For creative people, the internet's Golden Rule is: don't read the comments, or you'll risk artistic paralysis. Florida rapper Kathryn Beckwith, once known as Kitty Pryde and now just Kitty, has made a point of breaking that rule. She uses her blog to publicly sift through the vitriol and praise; she mocks her detractors, responds to calls for advice and questions about her life, and her relationship. She warns her readers of the brutal effects of disordered eating. She posts screenshots of reviews of her music. She revels in the feedback loop. "[I post the comments because] I want the shawtyz to get the attention they crave ( : 0," she wrote one day, employing some basic reverse-psychology tactics.
Kitty must have a constitution stronger than most, or she is one of those masochistic, online-native creatures for whom anonymous feedback is fuel. Her new EP, D.A.I.S.Y Rage, sounds entirely unfazed by the grade-school chatter she's monitored closely over the last six months. The eight-track collection is a sharper articulation of the Web 2.0 bubblegum rap we heard last summer on her haha, i'm sorry EP. She's joined by some new collaborators-- Das Racist affiliates Mike Finito and Lakutis, Grantbeats and Hot Sugar-- but they complement her themes instead of shifting them. To anyone who paid attention to haha i'm sorry, D.A.I.S.Y. Rage will feel familiar, feeding on warm, sparkly beats and topical rap nerdery asserted with a defiantly Disney Channel attitude.
Playing on Wu Tang's "C.R.E.A.M.", Kitty makes light of allergic reactions, rapping "Rash rules everything around me/ Getting drowsy/ Bena-bena-dryl, y'all" She's titled one song "Scout Finch Bitch" but she's really more of a Holden Caulfield: "I hate everyone that wants to be a millionaire/ So freakin' bad/ So freakin' bad," she complains on "Skrillionaire". She's a deft lyrical whistle-blower, arguing that "You're about as fraudulent as a mirage out in the desert/ Blue peacock/ You're puffing out your feathers/ To bring a bunch of bitches backstage into your dressing room/ So you could treat it like a petting zoo," on "No Offense", a song that might read like an indictment of her friend Danny Brown. But she's as self-conscious as she is critical, rapping on "Skrillionaire", "I'm bitter 'cause I do cool shit and you ignore it."
Kitty's voice is still saccharine, her tone precious to the point of sounding infantile. For a lot of listeners, that's reason to stop the tape immediately, but anyone who dismisses D.A.I.S.Y. Rage on that basis will miss out on the entrancing tensions of the EP. It walks the line between naive and savvy, between earnest and winking, confessional and oversharing, bratty and bold, experimental and inexperienced. Kitty pulls at threads that have been woven through reality-based art in the last couple of years-- I think of Canadian writer Sheila Heti's autobiographical novel, How Should a Person Be?, Cat Marnell's obsessive and Adderall-fueled self-documentation. She's one in a line of young women grasping many conflicting ideas at the same time; her position as a teenage white girl making rap leads to art that feels exciting both because and in spite of its unorthodoxy.
Part of the draw is that Kitty is hyper-aware of the tensions. On the EP's standout "Dead Island", she raps that "you weren't able to discern if I'm the wunderkind or underdog," laying out another one of the fissures. That track is a haunting ode to New York City, a brief hallucinatory journey that sounds like a Major Lazer beat is drowning. It's also both her most affecting and self-lacerating song to date, and it points to Kitty's ticket out of her sometimes-gimmicky perspective: her anguish. "Wiz is black and yellow and I'm white and fucking terrible," she says, before she serves up one of the most chilling assessments of the city that I've ever heard: "I love NY because there's so many bridges to jump off." She knows that reading the comments can remind you that you're not an island.
