Within a minute of meeting Olivia, you realise you’re in the presence of a future R&B star. It’s depressing. Depressing because you don’t even need to hear a record to know that the 23-year-old New Yorker is destined to be all over MTV and the music media within the blink of an eye.
As she walks into the bar of the plush Four Seasons hotel, she displays all the trappings of a bona fide diva. Flanked by minders and managers, expensive jewellery hangs from her neck and swings from her ears. Amidst the hustle and bustle, the suggestion is that Olivia is something special – although, with no pre-release copies of her album available, it’s hard for me to tell whether her near certain and clearly imminent success is grounded in any real talent. But, hey, there's no doubt that she looks special.
Olivia is part of G-Unit, 50 Cent’s posse of rappers. Like Eminem’s D-12, the Unit is a collective that's enjoying success on the back of an association with a global superstar. The whole thing is indicative of hip-hop’s escalating brand culture. Increasingly, success in the genre seems to owe more to marketing prowess than musical accomplishments. The divine Olivia, in the process of embarking on her own solo career, is already on the money in this regard too.
She rattles off the release dates of her forthcoming single, album and video like a pro within a minute of our interview starting.
Well, she knows how to get the message out there! What, I ask, are the benefits of being in G-Unit? “Having somebody involved who knows how to deal with the artists and how to deal with the project,” she says. There is little talk of music, in particular when she singles out the influence of 50 Cent. “He’s a marketing genius," she informs me. "If you tell him what you want, he’s going to go and build out a marketing plan so it will definitely happen. Everything he’s told me he’d do for me, he’s done.”
Raised in Queens, New York, Olivia grew up on the other side of the tracks to 50 and his G-Unit crew where, as she puts it, “the grass was always greener."
Brash, confident and ambitious, as a teenager Olivia spent her time going to church, getting poetry published and enrolling in courses aimed at helping her to develop a career in the music industry.
At 19, she had her first taste of success. Plucked from university by J Records, she signed a million-dollar record contract, though the resulting debut album failed to sell and the union turned sour.
“J records were basically making me into an artist that wasn’t me,” she recalls. “They were trying to make me the bad girl with the foul mouth, and that’s not who I am.”
Her experience at J taught her plenty about the workings of the industry and she knows what she wants from a record company. But is the music there to match the ambition? “Going to Jimmy Iovine and Interscope Records, who have the biggest rock and rap groups in the world, I figured this would be a dope place for me to make my mark," she says. "Because he has very few R&B acts who are big. So I want to be the first one for him."
Her album is called Behind Closed Doors. With contributions from 50 Cent and G-Unit’s Tony Yayo and Lloyd Banks, it’s a record which will doubtless be given a huge push. The promise in the title suggests that it'll at least be worth listening to. After all, you could hardly refuse Olivia the opportunity to impress, could you?
“It’s an intimate record, very sensual,” she says. “It deals with what happens behind closed doors, and there are a lot of different elements on the record. I have hip-hop. I have R&B. What I want is to be the new Janet Jackson. I’d like to follow her style.” By all means...