by VINCENT TINGUELY

Kinnie Starr has been bringing her hypnotizing brand of hybrid hip pop to international audiences since the release of her first indie disc, Tidy in 1996. The multidisciplinary, multilingual, multi-ethnic artist started out exploring visual art, and her love of hip hop naturally led her to graffiti culture. “At the time all the guys were doing tags, I was really into kind of aggressive stencil work and wasn’t receiving much love from the graf or hip hop community,” Starr remembers. “But I was listening to a lot of hip hop—at that time I was really into De La Soul, the Goats, Urban Dance Squad, Run DMC, MC Lyte, Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy.”

It was hip hop that eventually led her to performance. “I was mostly just writing in my journal, and then I would rhyme a lot when I would walk,” says Starr. On a jaunt to NYC, a friend coaxed her to test her flow at a spoken word venue with a mainly black audience. “It was a really small basement club where my girlfriend who lived there went a lot,” she recalls. “I distinctly remember the look on everyone’s faces in the audience. I was feeling them and I was noticing they were all kind of waking up, getting involved and engaged. That was definitely when I first realized that I had talent.”

Lately, Starr’s talent has led to a book deal with Last Gang and her latest CD, slated to drop May 30. The focus of the new album is love and family, two things she draws strength from. “When I was with my girlfriend in Mexico recently, we realized as we listened to the whole record that all of the songs except one are about my family—either my cousins, my mom, my dad, my ex who I thought was my life partner, my brothers—I only seemed to write about my friends and family and roots!”

“The new album’s called Anything,” Starr explains. “It’s a response to the number one question by journalists during the last 10 years of my career: ‘So what is your style?’” The West coast artist can expect to fit right in with Voix d’Amériques’s bold eclecticism. “Cross-genre albums are more acceptable now than they were a decade ago,” says Starr. “I don’t know if I’ll ever become a popular artist, but I have a better chance now than I did when I first started.”

Next week, Kinnie Starr appears in Love and Kisses From Vancouver, hosted by Montreal fave Alexis O’Hara. The line-up includes the Fugitives, a collective of slam-poets and multi-instrumentalists; Ivan Coyote, a transgendered cowboy, author of Loose End and the CD You’re a Nation; and dancers Deborah Dunn and Chanti Wadge. And check out www.fva.ca for details about dapper guest of honour Tomson Highway, the Nomadic Massive showcase, the nightly open mic, and the closing show featuring Loco Locasse and Quebecois performance poet legend Raôul Duguay.

Love and Kisses Feb. 14, 8:30 p.m., at
La Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent), $15

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