Video: Kitty Pryde, “Okay Cupid”

May 09, 2012


One month after Daytona Beach teen Kitty Pryde released her Beautiful Lou-produced song "Okay Cupid" on her Bandcamp, inaugurating a run of fawning interviews with Portals, Mishka and Vice, she retweeted maybe the aptest description of her yet: "the jail bait Hayley Williams of Rap." With an innocent giggle, a pouty bottom lip with "Prince$$" tattooed on the inside and a ’90s baby's openness to social media—last week she posted a series of prom photos on her Tumblr, which also features a reaction video to Lil Ugly Mane and a photo of her smiling behind Lil B’s book—Kitty Pryde has fallen into the role of the internet's preeminent coy white girl rapper, possibly the first person to ever hold the title.

Though she has released an EP, The Lizzie McGuire Experience, Kitty's two best songs came after it: "Okay Cupid" and "Justin Bieber." She shines by balancing young love talk—I wrote your name on my binder and everybody laughed at me, on "Okay Cupid"—with young sex talk, like her opening lines of "Bieber": Boys are like milk and they expire if you're late on em/ It's legal for me, I don't even have to wait on em. Together, the tracks form a tight pair about earnest crushes from afar, eerily foreshadowing Kitty's own potential place as an idol among nerdy males. She's funny and clever, with a distinctive voice and a unique perspective (in rap, at least), even if sometimes it's hard to separate her music from ideas about what it all means.

The goof-off video for "Okay Cupid," her first since signing with Main Attrakionz' managers, stars Kitty and two friends—one wearing a Star Wars mask and the other in a hat that says "White Trash Bachelorette"—drinking tall boys, googling photos of unlikely heartthrob Danny Brown and shopping at yard sales. High school era. Young shit, dumb shit. Referencing The-Dream and doing karaoke to Frank Ocean in the same song. Being cool by not being cool, or at least not to the confused people around you. And, most importantly, smiling anyway, putting on your Yeastie Girlz T-shirt and making something like-spirited strangers just might obsess over.

Video: Kitty Pryde, “Okay Cupid”