httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WJFjXtHcy4&feature=player_embedded

*sigh* Well, there’s one (or more) for every generation.

I think Kreayshawn (nee Natassia Zolot) is a fraud.  I don’t believe she’s serious; I don’t believe she’s real.  Some good discussion about Kreayshawn and appropriation is happening, but I’m still at the start line refusing to believe her alleged biography about being the child of a teenaged mother and growing up in East Oakland.

White people do this kind of thing–and by “kind of thing” I mean fabricate a story that somehow makes them more authentic, more “down”–all the time.  Vanilla Ice was never really stabbed five times; Margaret B. Jones was never really a gang member in L.A. despite what her memoir said.  (Apparently, folks love to lie in memoirs.)  So, I’ll just take Natassia’s stage name at its word: Kreayshawn = Creation.

Perhaps the truth will come out now that she’s inked a record deal.

We should, I suppose, ask: What would the point be of making all of this up?  To prove that even in Obama’s America, even during the recession, blackface money can always be made?  To remind us that white people acting how they think black people do will always prove endlessly fascinating and lucrative?  To suggest that talent only actually matters when you’re the person whose likeness is actually being appropriated?

What say you about Kreayshawn?