In conversation with: Princess xixi
Princess xixi sat down earlier this year with Sophie Billington to talk about their musical history, background and their new EP ‘A Dolls House’
…On their route into the music scene
…On themes of feminity in their music
…On creating their new EP ‘A Dolls House’
Sophie: Tell me a bit about your musical influences
PRINCESS XIXI: I primarily sing and rap and overall, my general style is alternate pop sonically rooted in UK bass. A big part of my artistic idea across all my work is that I mean as a mixed race person but being East Asian, as a trans person, as a queer person, as a bisexual person, I feel like my life is shaped by contradictions and trying to reconcile and make sense of things that are within me.
The mishmash of styles in what I do musically is my way of trying to actually make sense of that and make connections between things that a lot of people might see as completely different and having nothing to do with each other.
Sophie: Sometimes you’re rapping in Cantonese verse as well right?
PRINCESS XIXI: Yeah, in like ‘Taidu (Attitude)’ it's a Baile funk song where the lyrics are kind of cheeky and ironic and in the chorus half of it’s in Chinese as well, but it's not in your face about it, it's just there. I don't want to make a huge deal of it but it's just a part of me.
When it comes to the music itself, I don't want to over-explain it. I have a tendency to over-explain things in my life because I'm so afraid of not being understood. That's kind of why I want to take the opposite approach and just have the music be what it is.
PRINCESS XIXI: I guess like growing up I was surrounded by a lot of people who were very good at music, and even though I always loved it and pursued it when I was younger, I didn't feel like it was a really viable career option for me. Especially being Asian and constantly compared to other kids [I was always] left feeling inadequate.
And then, around sort of like 2021 I started posting on TikTok a lot because I was unemployed and homeless and bored. I was pissed off at the state of the world and I would just go online and talk about whichever obscure Twitter discourse was on my mind that day. One day I heard this this song "Blasian Baddie" by this half Japanese, half Ghanaian rapper called Kaede on TikTok - the hook on that song goes like "Blasian baddie, Blasian baddie I ciroc I don't sip no maggy", so I literally post a 10 second video for me going "Wasian tranny wasian tranny, six inch cock organic strappy" because like... "Sip ciroc" "six inch cock" it's like the same rhyme scheme right?... That was it, that was the whole video I didn't even keep going. But like, but that one went viral and people were like "No, keep going, you’re onto something."
Obviously a lot of people were just trying to set me up, because they were like "Oh yeah, we want to see how far she can take this and let’s see her rap so we can make fun of it." but I'd been listening to rap and making music for a long time and I just went to the studio and I wrote it. I basically spent a year learning how to produce just off the back of this one song and when I dropped it I thought everyone would have forgotten about it, but they didn't so I got my fan base!
Sophie: What do you think those people in your fan base, or those people that became your fan base resonated with?
PRINCESS XIXI: I'm not like the first trans rapper by any means [but] there definitely aren't that many trans rappers out there in the UK. Seeing a trans woman embodying herself and using her own voice without a million different effects is instantly impactful, but it's also the gimmick of a trans girl on a drill beat; it's very subversive but also also like in a way like completely authentic to the genre because drill is about documenting a subculture and a lifestyle of people who are incredibly oppressed and abandoned by the system, and who live lives that are completely alien to the majority of people in society.
Trans women go through a very similar thing in terms of rampant discrimination and systemic barriers. The fact that most trans women that I know, including myself, have experienced homelessness or had to go into sex work or had to sell drugs. A lot of the time I was talking about the same shit that people talk about in Drill songs but just coming from a trans girl's perspective.
Society is going through this moment right now where everyone's really obsessed with trans women as a public debate. It's just a weird, very surreal thing, everyone's hyper focused on us but no one actually takes the time to listen to us. For a lot of people inside the community and outside as well I think it was very impactful seeing a trans woman talking her shit, [it got people outside thinking] like, “oh, these are like real people, with dreams, and ambitions, and insane bars, and massive beats”, so that’s my personal analysis of why it resonated so well with people.
PRINCESS XIXI: That's a really interesting question actually. One of the reasons why it took so long to make ‘Leng Loi’, was that for me, it's always been really hard recording and listening to my own voice. Especially at the start of my transition, I was like very much “yes I must sound like publicly feminine all the time”.
