Hi, I'm Jo Fuertes-Knight. If you ever go on VICE.com, you'll probs know me from Girl Eats Food, my cooking column. If you don't know me at all, then hi, new matie! Anyway, I'm starting a new column about the only thing I care about other than food: rap stuff. You'll be able to find it every week on Noisey.com.
It’s hard to fathom just how big a business hip-hop modelling is in America. I mean the UK counterpart is basically just drunk girls grinding on a Fiat Punto in a funky house video. In the US though, the "video vixen" has become an oiled-up, poon-thrusting industry unto itself.
On the front of this month’s Source, rapper Lola Monroe poses alongside her Taylor Gang labelmates, and mentor Wiz “HEY I SMOKE WEED Y’ALL!” Khalifa. It’ll be her first cover as an artist, rather than under her former guise of "Angel Lola Luv," the hip-hop model who built an impressive empire on her enormous cakes, or--to her mind--her “acting ability."
Monroe’s music career had a bit of a false start under the tutelage of 50 Cent. Well, on his social media site, ThisIs50. She didn’t exactly get rave reviews for the clip for "You’re a Jerk" which seemed to be shot on a grainy flip cam in the toilet corridors of a civic centre.
She parted ways with Fiddy.com before remerging last year to become the surprise "Best Female" nomination at the 2011 BET Awards. The announcement was met with a lot of “maybe she should walk backwards at us so we know who she is” protestations.
It’s been kind of inevitable that any music media coverage on her so far —including this blog now…lulz— has been centered around her career as a vixen. To be fair, it’s pretty gnarly. Weeks ago she was gasping over her breasts in Kanye videos, and now threatening to shoot people in the face. It’s the same sort of disdain Katie Price got for trotting around in spandex singing tunelessly for Eurovision, except the problem for Monroe is that she’s actually good at what she does.
She’s argued that shaking off the video ho tag is an impossibility, after the likes of Karrine "Superhead’ Steffans “fucked up the perception of the game for everyone else”.
"Superhead" - if you’re not au fait with the ins-and-outs of stacked, early noughties hip-hop models - is the lady who penned Confessions Of A Video Vixen. The book critiqued industry heads she’d boned on length, girth, speed and, umm, smell. It’s a tell-all tradition still being upheld, most recently by the likes of Kat Stacks, the sexiest Afghan hound to ever accuse Cassidy of having HIV. She basically claimed that backstage on a shoot is a big cock-pie of orgies and models getting their backs beaten out for spare change.
So yeah, I can see why Monroe is pissed at constantly having to defend her virtues and nobody giving that much of a shit abut her music. Like, is she really getting it in the neck for taking advantage of rap’s ~sexual objectification~? Are we honestly doing “OMG, HIP-HOP IS SOOO MYSOGNISTIC HOO KNEW?” again? Because honestly, I don’t care if she capitalised on her buttocks to get her foot (ass) in the door, Lola Monroe can rap.
Follow JFK on Twitter: @fuertesknight
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