Lady Sovereign: Worthy Of A Guilt Wank?

“I’m on a boat!”

So anyway, last Sunday Lady Sovereign found some time off whatever branch of Shoe Zone she works in these days to enter the Celebrity Big Brother house. And because we’re on that Woodward and Bernstein tip over here at Fat Lace, our journalistic synapses started twitching: “Wait a minute, she was signed to Def Jam for a while, right? Man, there must be some hilariously bad  mixtape tracks out there with her going bar-for-bar with, I dunno, that guy with the flat face from Young Gunz or something”.

And you know what? No. No there isn’t. No “tch, men, huh?” track with Shawnna, no appearance as an unlockable character on Def Jam Vendetta: Fight for New York so you can beat her up as Omar Epps… not even a rote verse on an Avril Lavigne or Ashley Simpson remix so those two pinch-faced broads could prove that they know what the kids are listening to these days. There was a Missy Elliott (ask your grandparents) remix of “Hate Me Or Love Me”, where our plucky reality TV stalwart lets us all know that “No one got craps like mine”, a level of wordplay that would have surely seen her signed to Young Money if only she’d have come out three years later.

The thought occurs that I may have, at some point, merged together Samantha Ronson’s stunning time on Roc-A-Fella as “urban” “acoustic” “guitarist” but really, when you’re dealing with the stunning history of female artists Jay-Z has personally brought through, how can you not help but be confused and overawed by the quality there? I thought gay guys were meant to be good at dealing with women, anyway? I’m unsure as of whether or not it was Seanie’s choice to have her kick off her US career with a cover of “Pretty Vacant” on the soundtrack to one of those US teen drama shows where they stare out over lakes and then go and punch their locker, but it really didn’t help quell the impression that Sovereign was basically the Mel C that nobody ever had a guiltwank over.

Anyway, you may think that this isn’t remotely worth a blogpost on but, to be honest, I’ve now sat through three hours worth of Lady Sovereign recorded material in the hope that one of Playaz Circle was going to turn up, and I’m damned if I’m letting that time go to (even) greater waste.

Words by Dom Grande

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