KINNIE STARR
Mon, June 2
New City

My parents really want me to get famous, which is kind of unfortunate because I keep letting them down," jokes Kinnie Starr, sort of.

It sounds cliché, but since the singer/emcee/guitarist’s major label debut in the mid-90s (a short-lived relationship), she’s built a career on intentionally ducking expectations to keep both feet firmly in the indie/underground scene. Musically, that means a socially conscious, multilingual mix that combines elements of Billy Bragg, Tricky, Lauren Hill, De La Soul, and PJ Harvey, among others.

"I keep making decisions to stay in the art world but not to bust out and take my clothes off and become all superstar," she deadpans. "I could stand to earn more money that would come with more moderate exposure, but to receive that type of corporate push you need to become Nelly Furtado or Avril Lavigne or one of those megastar bands. It ruins your life, your sense of security, your self-esteem."

But instead of moving further away from a mainstream sound on her third album (Sun Again), as one would expect, she embraces it. This doesn’t mean recording songs about being like a bird or odes to romancing a "Sk8ter Boi," but just paying attention to a pop blueprint for tracks like "Amazed," "Alright," and "Rise" (written for her brother’s weddings).

"I tried to remember how Cindy Lauper made me feel," she says. "That was a directional template: a more fresh and joyous feel, as well as focusing more on melodies and arrangements–crafting them more. My older brother likes Destiny’s Child and Seal, for example. He always makes me these mix CDs, and I was starting to like some of the stuff he was giving me. I tried to see the merit in more mainstream arrangements. Instead of my arrangements being amorphous, which they tend to be in the tradition of dub or just poetry, I wanted to craft them so someone like my brother could hear my record and appreciate it.

"I’d grown kind of weary of watching intelligent forward-thinking people only expressing their opinion to people that they know agree with them. It just gets boring."

To fight such boredom, Starr immerses herself in a dizzying number of pursuits, such as photography, martial arts, silk screening, yoga, painting, studying political history and anatomy, counseling youth, and, recently, acting. She plays a promiscuous bisexual drummer in The Paper Dolls, an American indie film about an all-female band falling apart after moving in together.

She says one of the strangest parts of the experience was meeting Lemmy from Motorhead, who co-stars as a burnout musician living in a closet and hallucinating about blue worms. He was really weird," she exclaims. "He had on his rider a gallon of Jack Daniels a day. That’s, like, a lot. Fuck, I couldn’t drink a gallon of juice a day, let alone JD. He was really into Doritos and Jack Daniels, and that was definitely his thing. He just rambles, he makes no sense at all."

Starr’s next acting gig is much bigger and more exotic. She’s currently training 10-15 hours per day for the newest Cirque Du Soleil show in Vegas. Billed as an "erotic cabaret," Zumanity begins its run at the New York, New York Hotel this August. She’ll be onstage with a mic throughout the performance.

Starr signed the two-year, 1000-show contract because it promised "intense" vocal and physical training, but neither has met her expectations. "We’re just sitting on our asses studying our songs. They could be pushing me a lot harder and I’d be a lot happier."