Meet Brooke Candy: Rapper, Stripper, Warrior

Brooke Candy's given name is Brooke Candy, and she was born on 4/20. (Trust that we used our journalistic skills to verify this information.) Her father worked behind the scenes for Hustler when she was growing up in Oxnard. If her parents are surprised that she's become a stripper and rapper who smokes a lot of weed, well, they shouldn't be.

When she opens the door of her stylist's Echo Park apartment, she's wearing a baggy sweatshirt with marijuana leaves on it, and her hair is wrapped in a doo-rag printed with dollar bills. No makeup. It's a contrast to her look in her video for "Theme Music" -- her infectious song with Detroit rapper Count Mack (below) -- in which she sports glossy magenta lips and neon green shoestrings woven through her braids, strutting in a fur coat through a car wash.

"I'm stoned right now," she imparts. A large ashtray in the middle of the table is almost full of butts, and her voice is raspy from cigarettes and weed. Candy, 23, has been "Tumblr famous" for a while now, posting photos of herself in over-the-top costumes like exaggerated platform sneakers and velvet bikinis for the past four years, alongside shots of herself with Paris Hilton or fellow female rappers like Kreayshawn and Gita. More recently, she and her stylist Seth Pratt began superimposing her pictures over cheesy backgrounds like '80s cityscapes or tropical settings.

We first encountered her, however, earlier this month in "Theme Music," which was directed by Alex2Tone. Last week it landed on World Star Hip Hop, below the fabulous headline, "New Girl Rapper Showing Aeriola [sic] In Her Music Video." It promptly racked up hundreds of thousands of views and a long string of comments, most of them negative.

"They're so mean. I love haters. When someone hates on me, it motivates me. You're doing something right," she says. While that's typical rapper talk, we believe her, mostly because she was constantly bullied and made fun when she was younger, she says. "I grew up in the suburbs where there were cows but also tract homes with Real Housewives shit. I dressed and acted crazy, just like now."

She recalls going to work with her father, his office crammed with stacks of dildos and porn. "By the time I was 8, I was seein' that shit," she says. "That probably helped to shape my aesthetic, [which is] very over-sexualized." Her family, on the other hand, is "straight-laced." "I hang out with a bunch of faggots, and they don't get that," she says. When asked if she's gay, too, she shrugs and says she's "whatever."