At the beginning of 2011, Kreayshawn was uploading homemade YouTube videos, wondering where her rent money was coming from. Now she’s a pop culture lightning rod before she’s even released an album.
Directing was her first love, a passion that began when her mother bought her a video camera when she was 10. “People were like, ‘Are you crazy? That’s a couple hundred bucks,’” Elka recalls. “And I’m just like, ‘Whatever, let her play with it. Maybe she’ll discover something she likes.’”
By her late teens Kreay had begun to film and edit videos for local Oakland acts like DB Tha General, Nova Boy, and E-Molly. “I was doing music videos for free,” she says. “If you’re editing and filming all day, you don’t have time for a job. My mom was super worried. I was selling weed and stuff and my roommate was getting the hook-up with prescription pills. But our main focus was art.”
She gave up trapping after she landed her first paying gig in 2009. Local favorites the Go Gettas paid her $200 to shoot a video for their single “I Get It In.” Her work around town led to interest from other regional acts, including a kid from Berkeley named Lil B. “She was a dope artist,” B recalls. “I wanted to give her a chance so I let her shoot some videos for me. I put her in the game,” he adds, pointedly.
After she moved in with her maternal grandfather, Stanley Zolot, Kreayshawn’s home life stabilized. She focused on directing and began to experiment with another longtime hobby, rapping. “I have video of a 10-year-old freestyle I did about me eating free lunch in middle school,” she says. “Expressing myself was the main point. I wanted to get attention.”
In 2010, Kreayshawn finally put together a full body of work. She released her first mixtape, Kittys x Choppas, that September, and it went largely unnoticed in the rap community. With the encouragement of her manager, Stretch, whom she met through one of his clients, DB Tha General, she started to take her studio work more seriously. “I slowed down on the directing just so I could do music,” she says.
Last December, she asked her Twitter followers (then numbering 4,000) for beats, and Staten Island producer DJ Two Stacks responded with an instrumental sampling the “One big room, full of bad bitches” line from her mixtape’s standout, “Bumpin Bumpin.” “We were like, ‘Oh, shit. We have to use this,’” Kreay recalls. She did and the outcome was “Gucci Gucci.” Six months after that Twitter solicitation, she’d inked her deal with Columbia.
With overnight success comes overnight hate—just think how quickly Drake went from phenom to pretty boy punching bag. And when the overnight success happens in the genre of rap to a young white woman, there also come questions of credibility.
“People are so crazy that they’ll make their own fantasy life story of me,” Kreayshawn says of talk that her checkered past is fiction. “People have such passion loving me and such passion hating me, but it’s good to have passion either way.”
Kreay's also come under fire for a line in “Gucci Gucci” (“Bitch, you ain't no Barbie, I see you work at Arby's”) that was perceived to be aimed at Nicki Minaj. In her first Complex interview, Kreayshawn said that Nicki encourages girls to be “plastic and fake.” Now she insists that Nicki is a “great artist.” Maybe this is a product of the media training book she carries, although she might want to give it another skim. In late August, she told MTV that a line in her Cosmic Kev Come-Up Show freestyle (“You faker than Rick Ross”) was not a diss toward the Miami rapper, who was outed in 2008 for his past as a correctional officer. Three days later, she was on V-Nasty's live Ustream joking about his weight (“I bet you five dollars Rick Ross can't find his dick”) and saying that she wanted to tell MTV that she thinks Ross is fake. “I didn’t know that we were still on Ustream. It was just me goofing off with friends. I don't have any problems [with Rick Ross], but I can see how it looks that way.”
Her directing career has taken off as well. Soulja Boy has asked her to shoot a video for him, and, according to Kreay, Curren$y wants to collaborate as well. Snoop Dogg already has. Trina and Diamond have reached out, too. Left Brain from Odd Future, who made a cameo alongside OFWGKTA pal Jasper Dolphin in the “Gucci Gucci” video (which Left Brain thought would be a “fail”), echoes the general consensus on Kreayshawn’s directorial chops: “She knows what she’s doing behind the cam.”
