Your songs can be supernarrative, but the audience always seems to know all the words anyway. At that moment I knew that was where I’d be at for the rest of my life. It was phallic statues, very Gaultier, very Versace. In the bathroom, there were all these Polaroids of all of the drag queens and clubgoers. I took it upon myself to really explore the club and look at everything. It was a club called Crash in Queens, and my foster mother had family that worked there, and we got to go there before somebody’s birthday party.

The first gay club I ever went to, I was 12. I was really attracted to the flamboyant aspects of gay life, so going downtown, I’d see all the club kids that I read about. What was your first experience going to clubs in the city? When I was a little girl, I used to read The Village Voice a lot, and I became obsessed with New York night-life culture. Before that, I watched my brother play at Carnegie Hall with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. What’s the first music you saw in New York? When I was maybe 6 I’d go to the Manhattan School of Music to see my brother and sister play cello and piano and violin. Snuggled up in a fluffy red zip-up fleece in a small meeting room in her Bronx apartment building, Frasqueri described what it took to become Princess Nokia. She changed her name to Princess Nokia and released a series of albums, including one of earnest emo anthems, that secured her reputation as a tireless cheerleader for outcasts.

But she endeared herself to groups all over the city - women, queer kids, drag queens, ravers, punks - who saw themselves reflected in her music, and over time, she developed rhyming skills that she channeled into energetic, moving anthems. When the 26-year-old mixed-race native New Yorker began her musical career as Wavy Spice, she barely even rhymed - her first song consisted mainly of her saying “Bitch, I’m posh” again and again.

And if they did, they most likely wouldn’t admit to having it “so bad I’m bleeding.” And if they wrote about the loss of a mother and growing up in foster care with an abusive parent, it’s very unlikely they’d do it with the sincerity Destiny Frasqueri brings to her songs. Most rappers don’t write songs about their eczema. By Matthew Schnipper Photographs by Brenda Ann Kenneally

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