"I can’t go to Hawaii with fuzzy boots.”

I’ve got Chicago-based rapper Kid Sister on the phone, and girlfriend is hunting out sandals for an early January gig in Honolulu. While she drives, parks, drives and finally tries on some choice pairs (“in a nine and a half, please”), Kid Sis breaks down just how she went from riding her bicycle through snowstorms between three part-time jobs to being an URB Magazine Next 1000 cover star in under two years.

Sure the woman born Melissa Young sang in Catholic school choirs, did musical theatre “and found my inner ghetto dork” while attending public high school, as well as studying theatre at college, but it was only after failing to land “a desk job, making money and getting benefits” post-graduation that she considered music as a career option.

“I met people like Diplo through my brother [Josh Young, a.k.a. J2K of DJ/production duo Flosstradamus] and saw that the DJ thing could be a real job,” Young explains. “Honestly, I just looked at my brother, making all this money and travelling to different places, and realized that there are people who actually do this and only this.”

Though she hadn’t rhymed before October 2005, the bubbly, bi-racial Young quickly hit her stride.
“I don’t write about fucking and all the stuff that most girl rappers get pigeonholed in, and that’s fine because I wanted to be different. I think that naturally I’m a little bit nerdy; I was always the funny, quirky, chubby girl in school and I think that that comes out. I rhyme about food, dancing, boys, shopping, going to the currency exchange and trying to cash my $42 cheque from the focus group that I did last night — normal, poor girl-just-starting-out shit.”

As it turned out, the exclamation-prone MC had a few things on her side. Firstly, the Kid can rap like mad. Secondly, she has well-connected friends and supporters in people like Flosstradamus, producer XXXchange (Spank Rock) and boyfriend Alain Macklovitch (a.k.a. DJ A-Trak).
These links may have helped tip people off to her MySpace page, but tracks like “Southside” and “Let Me Bang” grabbed ears, getting thousands of hits and mucho blog and DJ attention. “Control,” Young’s first single for A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold label, bumped things to the next level, but she truly found herself working to meet demands after the release of “Pro Nails,” a catchy electro-hop single featuring Kanye West.

Connections can count. A-Trak, being Kanye’s DJ, decided to hip the mega-star to newer club sounds after West had a very public freak-out over Justice and Simian winning at the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards.

“Alain played him a bunch of stuff after the whole MTV Europe fiasco, saying ‘This is the new cool stuff,’ explains Young. “Kanye heard ‘Pro Nails’ and was like, ‘Let me do this right quick.’ I didn’t know anything about it at all. I felt like I’d just won the lottery when I found out!”

With West turning in a verse and appearing in the “Pro Nails” video, Kid Sister has gathered even more momentum. MTV and radio are playing her song, and even Billboard wrote an article anticipating Young’s debut album. Due out later this year and tentatively titled Koko B. Ware, it’ll feature producers including XXXchange and Trackademics, as well as more mainstream hip-hop heavyweights.

“I just got a beat from Infamous and Develop who do a lot of Dipset’s stuff,” she reveals. “All of their beats sound like murder beats except for this one, and I was like ‘Oh, I can totally use this!’ I just wrote to it and finished the song a couple of days ago, and it’s dope! Not to toot my own horn, but I’m impressed and surprised that I was able to write to such a different and slower beat. Things are good.”