At Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Hollywood, V-Nasty pours sugar into her iced tea, forming a small snowdrift in the middle, before adding a couple packets of artificial sweetener. Then, for good measure, she coats her ramekin of grits in sugar as well. This display causes her manager, Stretch, to burst out laughing. "And they wonder why diabetes is so prevalent in the ghetto," he chuckles.
V-Nasty is indeed from the ghetto — the 35th block of East Oakland, to be exact. She still has a house there, although she now also has a place in North Hollywood. Today, the infamous white rapper looks cute and slightly tomboy-ish in ripped skinny jeans, Air Jordans and a scoop-neck white thermal that doesn't conceal her leopard-print bra. One side of her dark hair is shaved, the rest has been straightened. In its natural state it's so nappy, she says, that in jail she mixed jelly with hair gel to tame it.
Stop us if you're unfamiliar with this combustible hip-hop character. She's a member of the White Girl Mob, a crew headed by Kreayshawn, who became a rap household name earlier this year with her blog smash, "Gucci Gucci." V-Nasty quickly gained notoriety herself, and now is known primarily as the white girl who uses the N-word in her rhymes.
A strangely compelling rapper whose stage presence dwarfs that of Kreayshawn, V-Nasty's N-word proclivities have drawn vitriolic responses from all corners. But until now, she's been conspicuously quiet on the subject. In fact, this is the first time she's ever spoken with the press. "I never did an interview before," she says sheepishly. "I was scared. [But] I actually wanna let people know how I feel about things."
In our talk she is self-deprecating and as sweet as her tea — the opposite of the defiant, race-baiting image she's acquired. It's obvious that the negative attention has affected her, but she remains on message concerning her narrative arc: that of a girl who grew up in the 'hood and was handed a ticket out.
As her fame swells, she's facing increasing pressure to tidy up her act. Where she once staunchly defended her word choice — which she says reflects the environment she came up in — she's now switched her stance. One wonders: Is V-Nasty capable of taking the edge off?
Now 21 years old, Vanessa Reece grew up in an Oakland neighborhood known for drugs and a high crime rate. She was a rough-and-tumble kid who dreamed of being the first girl in the NFL. Her best friend is her mother, who was in her midteens when she had her. Her father, meanwhile, is in jail. "I love him, but I ain't gotta do shit for him 'cause he never did shit for me," V-Nasty says.
When she was in sixth grade, V-Nasty and her little brother were at home when the police knocked on the door. She went looking for her parents but couldn't find them — it turns out they'd been arrested without her knowledge. "So I ran in the living room and grabbed my little brother off the couch. [The police were], like, 'Come out with your hands up!' I said, 'It's just me, I'm just a little kid!' "
By the time she was 12, she was cutting class and stealing alcohol from Safeway, and in ninth grade she dropped out of school. At 15, she gave birth to the first of her two children, both of whom are half-black. Since that time she's been in and out of jail. Robberies usually, she says. Once V-Nasty swiped a girl's purse at a Berkeley frat party; another time, she and friends were pushing people into oncoming traffic as a "prank."
She most recently returned from incarceration — six months in Alameda County Santa Rita Jail — in December and remains on probation. She won't discuss the details but contends that she's cleaned up her act. Now, "V-Nasty is a square," she says with a laugh.
Though she recounts her tangles with the law in an almost-humorous manner, at one point a somber mood comes over her. "I wish I didn't have to go through struggles. I could damn near tattoo my whole back with a list of R.I.P.s. That don't feel good. I wish I was from a town where there wasn't a gun in that motherfucker."
In the mid-aughts, V-Nasty met Kreayshawn through a cousin. The two rappers became extremely close, even living together at one point. Upon the sudden and unexpected success of "Gucci Gucci" in May, Kreayshawn became an overnight sensation, bringing V-Nasty and the third White Girl Mob member, Lil' Debbie, along for the ride. The crew have since toured the country, and V-Nasty has had the opportunity to make a mixtape with her favorite rapper, Gucci Mane, which is slated to come out next month.
She's not signed. Her only solo work released so far, a mixtape called Don't Bite Just Taste, which came out in April, is chock-full of taunts at "bitches." The N-word is sprayed throughout, and it's a messy affair — she's not always rapping in time to the music, for one thing. But it's also catchy and evocative; one can't help but appreciate the chorus of "You Already Know Me": "I don't wear heels." (Well, obviously.)
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