onwards is no longer, “Why is there a red-on-yellow mural of a naked chicken man in your bedroom?” The answer to this question is pretty good, but I suspect it will soon be surpassed by, “Why is there a five-foot-square Rasterbation of the album cover for Khia’s Gangstress in your hallway?”
The short answer is, “Because Khia is fucking amazing,” but I wouldn’t be a very good journalist if I left it at that. Let me try to enumerate the ways in which I love what basically amounts to a middling sex-rapper from Atlanta.
The way that most people likely know about Khia, if they do at all, is from the song “My Neck, My Back (Lick It),” which was not the only single from her 2002 debut, Thug Misses, but it might as well have been; even if she had followed up “My Neck, My Back” with “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Hey Ya,” it seems reasonable to assume that what most people would be talking about when they talk about Khia is the fact that, finally, somebody had scored a hit single whose chorus was concerned with analingus. There is no subtext to this song; there is no narrative around which butt-licking is draped. It’s basically the Occam’s Razor of sex rap — any song that makes Ludacris’s “What’s Your Fantasy?” seem coy can only have been honed and refined down to its bare essentials, much in the way that a diamond is really just a lump of coal without all the fucking around.
The song only hit #42 on the American Billboard charts, but it went to #4 in the UK. It’s not uncommon for this to happen; they’re different markets. However, in this case, there was an x-factor: The video made for the UK market did not actually show Khia. It showed, instead, a stable of women reenacting, for all intents and purposes, the good parts of The Bikini Car Wash Company; Khia was nowhere in sight. The American video, on the other hand, did feature her. It also featured what appears to be a typical Atlantean summer house party, making itself distinct from, say, MC Hammer’s “Pumps and a Bump” video1 by having cost maybe sixty dollars and featuring what I am assuming is Khia’s own backyard.
There is a reason why she shot another video for this single, and why she did not participate in it: After the video’s release in the US, she was hit with a staggering amount of backlash for the video, both because, yes, it features a Slip ‘N Slide and an inflatable raft shaped like a dinosaur, rather than helicopters and gold-plated cellphones, but also because, to be honest, Khia is sort of weird-looking. This may be unfair — Khia is certainly no uglier than either Ying Yang Twin, for example — but in a field where one’s success as an artist is directly correlative to coaxing an audience to fuck them, anyone with a genetic makeup that is anything but flawless has their work cut out for them2.
Khia did not, however, manage to secure a foothold steady enough to support her second single (possibly also because her second single is sort of crappy; “When I Meet My King” would have been a far smarter choice, considering it sounds like Seventeen Seconds-era Cure trying their hand at Miami bass). Not only did she drop off the charts, but she also became the target of the Internet’s rumor mills, with people claiming that she had been shot to death by her boyfriend, or had died of AIDS. It didn’t help her cause that Thug Misses was spotty (or that “My Neck” was sequenced first, probably negating the need for anyone to listen to the rest of it), and nobody was interested in throwing her a guest appearance, so it’s only recently that anyone’s seen anything of her.
What was really genius, it turns out, and what makes me love Khia so hard, was how she dealt with the criticism — all of which is only just now coming to light. Khia, as it turns out, doesn’t fuck around. When her video was razed and people started throwing fat jokes around, she simply made another one (and charted 38 slots higher in the UK as a result), and then promptly lost 50 pounds. When parodies of her single and its video started popping up, she took the most coherent one (Too $hort’s “My Dick, My Sack,” which is also exactly what it sounds like) and tossed it on her record as a bonus track. But, in what I consider her finest move, when someone found the 20-odd mugshots she’d racked up over the years, she made them her sophomore album’s cover.
This is a ballsy move, but I think it works in her favor for one salient reason: In every single one of these mugshots, Khia looks like she’s just had a really great time. These aren’t the sallow faces of someone who’s hit the bottom and is scooped off of the curbside by two cops, needles showering out of their pockets — these aren’t even the faces of someone who’s in a bad mood. Instead, you get the sense that Khia parties so hard, she needs to cool off in the drunk tank; that maybe she did twelve shooters at Sh-Boom’s, made a guy go down on her on the sink in the ladies’ room, then set fire to a mattress and dragged it out into the street — and then did it seventeen more times.
