Over six months after the release of her last mixtape, Mykki Blanco-- the female alter ego of Michael Quattlebaum-- is beginning to prove much more than just a walking talking point. Last year’s Cosmic Angel showed a dextrous rapper with fury to spare, a whirl of energy when she didn’t drown in her own ambition. After taking on an exhausting and seemingly endless international touring schedule, Blanco has earned a reputation as a powerful live performer. She harnesses this energy well for her first official follow-up, Betty Rubble: The Initiation, an EP-sized prelude to her official debut album that sees her rapping markedly improved.
The Initiation starts strong with “Angggry Byrdz”. Like the video game it’s named after, the beat is cartoonish, all plasticky plink-plonk sounds that Blanco pirouettes around with ease. As always, she’s got a bone to pick with, well, everyone, spitting, “Look at them angry birds/ Tryna shit on every word.” If you didn’t already get the feeling that Blanco was automatically defensive about her art, The Initiation makes it pretty damn clear. But in a world where drag queen feistiness is the subject of a popular reality show, Blanco is both caricature and cut-to-the-bone reality. You wouldn't fuck with her.
The rest of the EP is an up-and-down affair that loses the razor focus of its opener. More sprawling than your usual eight-track release, the clumsy experimentalism of Cosmic Angel remains despite Blanco's improved chops. She adopts all kinds of voices, mannerisms, and characteristics, flitting through personalities with the hummingbird hyperactivity of Nicki Minaj, especially on “Crisp Clean”, where her distinct rasp is contorted and choked like a crazy straw. Things get druggy and paranoid on the Supreme Cuts-produced “Bugged Out”, while Matrixxman’s “Ace Bougie Chick” is a jaunty summer jam with all the winking charm of Lil Wayne’s “Comfortable”. But even this one has a sinister undertone: its playful chorus goes “but you gon’ keep on fucking me/ And nobody has to know,” reminding us of the grim reality that being a gay black man is still an unspeakable position for so many.
Blanco’s rapping is unmistakably stronger, flowing faster and more naturally than ever before, but when she’s not in full force she has trouble keeping getting from point A to point B. The grumbly “Feeling Special” feels like it’s dragging itself from bar to bar, and the rapped-in-Latin title track, while daring, falls a little flat. In typically unusual form, The Initiation’s most engaging track features no actual rapping at all: “Vienna” is simply spoken word over an electro beat. A hilariously detailed story about a tour stop in Austria starring “this waifish Persian pretty boy named Sammy Nagasaki,” it oozes with warmth and humour, qualities that her acid-barbed lashings sometimes lack.
The Initiation is a stepping stone for an artist who’s looking increasingly important. Quickly sharpening her stock as a rapper, Mykki Blanco is so much more than the gimmick some have tried to make her out to be. And though The Initiation isn’t turning down any of the camp, it’s a deadly serious manifesto from an artist who wants you to discard your preconceptions and set fire to them. To those familiar with gay culture, Blanco’s outsized aggression is not just welcome, it’s maybe even standard. But there’s a world out there to whom Blanco is an anomaly, a spectacle-- and if she keeps up this ascent, they’re about to be shocked and surprised in exactly the way you begin to sense Quattlebaum wants.
