With her dirty-blonde hair and gangly limbs, Victoria Aitken looks more like a disaffected field-hockey center from Greenwich Day than “the female Eminem,” but according to her producer, Larry Dvoskin (who’s also searching for the first gay country-music star who isn’t k.d. lang), that’s exactly what she’s on her way to becoming.
“I’m riches to rags,” the Londoner says in her clipped, perfect diction. “Like Jenny from the block, only the opposite!”
Five years ago, Aitken, then 17, was at the center of a British political scandal when her father, Jonathan, a former minister of defense procurement, was sent to jail. Aitken gave false testimony on his behalf, but was spared jail. But she wasn’t spared news of her father’s infidelities, or the discovery that a friend was in fact her half-sister.
So she fled to America. And now the self-styled “table dancer” has come to conquer New York (first move: ingratiate herself with the D.J.’s at Bungalow 8). “She’s not starting out as the best-looking person, the best-singing person, the best-acting person,” confesses Dvoskin. “But she’s enlisting a community of people to lift her up. Sort of like Madonna.”
Aitken’s rap is in the anti-gangsta tradition: “A lot of rappers sing about the Cristal and the Jacuzzis and the fast cars and the you’re-my-bitch,” she says. “And I’m like, okay, that’s very cool, but they have no concept of champagne and fast cars, coming from that background. I’ve had all the Cristal. I’m more philosophical.”
Aitken and Dvoskin have recorded a single, “Daisy,” which they predict will be “a summer smash.” It sounds like Kylie Minogue reproduced on a (home) drum machine, over which Aitken speak-rhymes and philosophizes, à la Madonna’s “Vogue”: “Daisy isn’t only a flower / he’s the guy I’d love to devour /Give me power I want to be famous / so he’ll see me / on the cover of a magazine.”
She’s also endured her first rap battles. So what insults do other emcees throw at her? “Oh, it’s like, ‘Yo, girl, where you from? You got this funny accent going on.’ Wait!” Aitken pauses. “That’s quite a good line. Let me write that down!” And what does she throw back? “Yo, I may be a cutie, but I’m not exactly fruity. I may look like Britney, but you could never kill me. I may be just a girl, but let me tell you I can swirl.”
Boogie down, Belgravia!