And this perfectly encapsulates what I suspect about Khia: That she is so awesome, that any complaint you could level at her can be countered with proof that she’s way more fun than anyone else, and does not give a shit about your problems. When you get down to it, she is almost preternaturally unconcerned with other people. When Khia declared herself “Queen of the South,” rapper Jacki-O pointed out that she herself had already appointed herself as such; Khia’s response was, basically, “Well, I’m more popular.” At one point on Thug Misses, Khia declares that she is “that platinum bitch,” which I can only view in light of Trina’s claim that she is herself “the diamond princess.” Of course Khia would nickname herself after a more precious metal than Trina. In an interview with Urbanfans.com, when asked why she had been so silent for the past four years, Khia claimed to hate taking feature positions on songs (which would explain why all she’s done in four years is appear on one Trick Daddy song), but three paragraphs later, hypes up her appearances with T.I. and Trick, and expresses desire to work with Lil’ Wayne. (But not, apparently, Slim Thug, even though “I’m A Queen” implies that we can certainly question him as to the relative worth of Khia’s vagina.)
She’s also savvy enough as a businesswoman to attempt to place herself in a better position to make money, which I suspect was the impetus behind moving away from Artemis Records — yes, the same Artemis records that feature Steve Earle, Warron Zevon, and Better Than Ezra — as well as behind her inexplicable retooling of her only hit single as a way to talk up the New Jersey Nets before the 2002 NBA finals.3 (Again: Khia lives in Atlanta, Georgia.) In fact, Khia appears to have started her own label and promotional company, even though her official website sort of belies this fact. The best part about all of this is the fact that what heading her own promo team seems to imply is, rather than starting a street team and having people flyer around town (or, if you’re Hawthorne Heights, to hide Ne-Yo’s album), that if you give Khia $24, she will record your cellphone’s voicemail message for you. Or, that if you’re going to be in NYC, you should come hang out with her. (Also, Khia responds to her own message board, something that I suspect Jay-Z does not do.) And you know what? Based on all of this information, I am one hundred percent positive that I would love to hang out with her. It’s pretty audacious that Trina implies that she will fuck you for the sum of $20,000, but if I showed up at Trina’s house with a suitcase full of unmarked 20s, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t go through with it. (I’m also pretty sure that Lil’ Wayne would shoot me in the stomach.) I am absolutely sure that after my next paycheck, Khia will be telling you that she is the platinum bitch, but that Stephen cannot come to the phone, but if you leave your name and number, he’ll snatch your message back. Holla.
So, yes: When I saw Gangstress’s album cover, you bet your ass I was excited; excited enough to plaster my wall with it. (We talked briefly about wheatpasting it to the side of a police station, but that seems like something that only Khia herself would actually have the balls to do.) And the thing of it is: Based on the unevenness of Thug Misses, I really have no reassurance that her new record will even be any good. Her website implies that you can stream it, but the Flash code is fucked up, and I’ve already heard “Snatch the Cat Back” fifty times on her Myspace profile. “Snatch the Cat Back,” for the record, is pretty great, and the video is even better; it seems to imply that Khia lives in Dark City, and that the way she expresses to people that she regrets fucking them is to show them that she is not wearing a bra. (At this point, after all this erstwhile research, I am fairly convinced that she doesn’t even own one.) The best part is that if Khia really did live in some cyberpunk futurescape, and if this video were not full of low-rent special effects, but were actually shot with a pair of DV cameras, this would basically be the same thing as the “My Neck” video. None of the places she’s gyrating in are very lush, or even really very cool; there’s the obligatory room full of fluorescent lights, of course, but she also appears…in the road? In an empty room? It’s like she managed to find a cheap place in an apartment complex where robots live. And I think that might be the best thing of all — that no matter the level of Khia’s fame or the girth of her bank account, she remains Khia, and she could give a shit if you care. Even in space.
1 Which was itself received poorly by the American public — and even banned from MTV — for featuring MC Hammer in a grotesquely small zebra-print Speedo, and was is itself ironic for featuring an opulent mansion and landscape which MC Hammer would be forced to pawn about two years later.
2 This is where the recent resurgence in irony’s popularity came in very handy for Har Mar Superstar.
3 Not that this helped the Nets, who lost in a 4-0 sweep.
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