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Fillin in the Blanks with Amanda Blank :: In classic “Madlibs” style, the fiery femcee from Philadelphia helps URB write her story

By Brandon Perkins   Photography by phil knott

06/02/08 :: URB 151

Once upon a time, the suave Amanda Blank and her friend James Brown were preparing to walk down a boisterous red carpet at a swanky Hollywood party. It was the first such walk that the 24-year-old rapper from Philadelphia had ever encountered and there already a few problems.

The weather was mildly crusty and it clashed with Amanda’s too delicious leotard and denim undies combination. Amanda Blank was fighting a wily fake eyelash with the double-edged sword of 10” press-on fingernails; they looked simultaneously smooth and dangerous. With the cheetah fur lashes firmly placed and an eye-gouge blessfully avoided, Amanda Blank and friend waited their place behind the industry’s hottest new couple.

The paparazzi stretched at the mouth behind the velvet rope while they witnessed OprahSmurfette licking the neck of in their matching Jordache suits. The explosion of flashing lights was unlike anything Amanda Blank had ever seen, this side of The Sopranos, the award-winning television show about Los Angeles’s glamorous nightlife. It was 20 frenzied minutes before she was able to make her red carpet debut and she inhaled deeply one last time before putting on her pretty face for the cameras.

“Crickets….” Amanda Blank says. “All the cameras were flashing and we get there and it’s like crickets.”

Amanda Blank won’t be faced with the haunting stridulation of insects for long. A fiery and foul-mouthed rapper in the Lil’ Kim lineage, she’s made her mark touring and recording with the party rap sensations of the Mid-Atlantic: Spank Rock, Diplo and Plastic Little. She also counts Mark Ronson protégé Santogold and frequent URB cover star M.I.A. as close friends. It’s a world where life is only as good as the party and the lyrics reflect a great fuckin’ life. The BPM are perhaps the only thing higher than the scenester partiers on the dance floor. And after signing to Downtown Records (home of Gnarls Barkley and a sweetheart of Atlantic Records), Amanda Blank is poised to take the pretty-people party national.

“I don’t see it being bigger than big on an indie scale. I would rather have a career on the scale of somebody like Karen O,” Amanda Blank says of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman. “She can go to the corner store without makeup on and people that go to red carpet events can’t do that. I feel bad for those people who can’t really live a normal life.”

“Normal,” of course, is about as subjective a word as the English language has, but for now it means making music with her talented friends, touring across the country and getting incredibly nervous about performing in front of new audiences.

“I always think in my head, right before I go on, ‘I hope they don’t boo me,’” she says happily. “It’s like, ‘Wow, people actually like this? They’re into this? OK, awesome.’ I’m glad people are into it, but it’s always a little mind-boggling that people actually give a fuck.”

Rapping has never been easy for aspiring females. Hip-hop is a world of braggadocio and ask Hilary or Britney if society trusts women who understand their power. MC Lyte and Queen Latifah had to be better than the boys, while Lil Kim and Foxy Brown had to be nastier. The labels want sex because it sells. Jay-Z can rhyme about 6 a.m. booty calls, but the sexiness of mainstream female artists has relied on sloppily-garbed Pussycat Dolls. Just like anything else involving the sexes, there’s a double standard.

“It’s so annoying. We’ll go out on tour and all the boys get all the attention from all the girls. They can get a blowjob, a hand job, a fuckin’ rim job, whenever they want. If I ever tried that, it’d be over. No one ever called [Spank Rock’s] Naeem a slut or whore rapper. But with me, they might say stuff like that.”

Airing on the side of political correctness, if Amanda Blanks’ lyrics were fact-based then her teeth would surpass Luke Skywalker’s and rival Wilt Chamberlain’s. No editorializing is needed for lyrics like “My rhymes are painful and fresh/My pussy’s tastin’ the best” or “Oh no sir, I must say you’re wrong/I must disagree/Oh no sir, I must say you’re wrong/Won’t you listen to me…” 

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