The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (21 page)

Suddenly, where there was once no ladder up to the national spotlight and little evidence of an extant Chicago scene, there is a cottage industry of managers, labels and burgeoning talent putting the city on the map in a real way.

For Larry Jackson, the executive VP of A&R at Interscope who signed Keef, his initial reaction was visceral: “It scared me. And I knew it was going to be huge. It felt disturbingly powerful. Nobody really talks about Top 40 music anymore because the music is like wallpaper—it doesn’t make you feel anything. [“I Don’t Like”] pushes people.”

Jackson says that the reason they gave Keef his own label was in order to grab any other Chicago talent that comes bubbling up. “We did it to widen the net—so that anything that comes within 50 feet of Keef, we can catch it.” The label has already inked deals with two MCs who are part of Keef’s crew, GBE. Lil Reese and Lil Durk both recently signed to Def Jam; Lil Durk was released this week after serving two months for a weapons charge.

For Interscope and the other labels that were courting him, Chief Keef’s legal woes just added credibility to his swaggering image. While part of the appeal of this new wave of Chicago rappers is just that—the newness of it—hip-hop fans are eager to hear the real stories of the street, songs that are a true-to-life reaction to what’s happening in America’s murder capital. Keef’s gun charge, for better or worse, adds authenticity to the biography he relates in his songs.

“You look at the news and see who is doing most of these killings—he fits that profile,” explains Larry “Larro” Wilson, CEO of Lawless, the South Side record label that is home to King Louie and Katie Got Bandz. “Does it help that Keef is on house arrest? Absolutely.”

For 18-year-old Tavares Taylor, who goes by the name Lil Reese, it all seems a bit unreal. He’s know Keef since childhood and the two are still close; they have an air of brotherly collusion between them. Waiting backstage at Pitchfork, Reese’s demeanor stands in stark contrast to Keef—while no less a talent, he still seems like a kid, unaffected and wowed by the attention. Up until two days ago, he didn’t know what Pitchfork was or that it was even a big deal until he retweeted their review of his new mixtape and saw they have nearly 2 million Twitter followers. Backstage, he is listless, he wants pizza before he hits the stage but doesn’t know where to get it; his manager J-Boogie presents him with the show contracts, which Reese signs atop a garbage can lid. The biggest difference between Keef and Reese is that Reese didn’t expect this fame.

For Reese, the main thing that has determined his life and music is also the same thing he most wants to communicate to the rest of Chicago and the world. “I never felt safe. Still don’t.” J-Boogie arrives and begins herding the dozen-plus boys towards the stage, “It’s time.” Reese and Keef walk side by side in spotless head-to-toe white outfits, collars popped.

In these boys, Chicago has finally gotten the pop ambassadors it deserves—swaggering teenage wonders tapping into the zeitgeist like experts, telling their truth in blunt, steely lines. The first measure of “I Don’t Like” booms and approx. 18,000 pairs of hands reach for the sky. The duo are met with screaming as they walk out from the wings. For the 10 minutes they are on stage, they are magnetic, Keef’s incandescent—a natural—and suddenly they are done. Walking off stage, he finally agrees to be interviewed. Asked how it feels to have just played to his biggest hometown audience yet, he replies without pausing, “This? This ain’t shit.”

NUDE AWAKENING: SUICIDE GIRLS

SPIN
magazine, February 2006

This piece was co-written and reported with my esteemed friend and colleague Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who is gracious enough to let me include her work here.

“It’s been blood, sweat and tears since the beginning,” says Selena Mooney, as her blue eyes start to well up again. Mooney, 28, is better known as Missy Suicide, cofounder of SuicideGirls.com, the most visible alt-porn website on the Internet. As she sits in her office in SG’s bubblegum-pink Los Angeles headquarters in mid-October, her soft voice is nearly drowned out by the din that accompanies her site’s booming success, the constantly ringing phones and the clacking high heels of her all-female staff. On the wall behind her hang large color photographs of some of the site’s most iconic women, all taken by Mooney herself. One of the portraits is of Katie, a short-haired brunette who was the site’s first employee and later became its most visible model, and who just days earlier was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by SuicideGirls. In another image, a model name Sicily is clad only in a wet slip, her black-rimmed eyes cast heavenward; she left the company several weeks ago and has since become its loudest detractor. “The hardest part of this?” Mooney says. “Losing friends. Feeling betrayed and hurt.”

