A hot, beautiful spring Saturday shouldn't be spent indoors. There's too many beautiful women, waves, and other distractions awaiting you.
But that's exactly where I found myself this past Saturday, at Fort Lauderdales's Laguna Beach nightclub, in the afternoon, hanging with Central Florida's own Riskay for her first official video shoot. If you're not familiar with Riskay, she's the raunchy Bartlow rapper who became an Internet phenomenon when her shameless song "Let Me Smell Yo Dick" hit MySpace last autumn and went global.
The chorus to the song is so salacious it could make Uncle Luke blush. It's all about a woman needing to smell her man to make sure he hasn't been dipping his schlong where it doesn't belong.
She was in South Florida over the weekend drumming up support for that track.
Most radio DJs still won't play the song in this market but the radio friendly version of the track is getting lots of spins in Tampa, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and at a few other stations across the country.
Despite its saucy title, "Let Me Smell Yo Dick" is actually a pop song—catchy enough to crossover from rap and stand on its own. With a beat that's half crunk and half strip club, it's hard not to get hooked on it after hearing the chorus a few times.
It caught Perez Hilton's attention this past November and the Miami-raised blogger gave Riskay's four-minute diss track a life of its own. By January of this year, unlikely sources such as the New York Times and BrooklynVegan.com started giving it ink and there are tons of YouTube videos with folks creating their own version of the song.
But until recently, nobody really knew who Riskay was. The 24-year-old Central Florida rapper was working for the Florida Department of Transportation up until a couple of months ago with no record contract and minimum experience. She had just a MySpace presence to back her up.
These days that's all you need, and she's making sure her 15 seconds of fame attached to "Let Me Smell Yo Dick" don't go to waste.
Her song doesn't have a video yet. That's why we're forgoing the beautiful weather outside as local director Eric Klein is trying to piece one together.
Walking into Laguna Beach nightclub during the daytime puts things in perspective. The plush club situated at Fort Lauderdale's BeachPlace is basically empty except for the video crew, artists, and extras that are keeping the place busy. The film crew is busily searching for the best camera angle, extras are gyrating and trying to create a packed club scene, and all eyes are on Riskay.
She's holding court like a diva onstage, actually singing, not lip-synching, her song, barefoot with her shoes thrown to the side. The pumps hurt her feet. She's a little ghetto and very country and has an honesty that's hard to find in the music business nowadays.
"I'm real country," Riskay says while laughing during a break in the action. "If you understand the type of female that I am, you'll understand this song."
I can't help but ask her how she ended up writing a song with such a dirty theme and she doesn't hesitate dishing up the hilarious details.
"I was dating a guy who was cheating on me and going with other girls," Riskay says. "He came in the house one night and I knew something wasn't right. So I told him to drop his boxers and let me smell it. And I think a lot of people like that song because women want to do that to their men all the time but are embarrassed."
As it turns out, Riskay gets loads of emails every week from women telling her how empowering the track is. Sometimes she gets gay men who tell her the same thing.
She just performed at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin at Perez Hilton's party and closed out the show after N.E.R.D. "Perez is real cool," she says. "He's a good guy. He invited me out there to perform at his party and when I sang my song, he got onstage and sang it with me. It was just a great night."
Riskay and I are now standing outside getting some fresh air. "It's been so cool to have this song blow up like this," she says. "So fast. And mean a lot to so many different people. It's all a blessing."
So with other female rappers Khia and Trina going at it for bragging rights on who the baddest rapper in the south is, Riskay is a good example of why none of that stuff matters. Despite her name, she's not nearly as vulgar as you'd expect in person and carries herself better than most female rappers in the game.
The fact that she's from Florida is all the more reason to support her. Sure she's country, but that's what makes her so interesting to watch.
