Elizabeth Harris, better known as the outrageously sexual rapper CupcakKe, had not even been born yet when Lil’ Kim released her super-raunchy debut album Hard Core in 1996. Although there is a long-standing precedent for women rapping freely about sexual desire, it is still, for some reason, noteworthy when a woman expresses those needs. For CupcakKe, perhaps, it is because she is strapped with an anything-goes attitude toward the body and how she presents her own, whether it’s rubbing glazed donuts all over herself in a music video or the unhinged carnality of her lyrics and tweets. Last year she resolved to “suck 2017 dicks in 2017” and a Twitter search finds a cabal of fans, who she calls “slurpers,” curious about her progress.
While she may have a stunning ease dishing out absurdist one-liners about affectionately brushing someone’s pubic hair, it’s clear that she wants to be known for much more than just “sex and killing,” which she laments on her new album Ephorize. On the new record, she tackles self-esteem, LGBTQ issues, and the desire for genuine romance, while peppering her tracks with some of the funniest, absurdist one-liners to appear on a record since the heyday of Ghostface.
Most of the album’s production is handled by the relatively unknown Def Starz, who gives CupcakKe a varied beat palette that flirts with New Orleans bounce (standout “Duck Duck Goose”) and embraces the muted dembow pop varietal known as tropical house (“Total”); she raps over “Mask Off”-like synth flute lines on “Navel,” reggaeton percussion on “Crayons,” and carries on Chicago’s drill tradition with added gloss on “Wisdom Teeth” and “Meet and Greet.” There is no doubt that CupcakKe has incredible flexibility with beats. She doesn’t work within the same molasses-mouthed, lyrically repetitive confines of her contemporaries, endeavoring to play with her delivery and often even eschewing hooks. But her style and performance abilities are superlative when she is delivering the wackiest of sex raps.
Stop anywhere on the aforementioned “Duck Duck Goose” and you’ll strike pervert gold like, “My cakes got fatter by using cum as the batter,” or, “Coochie guaranteed to put you to sleep so damn soon/Riding on that dick I’m reading Goodnight Moon.” A description of her creative process she offered to Vice last year shines a light on why this is where she excels: “Right now I have on maroon. I think of the color red, and I just think of like, period blood. So I’ll say, ‘I made this outfit out of period blood.’”
That kind of one-step-beyond free association—and the lack of self-consciousness it takes to put it out there—is what makes CupcakKe so likable. Her lyrical tricks are unexpected and endlessly quotable (though maybe only in a private group text). On lead single “Cartoons,” she finds a way to flip children’s icons into totems for not taking shit (“If I see carats like Bugs Bunny/I’m Batman, robbin’ for the money… I’m a snack so I attract Scooby Doos/Give ’em Smurf dick, that’s balls blue”) and dedicates a whole hook to using cereal as slang for how her adversaries see her on “Cinnamon Toast Crunch.” She is still fine-tuning her mastery of metaphor and some of the more fun moments are sandwiched with some clunkiness, particularly when she is trying to get real. On uplifting opener “2 Minutes” she delivers dud similes like, “Life go up and down like a light switch” while on the effecting pro-LGBTQ anthem “Crayons,” she needs a little bit more intel on identity politics (see: referring to trans men and women as “transgenders”).
Though, writing a song in praise of the queer community is pretty much unfounded in the space outside of the underground where CupcakKe operates. It separates her from the rest of the pack, as does the distance she keeps from the sound many of her contemporaries employ. She has no dalliances with the Chief Keef-via-Soulja Boy slowed rap style dominating radio and SoundCloud, from Lil Pump to Lil Uzi Vert and beyond. Some of this has to do with how much women in rap have to create an almost fully-realized identity to stay afloat if they aren’t backed by an established male artist, but it’s also clear that CupcakKe is truly invested in the hyperbolic artistry of lyrics—she was a poet long before she sought to detail the myriad locations of where to put a dick.
Her brand is fearlessness, whether it’s being bold enough to fellate a hot dog in a music video or rapping what is actually in her heart, not in her bank account. She doesn’t talk about drinking or doing drugs on Ephorize, save a passing reference to other people smoking weed and a quick comparison of cum to rum. The world she’s building is unique, daring you to not to blush, trusting you to see her real life through it all. You can hear the potential across the album, especially on a track like “Self Interview.” She raps, “Back then we had lipgloss and some overalls, that’s the usual/Nowadays I gotta show skin and wear sew-ins to feel beautiful” to describe the external expectations put on women as they transition from childhood to adulthood. It is one of the many gauntlets she throws on the album to show that CupcakKe isn’t just an outsized character. She has a whole lot more to show us—there is just a whole slew of pussy jokes along the way.
