What I like best about Concetta Kirschner is that she admits to being a high-school loser who always wanted to be a famous actress. Since she wasn't as pretty as all the other girls in acting school, she got into music. I like this not because it's a unique story, but because it's one of the reasons Kirschner's dreamed up this ludicrous alter-ego of hers called Princess Superstar, and why four albums into her career, she's running buck-wild with it--desperate to make us laugh, or at least to make us hear her.

I imagine saying that to a reporter--"I always wanted to be famous"--knowing full well that the statement could make it into print, maybe even get used as a pull quote, and I redden a bit. Just at the thought. But I'm pretentious like that, and Kirschner probably didn't even turn pink as she owned up to her desire for empty mass adoration. Kirschner seems to have no shame at all, really, and while she's trying her hardest to make an imprint upon popular culture, she doesn't seem to worry about whether she's doing it shrewdly or just revealing herself to the entire world as an attention whore.

But that's what makes Princess Superstar genuinely funny: She's so crude and obvious. In this manner, Kirschner's hiphop persona embodies exactly what sets American culture apart from the rest of the world's. America is the greatest nation on Earth--not because it's so powerful, but because it's so self-absorbed and unsophisticatedly obscene. America is funny the way farts are funny: at once the big, ugly, unsophisticated trash of Penthouse magazine, MTV, and Jesse Helms.

So, long may Princess Superstar live among us--and Kool Keith, Lil' Kim, Peaches, DJ Assault, Eminem, or anyone else out there with a swollen libido and a bullet. The kids who busy themselves artistically by spouting colorful pollution into the blank nothingness, heating up all of culture's dead air with sex and lust and senseless braggadocio, coming through our headphones to make us laugh out loud in a crowded street, and taking us all back to junior high, when cruelty was a game, farts were genuinely funny, and sex was both ridiculous and just about the most exciting prospect imaginable.

On "Bad Babysitter," from her brand-new Princess Superstar Is, a 15-year-old Princess Superstar informs the Jewish kid in her care that she's hot for his father, but threatens that if he tells he'll "die of Sickle Cell." Meanwhile, she's blowing her boyfriend on the couch, putting a cucumber to good use (she tells the kid how nice and crispy the vegetable will be for him later), and forcing the kid to make her some Kool-Aid. When the parents arrive, the Princess tries unsuccessfully to seduce the father (played by High & Mighty) after demanding a ride home. It's ridiculous.

Princess Superstar Is has no justifiable reason to exist other than Princess Superstar's overwrought desire to be heard, but her album is fascinating because Kirschner's ego is immensely entertaining. She raps quickly like Eminem, but snaps at comparisons to him: "Well all I'm gonna talk about is getting fucked up the ass then!/Don't be mad Em, I'm just playin'/I wish I had a Dr. Dre and sold-out shows/One million white faces in Dayton...."

I'm taken by this one video reel on the Princess Superstar website: footage from the recording of "Keith 'N Me," a duet Kirschner performs with Kool Keith that is also on Princess Superstar Is. The song is great. Keith raps about doing the Princess from behind in front of a security guard at a mall, and Kirschner raps, "Won't beat around the bush so you can beat around mine/I'm a Slinky, coil my butt back and forth down the stair/I'm kinkier than pubic hair." But the video clip is the sweetest thing: two overgrown teenagers summoning all their creativity to make each other laugh. While Keith is recording, behind glass, Kirschner repeatedly doubles over, shocked and thrilled at where her collaborator is taking the song, the raunchier the better. And Kirschner appears nothing like a superstar in her pedestrian weekend wear. She is gentle and polite as she flips on the intercom to tell Keith his performance is "wonderful."

I don't know, it was just sweet to watch, I guess.

Happily, fun keeps happening in hiphop lately: exalted sex and stupidity for stoopid's sake. Last week, Dan the Automator came to Seattle with his new Lovage project, and this week Concetta Kirschner brings her giddy, attention-sucking Superstar parade through the Northwest. All accounts hail her as a no-holds-barred performer, with one critic calling her stage show "a grant away from performance art." It sounds like a really good time. You might consider wearing protection.