It’s hard for a new artist to ask for much more than having one of the hottest artists in the industry jump on your lead single and video, and that’s exactly what Kid Sister got when Kanye West ended up doing a guest spot on “Pro Nails.” The track and its inclusion on West’s Can’t Tell Me Nothing Mixtape gave Kid Sister’s career a huge boost in its early stages, but despite what you might assume, the assist wasn’t the result of the usual label politics and back-scratching that typically makes these things happen.

“With the Kanye thing, I never asked for that. When I saw him, I wasn’t like ‘Hey, what’s up on a collaboration,” she explains. Instead, Kanye heard the song, liked it and wanted to be on it; that was that. The extra hype for his deejay's new artist really was just an extra benefit. While Chi-town emcees may not be represented on the national scene in the same numbers as those from the east, south and west, Chicago emcees stick together.

The Windy City has a deep history both in Hip Hop and House music and Kid Sister will follow in those steps with an album that has her rapping over tracks by both Hip Hop and Dance producers. Kid Sis largely attributes her wide range in tastes to her mixed heritage, and while her favorite music is mid/late
'90s R&B, she also mentions that she grew up listening to Capone-N-Noreaga and started sneaking into clubs at the age of 12 to cop mixtapes and hear the latest records. “I had a couple of girlfriends who would get me fake IDs.”

These days, most emcees of either gender are more concerned with proving how tough they are than just having a good time, so the humor and energy that Kid Sister shares with earlier rappers makes her rare in 2008. Her range might make her difficult to categorize, but her ties with the past make her the future. Whatever you call her, Kid Sister is next.

Hailing From: Chicago, Illinois.

Current Works: Recently released the video for “Pro Nails” with Kanye West, plus singles “Switch Board” and “Control” from forthcoming debut.

Connects: A-Trak, Flosstradamus, Chromeo and Kanye West.

Life before music: "I was riding my bike between three different jobs working at a Reggae bar, a baby clothing store and at Bath & Body Works putting lotion on old ladies’ skin. It wasn’t even the mall! It was like a strip mall with a golf store, a check-cashing place and a Chuck E. Cheez’s. At least I got some lotion out of it... When I got to college, I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to get the desk job with the health insurance, but it wasn’t quite that simple; I was letting that get in the way of what I really wanted to do."

Debating whether or not to pursue rap: "I’ve been performing all my life. I did some work with community theatre and was in choir since I was seven or eight years old. It was something that I always did and enjoyed but never really thought of as a traditional skill; it was definitely not strategized or planned. I have a great aunt who was kind of like my mentor and she had been successful in her life as a performer. She would tell me, 'You’re such a great performer and it would be a shame if you didn’t get back into it,' and I’m like, 'Yeah yeah yeah, that’s easy for you to say, you’re not the one starving, you’re not the one working three jobs.' Still, she kept telling me, 'Get into it, get into it.'"

Beginning to perform: "I was a little depressed one day thinking about it and I was like, 'I’m already poor, so let me see what I can do because I’ve got nothing to lose.' I saw my brother [J2K of Flosstradamus] traveling a lot and I saw them having so much fun. When I started my thing, they had just started out maybe two months before that and I would go to their parties to support them. It wasn’t that no one came, but it was just our friends and people like that so I thought, 'Let me get up there and give it a shot.'

On coming up so fast: "It’s been a warp-speed ascension out of nowhere; it’s crazy. I can’t really understand how it happened so fast. It’s nothing but a gift from God dropping out the sky and falling in my lap. I never even asked for this, it’s just something that I feel that I’ve been favored for. Still, you have to be hungry about your shit; you have to be passionate."

On the competitive nature of female rappers: "It’s so silly… if you look at it for what it really is, we need to all bond together and lift each other because there aren’t that many of us. We’re always gonna be pulled apart and scrutinized and turned on each other in a way that men can never be because there’s so many of them."

Mixing her Hip Hop and Dance roots for the album: "It’s gonna be right in the middle. I’m biracial, so I’m used to working right in the middle because my whole life has been a balancing act. I don’t look at that as a bad thing though; I’m not the kind of person who ever tried to give up one side or the other of my culture, so what you hear in my music is a direct reflection of who I am; it’s a blend."

To the fans: "Thank you so, so much for the love and I can’t wait to see you on the road. The gratitude I have is indescribable. I just feel so lucky and so blessed, so what can I say other than 'thank you'?"

Discover the music: http://www.myspace.com/kidsister or http://www.foolsgoldrecs.com