The past month has clearly taken its toll on Mooney—not just the usual rigors of a 14-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week work schedule, but also the spate of behind-the-scenes troubles that have befallen her online enterprise. Beginning in September 2005, SuicideGirls weathered a series of allegations leveled by former models. More than 30 women have left since then, some claiming they had been subjected to unfair contracts and financial misdealings, others deriding the site’s girl-positive brand image as a sham and complaining that they had suffered verbal abuse.

At the same time, SG was enjoying the biggest boom in its four-year history, thanks to a string of business deals that brought its instantly recognizable punk pinups to anyone who had cable TV, an iPod or a DVD player. In its expansion from a grassroots, online community to a multimedia corporation, SuicideGirls had garnered more than just name recognition. By the end of 2005, it was also involved in three different court cases and saw several disgruntled ex-models air their dirty laundry in the same types of online communities that SuicideGirls had helped pioneer. Now even the people who have been with the site since its inception are wondering if the idealism it was founded on has been lost. “We were beyond familial,” says Mooney. “The girls expect a lot, and we tried to help. But when you grow, you lose innocence. You realize, reluctantly, how the world works.”

When Mooney launched SuicideGirls in September 2001 with a male friend, Web developer Sean Suhl, she imagined the site as a more of an art project than an entrepreneurial venture. “My passion was taking pictures of these beautiful, strong women I knew,” says Mooney, who was then a Portland, Oregon-based pinup photographer. “I was struck by the confidence they had in themselves and their bodies, and I wanted to share that confidence with the world.” SG differentiated itself from mainstream porn by identifying itself as punk, offering its subscribers interactive bulletin boards, blogs and galleries of models who didn’t represent the usual porn star aesthetic. “It didn’t pander to pornography’s idea of what sexy is,” says author and sex educator Dr. Susan Block. “The women had wit and intelligence about them that was different from the traditional porn slut.”

Slender, pretty, no-bullshit women who dig metal, grindcore and piercings, ex-models Jennifer Caravella (who still goes by her SG screen name Sicily) and Kelly Kleinert (who uses the nickname Shera) embody the archetype that has been integral to the site’s success: hip, empowered young women who have no problem with getting naked or talking back. Kleinert, a 24-year-old college student from Reading, Pennsylvania, joined SuicideGirls in late 2002 because, she says, “I saw there were chicks like me there with tattoos, who seemed cool.” Caravella, a 28-year-old performance artist from San Francisco, signed on a year later. And when the site kicked off a cross-country burlesque tour in May 2004, both women were selected to perform on it, each being paid $100 per show for a total of 41 dates. “There is definitely favoritism,” Caravella says, “And once I joined the tour, I got to be a part of that more favored group of models.”

The excursion is chronicled in the DVD
SuicideGirls: The First Tour
, a cheery travelogue that juxtaposes strip routines with
Real World
-style confessionals and scenes of the model causing jovial mayhem in punk clubs and EconoLodge parking lots. What the on-camera bonding doesn’t reveal is the fear and doubt they were starting to feel about the site. “I was so excited about the whole tour,” says Kleinert. “I was so eager to meet people I didn’t realize it was weird the entire time.”

Prior to the tour, SG cofounder Suhl had allowed some of the featured models in the film to live in the bottom-floor apartment of his sprawling home in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz hills. While she and her tourmates rehearsed their choreography, Kleinert says, her interactions with Suhl were growing increasingly negative. “Sean can be the nicest guy,” she says. “Sometimes I’d talk to him and think, ‘I love this guy, he’s going to do so much for me.’ And then he turns on you in a second.” By the time the girls hit the road, verbal attacks from Suhl had become a regular occurrence. “Sean would call the girls on the phone all the time, telling them to pull their performances together or they were off the tour,” says Mike Marshall, the DVD’s director. “I think he was trying to motivate them. It was stressful for [the girls] because they aren’t professional dancers. There were growing pains.” But the targets of Suhl’s criticism saw it differently. “Every day was hell,” says Kleinert. “Sean told us we sucked so much that we made this banner for our costume kit that said SUICIDE GIRLS BURLESQUE YOU SUCK.”

