Lady Sovereign Makes The Entire Crowd Berserk

The Brits have always fed us the extremes of class and crass, which means that for every James Bond and Lynn Belvedere that gracefully hops the pond, we get a Johnny Rotten and a Vicky Pollard.

Clearly, vertically challenged rapper Lady Sovereign fits into the latter category, a fact she acknowledged during her awesome Oct. 24 show at Toronto's Opera House with an excellent, energetic take on the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," a song she also covers on an upcoming O.C. compilation. How punk is that? (Don't answer.)

As Lady Sovereign strutted around the stage, grabbing her crotch and inciting audience members to burp, you couldn't help but wonder if an inner-city family planning clinic didn't have an abandoned pack of fags and an empty chair with her name on it somewhere. But does Lady Sovereign belong back there, joking about hand jobs with her jobless teenaged friends while resting a baby on the leg of her track pants? Hellll nooo!

As soon as she bounced onto the stage in her big, black shades and big, black tee, you knew she belonged right where she was. Looking like Sporty Spice after a few too many drying cycles, the miniature MC proved to be self-assured, self-aware, silly, energetic and endlessly entertaining. Plus, backed by her DJ, drummer and bassist's undeniable nostril-rattling dance music, she proved to be capable of getting the entire crowd going berserk.

Opener Cadence Weapon's crazy combination of high-speed break beats and fiery rhymes managed to engage those in the Sea World Splash Zone up front, particularly near the end as the strong performer threw water into the audience and jumped into the crowd to furiously shake off the sweat with a group of similarly doused dancers.

But Lady Sovereign managed to get the cheap seats to "boogie woogie" with her as well. As she launched into "Love Me Or Hate Me," the entire place happily chimed in: "If you love me then thank you/If you hate me then fuck you!" It seems like most listeners — particularly those going crazy at the Opera House — straight-up love her. In fact, with Def Jam's president Carter in her corner, Sov has surprisingly already taken the song to #1 on MTV's TRL countdown.

Interestingly, on "Blah Blah," another fan favourite, Sov tries to distance herself from that other successful white rapper, noting, "People wanna classify me as an Eminem/But hear why I'm a different kind of specimen/Just because I be a white Caucasian doesn't mean we be the same/Because one: I'm not American/Two: I'm not a man/Three: I'm comin' through with a different kind of plan."

Nevertheless, on "Love Me Or Hate Me," the charmingly redundant "white Caucasian," like Eminem before her, presents a kind of plan that's both refreshingly funny (remember when Eminem was funny?) and overly conscious of its potential polarizing effect. Sadly, as soon as your grandmother tattooed "Kim — Rot In Pieces" on her tummy, Eminem's initial you-hate-me-I-hate-you gimmick rapidly became tired, leaving us to wonder, will the same thing happen to Lady Sovereign? Maybe. If she's lucky.