Kitty Pryde

Chicago rapper Sasha Go Hard dropped her new mixtape, Round 3, on Feb 5. Joining a league of DIY artists making their mark on the long overdue rap revolution, including the likes of fellow drill star Chief Keef, suburban white girl Kitty (nee Pryde), New York gender bender Mykki Blanco and so many more, hers is an understated rhythm with a lo fi aesthetic.

Sasha Go Hard's Round 3 mixtape artwork. — Sasha Go Hard’s *Round 3* mixtape artwork.

Sasha Go Hard is one of a wave of artists with vastly different agendas and approaches to their craft, yet they’re all releasing music under the same umbrella of hip hop, at the same time destroying its associated archetypes at its very foundation. It’s no surprise, then, that UK-born beat-maker Diplo produces urgent opener ‘Damn’, while controversial Oakland performer Kreayshawn features on the see-sawing gangsta rap pastiche of ‘Kill Bill’. And that’s on the same track listing as vocal detractor Le1f who appears on wavy female anthem ‘To The Girls’. He criticised Kreayshawn over her association with V-Nasty and her use of the ‘n word’ in an interview posted here.

Joining the ranks of other rap world weirdos, this new mix is a welcome step up from Sasha Go Hard’s early rough sketches and a harbinger of the goodness that is to come. Download Round 3 here. **

The Florida meme-cum-human-being, formerly known as Kitty Pryde, has dropped her first EP Daisy Rage via her social network. She’s just Kitty now and a triumph for the purported vapidity of the Great Online with her darkly unstable lyrics attacking everything and everyone on the back foot as a girl who’s single-handedly “ruining hip hop”.

Just 19-years-old and virtually born on tumblr, the snow-white ginger from the suburbs joins a legion of mutant rappers smashing the status quo and taking popular culture down with them. She´s already collaborated with Texan rapper Riff Raff and contributed words to Le1f’s latest Fly Zone mixtape but now she’s come into her own with her razor sharp social (media) observations delivered along the eye-rolling languor of the new cyberpunk. YOLO, twitter and Kim Kardashian’s backside aren’t safe from her biting commentary and with any luck there’ll be plenty more where that came from.

Kitty’s Daisy Rage EP is out now.

Sasha Go Hard drops ‘Round 3’ mixtape.

Kitty – ‘Daisy Rage’ EP