Lady Sovereign Rapper Lady Sovereign isn't afraid to speak her mind - as Jessica Simpson's ex-husband found out.

Mar 27, 2007 09:03:27

The phone line falls quiet. There's a rustling sound, like a bag being rifled through. There's silence again, before an extended, melodramatic sigh. "Shit," says Lady Sovereign in her best council- estate parlance. "I've only got one cigarette left. "I hate doing interviews," she adds. "I can't handle sitting still for that long." This is the Lady Sovereign shtick: cheeky, foul- mouthed, pugnacious. In a mainstream hip-hop world that values women more for their derriere- shaking abilities than their lyrical vernacular, the 21-year-old British rapper has risen to the top of the international pile by offering a different female perspective. Her debut album, last year's mischievous, grime- laced Public Warning, gave the pint-sized MC an unimagined level of notoriety, both for her rapid- fire rhymes and her cocky street-urchin persona. Her record, which included the fiery singles Random, 9 to 5, Hoodie and Love Me or Hate Me, drew comparisons to the Streets' Mike Skinner and Dizzee Rascal. But it was her cheeky attitude between tracks that set tongues wagging, especially on tour in America. "I don't think they knew how to take me," she says, laughing. "I'm just witty, you know what I mean?" She laughs again. "I just kind of go on and on about the same joke to keep myself amused ... If it means verbally attacking someone, I'll do it." One now infamous verbal attack was against Jessica Simpson - via her ex-husband Nick Lachey - after an excessive quantity of Red Bull and champagne at an industry shindig in Miami last year. "I saw him and people were like, 'You should go and say hello,' and I did. So I was slagging off Jessica Simpson for about 10 minutes and he was laughing, and then strangely after that I sort of passed out and was repulsively sick everywhere, all over my manager and everything ... I keep seeing him now. It's funny, kind of like, 'Oh, you again.' " But there's a measure of legitimacy to her rascal- like ways. Sovereign, aka Louise Harman, grew up in London's notorious Chalkhill Estate housing project. An admitted football junkie - "I thought I was going to be a pro footballer until I found rapping" - she was first exposed to hip-hop by her mum, who was an avid Salt-N-Pepa fan. She starting rapping at 14 and by 16 had dropped out of school to concentrate on developing her rhymes and producing her own tracks. After landing an acting role in an educational film, she persuaded the film's producers to let her make the soundtrack. Her demos for the film landed in the hands of garage producer Medasyn, who helped launch the rapper's career. She dropped her debut EP, Vertically Challenged, on record label Chocolate Industries in 2005. Even her multimillion-dollar signing with Universal imprint Def Jam had a genuine hip-hop edge when label president and hip-hop royalty Jay-Z asked her to freestyle for him. "It was like putting a goldfish in with the sharks," she says, "but the goldfish bit back." On her fi