Exclusive Interview: Amanda Blank

Hip-hop can be mightily unforgiving when it comes to defining – and especially redefining oneself. Amanda Blank began her career with a string of increasingly high-profile guest spots on rap and later pop singles; but even though she moved from the likes of Spank Rock to Britney Spears with an ease and dexterity matched only by her effortless, rapid-fire delivery, even fans assumed she was essentially – if not only – a filthy motormouth whose thoughts wandered more often into the bedroom than onto the dancefloor.

With the release of I Love You, her solo debut, Blank wastes no time challenging that perception: although the disc doesn’t skimp on dirty talk, it’s first and foremost a collection of future club classics, with several more reflective tunes thrown in as an indication her music is more than ready to make its way into the mainstream. Crave recently spoke to Blank (real name: Amanda Mallory) via telephone to discuss the development of her album, reflected on redefining herself and her music in her own terms, and talked about the challenges of being a formidable female in hip-hop’s boys club.

Maybe just to get started, you could talk about what the process was for you, or the lesson you learned, when you went from appearing on other people’s songs to creating an album of your own?

Amanda Blank: It was hard definitely in the beginning trying to figure out what I wanted to do, what I didn’t want to do, and it’s all mine. Something about that is really great – it’s really freeing, like I have no one to answer to but myself and at the end of the day it only matters if I like it – and then there’s something really scary about it because you’re in it alone. You’re not leaning on someone else for help in the same way. But I don’t know – I really enjoyed it. It definitely got to the point where I was so used to doing songs with other people, and it was their songs and what they wanted to do, not always necessarily what I wanted to do. But just like I wouldn’t want somebody telling me what to do on my song, I’m like, okay, I’m writing a verse for you or I’m rapping for you, and this is what you want to do and I want to do it with you, so we’ll do it your way. And on a lot of the songs, there was definitely a lot of collaboration, so it was like, okay, this is what people have heard from me because it’s what somebody else wanted in a lot of ways.

So [on my own album] it’s like trying to just be confident and okay, I’m going to do something different, and I have to get over that fear of upsetting certain people or people that want to hear a specific thing from me, and that was kind of the first lesson I learned.

I remember Santi[gold] said to me, I was like, “I’m nervous to sing.” I remember it was before a show and I had written all of these songs and she came to hang out and be there for me, and she said “they’re never going to get used to the idea of you being a singer if you don’t do it.” She was right; I was a little nervous at the beginning to disappoint people who wanted to hear me rapping really quickly or about certain things, and it took a minute to kind of get over that. But once I did, it kind of all came together, and was like, okay, I’m not going to please everybody all the time anyway.

Was there any sort of artistic template or album that inspired you or you may have modeled your album after?

Blank: Not like one specific album, I would say. I mean, there’s lots of girls that I totally admire and look up to and the music that they’ve made. Like Missy, for example; I love Missy Elliott, and think she’s so cool. She’s such a weirdo in like the best way ever. And the Blondie albums. There’s a lot of women that have really inspired me but musically on this album there was a lot of funny shit that I liked as a kid, and I’m always listening to a lot of Depeche Mode. I think that’s like the always-constant in what I’m listening to on my record player, but definitely I think I was influenced a lot by them and that sort of like there would be songs that were kind of dark but still really danceable. I really felt like I wanted that element on the album.

A lot of freestyle music was inspiring and I definitely was inspired by [that], so this like ‘80s fun pop stuff. But I don’t know if there was one specific album that I was like, “this is it.” I don’t really think that the album has been made yet; I mean, I hope I made it, and I’m definitely inspired by my friends and the stuff that they’ve done. But I don’t know – I enjoy thinking from all over the place with this album.

You mentioned that people might have been expecting you to do a certain thing. Before now you were best known as this extremely fast, dexterous female rapper who could be just as dirty as any of the guys. Was there a conscious decision to subvert the persona you created or people associate with you?

Blank: I think it’s just that I’m not like that all of the time. I don’t think I get so worried about being pigeonholed, because that’s like whatever people think. I’m not worried about that so much as I am just that I wanted something like I said before – I don’t know if the album has been made yet, the ultimate girl album. I mean, there have been a lot of amazing, ultimate girl albums, but not one specifically that I could model mine after. Santi has said there hasn’t been a lot of girls making music that we want to hear, so we make it ourselves.

With the album, I think [I thought] if I were a girl and I wanted to hear Amanda Blank, what would I want to hear her doing? I wanted to make something that was relatable to girls and wasn’t all about sex, or wasn’t all rapping so quickly, because it’s not all I’m about. That’s definitely a huge thing; sex is really important and I think women should talk about it and I think there’s no shame in my game. But me not rapping so much about it is not me saying, oh, I have to get away from it because I want people to take me seriously.

I have a lot more songs like that left in me, and I’ll make a lot more of them. It was more just like, there are things going on in my life now, there are things going on in other girls’ lives that ought to be talked about as well. But as you do get older, you change and the things that are important to you change. In ten years I could be going through some crazy quarterlife crisis and only want to deal with 19-year-olds, and you better believe I will write an album about it (laughs).

