Superhead, Meet Supercleb

BOOK REVIEW
Confessions of a Video Vixen



Got a chick named Super-head
She give super-head
Just moved in the buildin, even gave the super head
Jadakiss, "Blood Pressure"

So begins the story of the most hated woman in hip hop. Well, not with the super getting head, but with Ja Rule and his Murder Inc. compatriots re-gifting the nickname Jadakiss had originally bestowed on the generous lady friend in the song.

Karrine Steffans, hip hop groupie, "video vixen" was the recipient.

I was finally able to get my grubby little hands on her 2005 memoir sans the shame of having to admit I was buying it (great Hannukkah present, Bri, thanks!) and devoured it within seventeen hours of arrival. That the book discussed the respective endowments of Shaq and Vin Diesel had nothing to do with my reading pace.

Want the rest of the list? Kool G Rap, Ice T, Ja Rule, Irv Gotti, "Papa" (=Method Man, according to Crim & Assoc.), Puffy, Ray J, Fred Durst (random!), Xzibit, DMX, Bobby Brown, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Usher, probably hundreds of unnamed athletes and music industry execs.

Sup, you could do with some editing. Of those, only Method Man, Vin Diesel and maybe Xzibit actually seem sexy when you think about it. And when you read about it.

Don't read this book unless you're prepared to have a big shit taken on your sexual fantasies about rappers. Kool G Rap beats her, Irv Gotti pimps her. Most of the rest take their fellatio apportionment with bizarre matter-of-factness, buy her some shit and move on.

And she doles out the apportionments in kind, with skillful efficiency. There are actual torrid affairs with a few of the aforementioned, but what takes place with most is a weird, sterile transaction in which both parties seem to know they have to do this, so they get on with it, already. The more famous the man, the less pleasant the sex: witness her mediocre fifteen minutes with Puffy (p. 149), gross baths in Shaq's copious sweat (p. 144) and grimy, late-night hotel encounter with Dr. Dre before he started working out (p. 115).

But the book never really tries to explain why. Readers get to see her being cruelly abused as a child and raped at age thirteen; we generally gather that she has a great gaping void which must be filled with famous cock. She does explain that, through all of it, she is miserable, addicted to fame, money and drugs.

But with her standing right there at the crossroads of so many fascinating social forces--race, fame, sex, gender, hip hop--I couldn't help wanting her to apply more of that fellatistic ambition to her writing, to give me not just the wheres and the hows and what they ordered from room service, but the WHY DID YOU DO THIS?

Maybe it's unfair of me to expect so much in the way of analytical skills from Sup. Although she does reclaim her by-then-shameful nickname at the end of the book's journey, explaining that in England "superhead" means something like "brainiac."

Gripes aside, I like Sup. She certainly does keep it real. It's no fun having the great army of hip hop ready to kill you with its bare hands. She broke the unspoken code and infuriated rappers and their followings, which says a lot about who the code hurt and helped in the first place.

They didn't see it coming, which is kind of delicious. You just get the feeling that all those guys thought they were in the warm mouth of a pleasure robot, not a living woman who just might fuck and tell.

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