It's about striking that balance of having that aggression in my delivery that fits the genre while also maintaining enough femininity in my voice. The bars were there from the start, but if I went too aggro my voice would just go a bit deeper and I’d listen to it back like “that's just a fucking boy rapping, I can't put that up”. In a way the process of recording that one song helped me find my own voice a lot more. It still sounds like me, but it just has that like actually a little bit of airiness and breathiness that helps me feel more comfortable when I'm listening to it and sonically that's given it that hyper pop feel even though that's not really the intention.
‘Leng Loi’ was a statement and since then it's been a case of “Well, I could just keep making the same song over and over again because that's what people want, or, I could actually use to explore different facets of my femininity and how I move through the world, how I'm perceived by people, how I perceive the world”. I think there's a lot to be said for female rage and there is space in music for trans feminine rage as well, because we have a lot to be angry about!
Sophie: We worked on the 'Work Me Up' music video together - what was it like working on the visual side of that project?
PRINCESS XIXI: Growing up I wanted to be like a screenwriter and did theatre for a little bit. I see all these videos of ads like "Are you a musician and you're making a music video in 2024? Uh wrong you shouldn't do that. It's like the worst way to promote your music"
But honestly, I don't actually fucking care, because I didn't want to make that music video to market the song, I made that video because I wanted to make some art. It’s essentially me struggling with whether or not I want to 'Let it go' as in like you know get over a person, or 'let my sickness take control' which would be going crazy and you know like pulling up at their house at four in the morning, and throwing a brick through their window, and spray painting their door, and egging their house.
What better way to represent that than through having me just like fighting myself in a really cunty outfit with a big scary knife? Going into this video I wanted it to be like an all like queer, East and South East Asian cast and crew and ended up being 78% ESEA and a mixture of queer and straight people, but then I [thought] “you know what this actually nice, we don't share the same identity but what we do have in common is an appreciation of art and making art and making good work” and everyone seemed to actually really like the song.
Sophie: We’ve spoken about the meaning behind the release of A Doll's House but how did you find the process of creating it?
It's been interesting, it's been weird. It's gone through a lot of different eras and iterations and definitely taken me a lot longer than it should have but I'm glad it did. I was born in the Year of the Ox and I think that comes as a shock to a lot of people. People have this image of an Ox as really reliable and steadfast. I’m more airy fairy, but when push comes to shove I'm able to persist even when things are dark and that's what I've learnt on this project.
I wanted to throw in the towel so many times, but I just kept pushing. Am I 100% happy with it? No, I never will be! And do I still want to change it? Yeah, and when I release it will I have a million and one things I hate about it and want to change? Absolutely, but that's what being an artist is, it's about not being done with it, and wanting to constantly do better. With the EP in its current form I think that ultimately it has represented who I was and what I was going through at this time in my life and it stands as a testament to the person I was when I wrote those songs.
Sophie: Would you say that you’re a perfectionist?
Absolutely, it's one of the reasons why I've got five songs on Spotify when I've written hundreds you know? It's that constant striving for perfectionism - the work's never done… With the arts, sometimes it's not about when you're done with the work, it's when the work's done with you.
With my relatively small discography I really hope that people can go back and I trace the evolution of my sound from like 'Leng Loi' to all the way up to this EP and beyond hopefully because I will be doing more stuff, this is just the beginning and yeah, with this EP what I learnt was it's hard making longform projects, like, this is hard, but it's worth it and maybe it's not gonna be for everyone and I don't think it's gonna like necessarily change the world or anything but I definitely think that the right people will find it and the right people will get it.
PRINCESS XIXI: I mean honestly that's the thing, I couldn't tell you. Obviously I could say “oh yeah like trans people queer people, East Asian people, people who like bangers, people who like bass, music people, people who like footwork and people who like lyricism and rap, you know like genre blending alt pop” but it's silly to put people and art into boxes like this; it’s what a lot of labels and communities may want to do but I don't necessarily feel like that's the best thing for creative development and for music and art in general.
When people latch on to music, it's less about the sound of it and “oh wow like these kicks are so big” and “like wow like those compressions” - it's more about the feeling and emotion. I don't make terrible music by any means but I would much rather listen to an absolute trainwreck of an EP that has real intention and spirit and emotion behind it because that's at least entertaining to listen to and has real love put into it.
No matter what you feel about the music in ‘A Doll's House’ I defy anyone to listen to it from start to finish like while reading the lyrics and not feel something by the end of it. Even if all they think is like “wow that was a piece of shit”, they'll still feel it, you know?
Princess Xixi’s new EP A Doll’s House is out on release this May. You can listen to ‘work me up’ now on spotify