When you started performing, was there a deliberation or conscious effort to develop that public persona? Because it seems like a real challenge for women in hip-hop to be purely feminine and yet taken seriously.

Blank: Oh God, it’s a nightmare. It’s a male-dominated industry, like most industries; the music world is a boys’ club – other bands, other rappers, other musicians, producers, DJs, critics, writers are almost all guys, and they have such strong opinions about women and what they should be rapping about or what makes a good female MC. It’s a little frustrating because in some ways these guys tell you how to rap; it’s like, are trying to tell me how to be a woman, too?

It’s frustrating because it’s such a double-edged sword, rapping about sex and having a sexual identity in your music, because it’s like if you rap about sex, I think a lot of people have the attitude that girls only rap about sex because it’s all they know how to rap about, or it’s what’s going to get them the most attention. It’s so cliché, how come there aren’t more women rapping about other sh*t? And there’s a lot of women rapping about other things that don’t pertain to sex. If anybody listened to like half of my lyrics, I’m not always rapping about that.

They did that to Spank Rock so hard, saying he’s just a crazy misogynist rapper, and I’m like have you actually listened to his album? Half the sh*t he’s saying is so obviously tongue-in-cheek. And it frustrates me because if I wasn’t rapping about sex then I’d be boring; I’d be a lesbian. But now that I am rapping about sex it’s like that’s all I know how to do. It’s definitely been difficult and I feel really fortunate because I’ve been really over the top with it – I can go to some really strange places – but generally it’s embraced, and women seem to get it. Well, there was one woman that said I was asking to be date-raped, but oh my God, she better hope that she never meets me in real life!

But I’m not worried about the people that don’t like it. The people that don’t like it are never going to like it and that’s fine; I’ll be bummed when the people that like it start to dislike it. [But] it’s a very complicated situation because men have been so opinionated about it for so long, a woman’s sex life or the way a woman should behave, and it’s frustrating. It’s like, that’s done. But I think there a lot of women taking back the night.

How do you feel about the state of contemporary hip-hop in general? It seems like they’ve whittled the genre down to some amazingly specific, minimal pop formulas, in both good and bad ways. Some people say hip-hop is dead, for example.

Blank: No, they’re just old and out of touch. That’s the thing – rap music is for kids! It’s always been about young people and youth culture, so it’s hard, but you know what? People do it with rap music, but they do it with rock music too – no one sort of likes the ‘next style’ of rock music, and there’s a lot of new sh*t that I f*cking hate as far as like rock music or punk music or dance music, because you get so attached to the stuff you loved when you were a kid, and when it changes you go, no way – this sucks. But I think there’s something really amazing about a lot of the new stuff because it is for kids, and kids f*cking love it. Rap music is doing very well in mainstream culture; it’s way bigger than pop-rock.

I think that people who are saying ‘hip-hop is dead’ are out of touch, because there’s a lot of great rappers that are still doing their thing out there and they’re doing it in ways that aren’t boring. Like, look at Q-Tip’s album; it was great! I thought it was so well done, I thought the music was great, his rapping was great, he killed it. Hip-hop’s not dead, and if you want that kind of music, it still exists; he’s not looking down at all of the new sh*t. He’s like at our shows, and he keeps up on stuff like that, so I think it’s these people that are close-minded and they think everything is so dumbed-down, but at the end of the day, it’s pop music. A lot of it is disposable, a lot of it is sh*t you’re never going to listen to it again, but I don’t know if I see anything wrong with that. I know that a lot of people probably wouldn’t agree with me, but I certainly don’t feel that way.

Is there a track on your album that you’re most proud of, or if it’s possible, that sort of encapsulates your artistic goals?

Blank: (laughs) Yes and no. I think that there is one song that I particularly love because I’ve always written songs like this and I never really played them for people, but “Leaving You Behind,” I wrote that and I played it for [producer] Switch and I was like, I don’t really play a lot of people that kind of stuff that I write. I was sort of playing around on the guitar and piano, and I played it for him and he was like, “I really think you should put this on your record.” I was like I don’t know, because I have a ton of songs like that and I think I may save them all for a whole different project and just put them all together. He was like, no – I really think you should have at least one of these on here. We discussed it a lot and we worked on it, and the way we made it was really easy and organic; for example, Lykke Li, she was there just hanging out and she was like, “oh, I’ll sing on it.” Like we were just hanging out and having fun – it was really easy. Alex [Epton] came in, he was playing around, he played the drums; there was laughter at the end of the song because he was giggling and Switch is standing there the whole time going, “I can’t believe Alex can play the drums.” Just all of us hanging out, we just made it, and I like really pretty sh*t, I am a girl in so many ways, so I think it is funny because it’s such a pretty song and it’s so sweet, but the lyrics are kind of weird and mean and f*cked up.

But I think that’s me, I’m worried – it’s all sweethearty and totally sad and sappy, but then at the same time totally f*cked up and mean at the same time. In a lot of ways I think that song says a lot about me. But I do love that song and I’m proud of it and really happy that I put it on the album, just because I wasn’t going to.

Thanks for the interview Amanda! For more information on how to buy her album and listen to some of her tracks, check her out on MySpace.

Interview by: Todd Gilchrist