Bunny Rabbit
The Brooklyn avant-folk rapper is all about dirty snow, Bone Thugs, and punk harmony
By Andrea Bussell
Published: February 26th, 2007 | 3:14pm
If you thought there was no place for Salt-N-Pepa–style rap on the indie scene, think again, because Bunny Rabbit is just that. Lovers and Crypts, her debut album on Bianca Casady’s label Voodoo-EROS, is a mix of highly-sexed gangsta-rap throwback, punk sensibility, and avant-garde folk. It’s the sort of ultra-hipster art irony that could have only been birthed on the north side of Brooklyn.
A self-described “pop prophet,” Rabbit constantly references herself as a concept — one she says she conjured in the image of Christ, Queen Elizabeth I, and Paris Hilton. It’s an embodiment that’s “best experienced as an object of spiritual, emotional, and sexual consecration,” she says.
Surprisingly, despite that sort of grandiosity, Bunny is down to earth and likeable, soft-spoken, and endearingly modest. From her Williamsburg apartment on a Saturday afternoon in February 2007, her partner in music and life, Black Cracker (née Celena Glenn), by her side, Rabbit explains that she is a concept — or at least she was supposed to be.
“We started off thinking of Bunny as a character that I would play since my background is in theater, and we actually wrote out things about her. But as we got deeper and deeper into the creative part of it, I realized that a lot of the qualities that I’d meant for this character were really just me. Everybody’s calling me Bunny, and now I really can’t distinguish.”
Not to be left in the shadows is Black Cracker, who is in many ways the real mastermind behind Lovers and Crypts. It’s Black Cracker who’s been dropping beats and spreading rhymes around the Brooklyn artistic community for years. She’s produced tracks with CocoRosie, toured with the sister duo several times as their beatboxer, and has won accolades and competitions internationally for her writing and performances (for the full, impressive list, visit her MySpace page myspace.com/celenaglenn). She was the one who prompted Rabbit to record.
“Black Cracker has her studio at our apartment, and she used to have people come over and just kind of play around,” Rabbit says. “One night she was making some beats and she was just like: ‘Freestyle.’” I said ‘OK,’ and then I started to talk about a bunny rabbit running around the streets of Brooklyn. The next day [Black Cracker] said, ‘I think we should make an album,’ and we did.”
Rabbit, who sweetly and politely declined to give her real name — “That’s back in the day,” she says. “That’s a previous lifetime” (though it’s not that hard to find if you really want to know) — says that once they were committed to the album, she drew inspiration from “the Virgin Mary; really tacky trinkets that I would find in the dollar store; fake flowers; Bone Thugs-N-Harmony — a group I used to listen to when I was in sixth grade, and I was really confused and didn’t know anything about anything; and the dirty brown, old snow that gets all the way up your knees and wets your pants.”
To Rabbit, drawing from the characteristics of inanimate objects to write songs is more than just charming abstraction. “Snow can be so fun and so pretty, and when it’s dirty you see the effect of the world and of humans and cars, and it’s just the reality,” she says. “Our songs are very real that way. They have that prettiness, but they also have the dirt and the grime, and it just feels like that’s the balance we’re all living in.”
—
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andrea Bussell writes fiction and is a frequent contributor to Venus Zine, Bust, Punk Planet, Bitch, and New York Press. She loves Coney Island, gun ranges, Nick Cave, and obscure, early ’90s space rock. Having narrowly escaped the dreary clutches of Michigan's bible belt, she now lives in Brooklyn, where she studies knife swallowing, just for the hell of it.
Issue #31
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more