Early this year when I interviewed Michael Quattlebaum, the New York poet and performance artist who raps as Mykki Blanco, he explained: "I would rather be famous like Insane Clown Posse than like A$AP Rocky". He spoke of his childhood adoration of Eminem and his preferred "shock-rock" tactics in approaching art and rap music-- an ideology that synced up nicely with the sinister, hallucinatory handful of Mykki Blanco tracks that had been posted on SoundCloud. But shocking listeners is a tall order in 2012, and adopting a Lolita-doll rap persona and snarling verses about doing mushrooms and "white boys with them yarmulkas/ Model chicks with a million followers" will earn a glowing profile in the New York Times Style section sooner than it will drop jaws. So it follows that Cosmic Angel: Illuminati Prince/ss, Mykki Blanco's first full-length release, is a grab-bag of experimentation tailored to today's blurry rap landscape and transgression is only part of the mix.
Like many of her contemporaries have in recent months, Blanco employs a host of electronic producers who usually work without rappers, sometimes to striking effect. Upstart underground names like Brenmar, Gatekeeper, and Sinden offer up a broad, scrappy palate of beats crafted to get people moving. The Brenmar-produced "Wavvy", for instance, is a clear standout, weaving Mykki at her clearest and most urgent through an infectious slice of tropicalia. Sinden and Matrixxman's sinister "Haze.Boogie.Life" beat invokes the image of gooey liquid dripping through industrial pipes, mimicking the sorts of basement-performance settings that brought the rapper to life over the last couple of years, but made brighter and shinier and more danceable.
That's not to say she's only well-served by more straightforward hooks-- the second half of the album pulls heavily from Mykki's lo-fi early days, when the performance-art aspect of the project dominated. On the Katy Perry-referencing "TeenageDream" she's murderous and imaginative, hissing: "Eighteen/ Mykki Blanco, teenage dream/ Homecoming queen, stroking woodies/ Toy Story/Denying me the black card?/ Oh, now it's statutory" like she's at a poetry reading hosted in a grimy underworld. It's that sort of psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness flow looped through cartoonishly girly vocal filters that brought Mykki Blanco character to life initially, the character she described as having "two sides: cute and criminally insane." When both personas bubble out of Blanco in fierce equal measure in a verse, it's gut-punching. Somewhere, Roman and Martha Zolanski are furious.
Where Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss falls short is in the bloated middle ground between club and camp. There are a handful of downbeat tracks here that meander aimlessly, and some of the mixtape is rickety, as though it would crumble to dust under a little bit of pressure. Here you can hear Blanco's raps occasionally grow fumbling and flat, like on the washed-out drum-and-bass/metallic lighter-flick beat of "Squanto": If you make it to the end of the song's four minutes, you can pick out rhymes of "solution" and "resolution" through the mumblings, but there's little to make you want to rewind and decipher a meaning. You'd probably just as soon skip forward and revisit "Betty Rubble", one of Blanco's earliest tracks. There she raps, "You think I was a mink the way these dogs was sniffin'/ You'd think my name was Homer Simpson to these Peter Griffins/ They hangin' off my angry word/ Damn these fucking Angry Birds"-- a raw reminder of how thrilling her character can be at its unfiltered peak.
