washingtonpost.com
For Nellie McKay, Divadom Awaits
By Allison Stewart
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, March 15, 2004; Page C01
If 19-year-old rapper, raconteur and piano-playing jazz singer Nellie McKay didn't exist, someone -- a record company executive, probably -- would have had to invent her.
The true details of McKay's improbable life seem beyond invention: Her hardscrabble upbringing in Harlem, culminating in a brief stint as a 10-year-old hostage. Her grandfather, who did time in San Quentin for murder. Her polite feud with Norah Jones (sadly one-sided, since Jones doesn't seem to have heard of McKay). Her triumphant rise to the middle, a tale that equally evokes Horatio Alger and Barry Manilow. To say nothing of her recent debut, the splashy, double-disc "Get Away From Me" (any swipe at Jones's "Come Away With Me" is purely intentional).
McKay's music is a cranky but high-spirited combination of rap, rock, jazz and Tin Pan Alley pop. On "Get Away," she takes on cloning, the Oxygen network, her unrequited crush on David, her next-door neighbor ("David don't you hear me at all / David dear, I'm just down the hall"), rhymes Phil Spector and Hannibal Lecter, insults George W. Bush and generally seems to have a good time.
McKay has already evoked critical comparisons to artists as varied as Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter and Randy Newman, though the most apt review was the one that re-imagined her as a combination of Doris Day and Eminem. With her genteel thrift-store suits, perfect diction and facility for hip-hop, McKay is both willfully anachronistic and utterly modern.
"I wish I belonged in a time where you could wear petticoats and everyone wasn't in jeans and wasn't so vulgar," she says. "There's this kind of 'Sex and the City' syndrome where there's no more romance, it's all just hooking up. Doris Day takes me back to a time when things were much more innocent. But as far as music goes, I'm very interested in being a part of my generation. I don't want to just be a throwback."
In person, McKay (pronounced Mc-EYE) is voluble and friendly. She worries about her appearance on "Live With Regis and Kelly" the next day. (Will they make her chat with them? She hates that.) She's worried about a recent interview in which she discussed her greatest fears. (What if she ever gets a stalker? Why give him ideas?) She is sitting in a coffee shop in Harlem, next door to her apartment and a few short blocks from the site of the childhood mugging nearly a decade ago that served as the inspiration for "Manhattan Avenue," one of the cornerstones of her debut. McKay was getting out of a car when she was attacked by a man wielding a box cutter; he grabbed her, held the weapon to her throat and demanded money from her mother.
"It was a fairly brutal moment," she recalls. "I still can't open a car door without actually getting out. You either open it and get out or you stay in with the doors locked. I was telling my mother I wanted a waffle for dinner, and then there was a guy there. My mother had enough wits about her to throw the dummy wallet at him."
McKay's mother, Robin Pappas, had been an actress in England, appearing in "Chariots of Fire" and other films before moving to America with the newborn Nellie and finding that work had mostly dried up. McKay's maternal grandfather was a violent, bipolar personality who, McKay says, led a "frustrated and harmful life" that culminated in a stint in San Quentin for his participation in a murder. McKay's father is a British director whom she hasn't seen in years; Pappas raised McKay on her own. "We definitely struggled. . . . But kids don't know the difference between a dollar store and Barneys. My mother always provided for me."
Mother and daughter left town soon after the mugging. McKay went to high school in Pennsylvania, learned how to play the piano, sax, xylophone and cello, and returned to New York to briefly attend Manhattan School of Music. Bothered by the school's cliquishness ("I can't tell you how much I abhor being cool"), she dropped out after less than two years.
She began working the tough proving ground of cabarets and gay bars at 17, first playing cover tunes and, eventually, her own material. An interview in a local magazine drew the attention of Columbia Records executives, who signed McKay after a brief bidding war and installed her in the studio with former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick in the summer of 2003.
Released last month, "Get Away From Me" (original title: "Black America") is deft and sharp and, in its way, subversive, packed with rapid-fire ruminations on politics, pop culture and romance cloaked in mild hip-hop beats and slight, lovely melodies. McKay has drawn more from her own deep well of influences -- Stephen Sondheim, Bob Dylan, Dinah Shore -- than from the old-school social satirists to whom she is often compared.
"I think it can be hard to listen to satire sometimes," says McKay, who also expresses a fondness for the music of Shakira and Pink. "I have a friend who covers Tom Lehrer in piano bars, and one of the songs he covered was 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.' That kind of put me off Tom Lehrer. I'm still enough of a teenage girl that I like listening to teenage music."
It's the disc's most overt stab at gender politics, "I Wanna Get Married" ("I wanna pack cute little lunches / For my Brady Bunches / Then read Danielle Steel"), that's gotten the most attention. "People think that's a joke, but it really isn't," says McKay. "I long for that kind of . . . 'Bewitched' model. But my post-feminist [side] is very in tune with Alanis Morissette."
On the surface, at least, the disc's numerous jazzy ballads recall Norah Jones more than Morissette, and countless reviews have already positioned McKay as Jones's strange younger sister. "I think they're pretty different, actually," says Nic Harcourt, deejay on the influential Los Angeles radio program "Morning Becomes Eclectic" and an early backer of McKay's. "Nellie's record is a lot more eccentric. I don't know that it's going to find the same audience. She's got more than just the piano-playing-chanteuse thing going on."
Because McKay wants badly to be famous -- insists on it, actually -- she tolerates the comparisons, hoping Jones's success will be the rising tide that lifts all boats. "She seems like a very happy person," says McKay suspiciously. "Her music is less topical than what I'm trying to do. I think that's our greatest difference.
"I really want to reflect the times, where I think her appeal is that she doesn't reflect the times. I'd rather make waves."
