Music

Unabashedly Filthy

Katie Kate Has Arrived—Make Room or Get Out of the Way

by Larry Mizell Jr.

Mary Kalhor

KATIE KATE Not taking business cards.

When I first heard of Katie Kate, I was, let's say, dubious. Having only heard her name, never heard her, I fully expected some Northern State–style unintentional rap parody, full of faux-'80s cadence and earnest PSA raps. When the MC/singer/producer played 2009's Go! Machine, the two-day hiphop fest helmed by the Out for Stardom crew, I was proved way wrong by her leonine, hard-eyed swag and subtly smart raps, shot clear and confidently through the club speakers. Unfortunately, nobody was there yet, so nobody really believed me when I told them, "Yo, ol' girl was dope."

Nobody who's paying attention, or at least very few, would deny her that in 2011. Her new album, Flatland, is one of the best local offerings all year—a self-produced coming-out party that marks Katie Kate's arrival as it simultaneously tells its smaller-minded denizens where to kiss. Kate's buzzing, Santogold-esque synth-slap is not just cool, it's icy, but Coke Slurpee–tasty (the inverted "Strawberry Letter 23" of "Totebag") and diamond-glacier cold (the abominable snow-jam "Bodyout Princess"). She's the archetypical "Bad Amazon," the Queen of the Animals with "defenses up," rebuffing clueless rap dudes trying to pass business cards. Yet the intimacy of "Houses" burns like the hearth does your face after stepping in from a blustery cold world.

"I've always had this habit of picking up any instrument I possibly could and making music with it," Kate says via phone as she walks the noisy streets of Manhattan. "I've always done music since I was a little kid—playing flute, piano, writing songs about my dog. I got my hands on a copy of Reason my first year at Cornish. I took an intro to electronic music class, which got me very excited about the process, working with analog synthesizers, sine waves, raw electronic sounds." It's hiphop, however, that has her heart: "That's what I listened to when I wasn't listening to stuff for school, like John Cage," she says, laughing. "What I like about hiphop is that it's guttural; my father [who urged her to go to school for music, and who appears on the intro to "Thick Stacks"] once told me he understood why I loved hiphop—it's raw, raw energy, and true." With the strategic support of her OFS crew—"Radjaw was really careful at making sure I never just seemed like 'the girl that they cosigned'"—Kate stands on her own two, arms akimbo, elbows pointed to the onlooking slew. Make room.