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By Jen Boyles   Photography by Derrick Santini

03/31/07 :: URB 145

"CHI-TOWN I’MMA MISS YOU!!” KID SISTER YELLS INTO THE MIC, HER CHARISMA WAFTING LIKE CARTOON fumes over a mess of flat-brim baseball hats, natty dreadlocks, indie-rock haircuts and side ponytails mimicking her own. The crowd at the Empty Bottle—a bar  hat truly redefines “dive”—jumps up and down in one maniacal mass to her PG-13 Crucial Conflict-meets-Khia party rap. They’re so rowdy, in fact, that my friend gives me a wtf? look as she picks tiny pieces of the ceiling from her hair.

The show is a slightly sentimental one, as it is 27-year-old Chicago native Melisa Young’s last ometown gig before embarking on her twomonth-long “Catch an Attitude” European tour (also featuring her boyfriend, A-Trak, her brother Josh’s equally hype DJ duo Flosstradamus, and raze). A loveably campy hip-hop caricature in her massive ‘round-the-way-girl earrings, gold chains and neon sneaks, Young lays it down for her hometown tonight, taking her cutesy  ghettochick drawl and amplifying it to match the energy of the room. Lyrics to “Southside” crawl laxly—but loudly—over an instrumental Josh spins of ATL anthem “Walk It Out”:

“Is that your girlfriend, nigga?/Her name’s Alexis, nigga/She look like a Buick, nigga/Is that our girlfriend, homey?/Her name is Champagne/That girl look like a fuckin’ ‘40.”

Crowd goes nuts. More ceiling dandruff.

“I can’t believe this,” my friend says with an annoyed laugh, as she swats more debris from her bangs. And though she shows no signs of it onstage, Young can’t believe it either.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
“I charge $15 an hour,” a refreshed Young says, as she sashays up to the bar at Moonshine the next morning, smirking briefly at the balding bartender who’s got an eyebrow semi-permanently raised in her direction. Despite it being a Sunday, the curvaceous girly-girl is still sporting those gold chains (chayyyynz, as she puts it), plopping her big bowling bag of a purse down on the stool next to her. I can tell the bartender wishes she’d made that comment to him—and with a much more scandalous meaning. “I mean, I feel like I’m interviewing for a job right now or something,” she says, giggling with a gallant innocence that shows off her lack of experience with “the media.” She pauses in a pose of mock professionalism, leaning in with earnest and crossing her legs—which are wrapped in blazinghot pink stretch pants and topped off with Coach (perhaps “Coach”) rain boots. And then, almost too predictably, rap music’s underground darling of the moment excuses herself for a bathroom break.

“Hawld awn, pleeeeeze,” Young says in her exaggerated, South Side-spawned dialect, speaking directly to my digital recorder as if there’s a live audience inside. A massively long, SWV-reminiscent fake nail reaches for the “stop” button, and if I wasn’t so caught up in admiring its ornate decoration, I might have snatched the gadget away for fear she’d accidentally slice it in half.

On a superficial level, we’re at the bar this morning after an hour-long mission to find Chicago’s meanest bitch of a Bloody Mary—a concoction she hopes will loosen her up to talk about the true reason behind our meet-up (“I hope I don’t sound like an alcoholic,” she says with a grimace).

Twenty minutes into it, Young is talking quite expressively about her suddenly being the hip-hop “It” kid—something she struggles to grasp. Her enviable (or not) predicament is laid in front of her like our newly arrived breakfast sandwiches: One year of rapping, six songs and a handful of shows have added up to a European tour, an in the-works album deal and, obviously, the cover of URB’s Next 1000.

It’s an ascension that’s been rapid, at the very least, I note.

“Hmm, well, can a girl ascend to a full stomach?” she laughs with a curly weave of her neck. The comedy doesn’t stop there, though, not with this girl and not ever, really. Reaching into her mammoth purse, Young pulls out a full-sized bottle of Tabasco sauce. You never know what a restaurant might have lying around masquerading as hot sauce,” she says seriously, dumping some into her drink.

TRYIN’ TO FIND A (BOLOGNA-FREE) BALANCE
“My background is one that is marked by paradoxes,” Young says like a pro, as she spears the potatoes sliding around her plate. “Do you know what a paradox is? I learned that in AP English.”

The child of a black father and white mother, Young is constantly playing to both extremes, claiming she went to a “commune hippie” middle school and then a “super, super hood” high school. Our pep rallies were off the chain,” she explains, conjuring images of a bad Master P video. “The band would play OutKast and our cheerleaders were juke dancers, except it was called booty house back then. I was in a dance troupe and we’d do all these ghetto-ass routines, but I also did musical theater and was really into Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. So when I first started doing these shows, I had to, like, fight back the jazz hands.”