ArtShyte!

Tumblr Wave: Kitty Pryde - Okay Cupid
Just about everyone from my generation has in some capacity made a place for themselves on the internet, and the amount they’re on is always growing. Some teenage formative experiences are now centered on the internet. Mostly though, the internet experience is commonplace. Update Facebook, follow Kanye on Twitter, argue in the Youtube comments section, go on 4chan for the first time, reblog, reblog, reblog.
Vice Magazine recently did an interview with Kitty Pryde, a rapper from Daytona, Florida, in which they described her as ‘Tumblr Wave’. In other words, she’s part of a wave of new musicians that are creating their music in a similar way to how they live- by talking about and sharing the things they find on Tumblr. Reblog, reblog, reblog. But I have a couple of problems with this. The first is that artists have always shared work that they love- that’s a huge part of what influence is. The second is that to me, and I imagine to a lot of high school and university kids that have built part of their lives on the internet, it doesn’t make any sense to single her out. If the rest of us rapped, we would all sound like Tumblr dashboards. Part of our lives exist on the internet, so for rappers, writing about the internet is a natural next step.
The attention Kitty Pryde is getting at the moment stems from her song ‘Okay Cupid,’ a Beautiful Lou produced cloud rap track that’s about as far away from the last Beautiful Lou track I listened to (A$AP Rocky – Trilla) as possible. Instead, its closest predecessors are Clams Casino’s more mellow tracks- the speed-warped vocal samples and pretty synths. This Lil B-indebted sound oddly works perfectly with Kitty’s lyrics, which at first seem like inane teenage girl chatter, but gradually reveal themselves to be much more emotionally involved. Take the line, “You apologize to me when I see you do a line, but like, I’m open-minded and it’s fine. I don’t do that shit but I don’t really mind it,” which is fit in between cutesy descriptions of her and her high school crush at a party. There’s a lot of tension there.
That kind of real, awkward, and incredibly relatable situation is what Tumblr Wave is really about. Tumblr Wave is about a girl telling her friends about a guy she likes over Facebook, and then sending them a Frank Ocean video. I’ve never tried to impress a guy by not caring that he just did a line of coke, but I have been in awkward situations, and I have talked about them on the internet, and I love Frank Ocean. Kitty Pryde isn’t the most technically proficient rapper to become popular in the last year or two, but she is the most relatable.

By Conor

(Source: postdubstep)