ONTD

Real Name : Michael David Quattlebaum Jr.

- Age : 25

- Grew up in : Raleigh, North Carolina

- Resides : in Harlem

- Influences : Lauryn Hill, Kathleen Hanna, Jean Cocteau, Eminem, and Anais Nin

- Dropped out of Parsons

- Was inspired by Vincent Gallo to run away from home as a teenager



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Mykki Blanco is Michael David Quattlebaum Jr.'s alter ego that was created a year ago when Quattlebaum decided to leave his house in head-to-toe drag. He was hit on five times that day, and realized his alter ego garnered enough attention to make a regular presence out of. Mykki Blanco describes herself as “a mixture of riot grrrl and ghetto fabulousness.” Since developing the Mykki Blanco alias, Quattlebaum has been signed on to UNO records and has performed and been spotted at major venues and events including Art Basel, Santos Party House and Le Baron.




Mykki Blanco rejects being called a "gay rapper." His EP, Mykki Blanco & The Mutant Angels, is based on the idea of androgyny. Quattlebaum uses poetry and her alter ego to perform ideas of alternative sexuality. After running away from home as a teenager, Quattlebaum would go to a gay bar in the Lower East Side called The Cock, where he met Alexander McQueen and Ryan McGinley.

In an interview with Interview Magazine, Quattlebaum attempted to define his sexuality:

I considered myself gay for so long, it really wasn't until I started dressing as the opposite sex pretty regularly that I began to see my gender identity shift. To be flat-out honest, it wasn't until I started sleeping with men as the opposite sex that things started to really change-when I found out men that I found attractive found me attractive as a woman!





Quattlebaum talks about his trans identity as a performance art. In an interview with Fader, Quattlebaum says his Mykki Blanco cross dressing performance is shock rock, and that he is not trying to become a woman in his cross dressing, but also maintain his masculinity at the same time. In the same interview, he also admits that his past style phases included dressing like a hippie and, later, a punk.












“Welcome to Hell, bitches. This is Mykki Blanco!” So begins the raucous and rapidfire first verse of countercultural downtown artist/rapper Mykki Blanco’s “Wavvy,” a shimmery, Brenmar-produced track that percolates and settles at club-ready intervals like a sped-up bong rip. After a year of making waves through a series of performances, poetry readings, atypical releases, and a relentless stream of consciousness on Twitter, Blanco (nee Michael David Quattlebaum, Jr.) poises himself to break through with this dazzling video directed by fashion photographer Francesco Carrozzini. Opening with a humorous and deftly-performed drug-dealing dramatization, Blanco purchases a handful of purple pills which are supposedly a drug called “Wavvy” before being chased by a clumsy female cop through the garbage-lined streets of downtown New York. Luckily he hops up on a getaway mack truck that turns into some sort of personal rave confessional, before emerging at a dark and decadent Gatsby-esque party as his feminine alter-ego, preening for and assaulting the camera in various states of semi-drag. If you aren’t shocked by the rise of an experimental drag performer in the often homophobic world of hip-hop, perhaps you should gag on the fact that in terms of production, her video puts the sort of fare you normally see on 106 & Park to shame. Gag on it:







At Home with Mykki Blanco






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