Despite the instrumental role he plays in running SuicideGirls, Suhl remains an enigmatic figure. Before launching the site, the 30-year-old had survived the Internet bust of the 1990s to establish himself as an early proponent of Web communities and blog-based networks. He has become increasingly private since the onslaught of allegations (he declined to be photographed for this story and would only be interviewed by phone, reluctantly), ceding daily involvement and hands-on work to Mooney while concentrating on the site’s development deals. The most personal information available on Suhl appears in his member profile on SuicideGirls.com, where he describes himself as “obsessive-compulsive, slightly agoraphobic,” with a “fear of intimacy,” and lists “McSweeney’s stuff” and
Lolita
as some of his favorite reads.

Suhl maintains that his critiques of the burlesque shows were merely jokes. “I think if you asked some of the other girls, they would say it was funny, if you ask people who hate me now, they would say it was a horrible, demeaning, abusive act,” he says. “There were still dinners bought, and people continued to live at the house, and it was all fine. Until they decided it wasn’t fine.”

Almost a year after the tour, in July 2005, Suhl allowed Caravella to move into his house. During her stay, Caravella claims, some of the models featured on
The First Tour
had grown increasingly concerned about receiving the 5-cent-per-disc royalty Suhl had promised them from DVD sales. (A publicist for SuicideGirls says that the women will be paid a royalty once the initial costs of the DVD are recouped.) Caravella says she asked Suhl to produce a contract: “I just wanted the piece of paper with his name on it that marks his word, that’s all.” But when she made the request, she says Suhl refused, then “flipped out.” Shortly thereafter, he told her to move out, and Caravella quit the site.

Suhl doesn’t deny kicking Caravella out of his house and counters that she had been taking advantage of him. “She came to me and said she had nowhere to live and nothing to eat,” he says. “At the time, I did what I thought was right. I feel like taking in that person was a mistake. It wasn’t a good situation.”

This wasn’t the first time Suhl had feuded with his models. Three years ago, Dia Mentia, a Web designer who posed in full-frontal photos wearing black lipstick and drizzling cherry juice over herself, became one of SuicideGirls’ first models to have her own fan base. “I was SuicideGirls’ cash cow,” says the 30-year-old Mentia (who would only be interviewed on the condition that
SPIN
not publish a real name). But in January 2003, six months after she joined, Suhl asked her to leave the site, allegedly for disparaging other models on its message boards. “I shed no tears,” she says. “I was like, ‘If you’re gonna kick me out, fuck you and I quit.’”

Mentia defected to another site, Deviant Nation, a punk-porn start-up that would have posed direct competition to SuicideGirls had it ever launched launched. In April 2003, SuicideGirls reported to the FBI that Deviant Nation’s Chad Grant had hacked into SG servers; it also attempted to sue Grant in civil court, but when he didn’t show up for the trial, SuicideGirls discovered it had sued the wrong Chad Grant—a different Californian with the same name. The debacle was later settled out of court. “The Chad Grant case was ludicrous,” says Mentia. “Essentially, it was very specific to my leaving.”

Two years later, the real Chad Grant would finally be charged by the FBI for the alleged hack. By then, however, he was just one more participant in an ever-expanding series of battles SuicideGirls was fighting, and Mentia would be there to chronicle them all. “Dia was only on the site for six months total,” says Mooney, “but nobody has been as relentless” in attacking SuicideGirls. “At first, no one really listened to her. More recently, she seems to have found an audience.”

While the alternative and online press were covering the release of
The First Tour
, they were also discovering two websites that had become clearinghouses for SuicideGirls-related complaints and gossip. Tales from the Darksite, a community on the blogging site LiveJournal, had become Mentia’s forum to post updates about women who were quitting SuicideGirls, framegrabs of content that had been deleted from the models’ blogs, and anything else she felt like ranting about.