Sky Ferreira: Hurricane Lolita
Words: Robert Brink / Missbehave, April 2008
The backstory: In the mid-2000s, I was staff writer for Missbehave, a magazine owned by Mass Appeal, literally created as a women's version of Mass Appeal, run by women.
Got a call from the editor one day to do a piece on an up-and-coming "pop star" named Sky Ferreira. I'd never heard of her, but I also never said no to an assignment back then.
Sky's agent or manager (or maybe it was done through the my editor, I have the emails somewhere) connected us and I was told to meet her at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in LA to do the interview while they set up for the shoot a block away. I've included some candids I found from the afternoon:
When I got to the cafe there was no manager, no agent, no parent, no friend—no one, Just Sky. It made me kind of sad, because I believe she might have had some family issues and been on her own back then, kinda feral, getting into night clubs and partying with Paris Hilton, that kind of thing.
Naturally, though, meeting a 16-year-old girl alone in a cafe was super weird and felt wrong, but we did the interview and headed straight to the shoot. I hung out and watched for a while and left before the first outfit change even occurred.
Based on my internal discomfort of the experience in the cafe, I played off the "To Catch a Predator" and "Roman Polanski being exiled from America for his behavior" metaphor for the intro. The stories of record industry execs fawning over and preying on her likely inspired the editors to give it the "Hurricane Lolita" title (based off the Vladimir Nabokov novel). Surely an article that would never run these days. I'm cringing reading it again too. At no time was any portion of the two or three hours I was there (interview and shoot with the crew) anything less than professional.
