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SAGA OF AN ASIAN BADBOY
PAGE 3 of 7
| "For some strange reason Prince is the one who gets pregnant. I would be that child." |
"Kita's sexual appetite and directness about satisfying it might concern some women. Not Summer. She finds his honesty a cause for reassurance. "He'll tell you what he really feels," she says. "Most people you can't trust at all."
Kita's directness is refreshing. What makes him even more unusual is a total lack of pretension about what he hopes to achieve. Ask most artists about their goals and you get talk about artistic integrity, the purity of their motivations. Ask Tomi Kita and he talks about the need to keep breaking patterns and changing images in order to stay fresh and hold the media's attention. "I'm not going to have long hair forever," he says, putting his finger on a key element of his current image. "I believe in change."
Kita represents a new kind of artist born for success in the age of global multimedia deals. Their stock in trade is attitude, visual style and exhibitionistic displays of primal urges. Their genius lies in perpetually remaking themselves to stay just far enough ahead of the social change curve to provoke without alienating. This kind of chameleon must be tough enough to rip out his own quivering innards for the cameras. Their real medium is the mass media, with their own voracious appetite for cleavage and confessions. Top multimedia artists, like Madonna and Prince, know instinctively what will set the media salivating and just how much raw meat to throw at them to keep them haning around.
Such artists also display a cool, precocious head for business. Kita admits he used to dislike Prince but has lately come to appreciate his genius at building up his personality cult. He particularly admires the way Prince created Paisley Park, his own wholly owned record label, which enjoys the backing of a giant like Warner. Kita's other role model is Madonna who he thinks is a less-than-beautiful girl with a mediocre voice who has managed to turn herself into a multimedia phoenomenon.
"I'd like to do video," Kita says of the offers he is getting, "play with the media, show my face to the world. That's what Madonna is doing." Which would he rather be -- a male Madonna or an Asian Prince?
photo by Chuck Goodenough
"I'd rather say," answers Kita without missing a beat, "Madonna and Prince get stuck in an elevator and have incredible sex. For some strange reason Prince is the one who gets pregnant. I would be that child." Then Kita orders linguini with clams.
ita's own ambitions for rock stardom are channeled through an entity called Ra Falcon whose offices are on Sunset Boulevard, right across the street from the Mondrian. Kita is founder and sole owner. He denies that the money for the venture came from his father, a successful construction contractor in Hawaii. When I press him, Kita says it came from investors who are "family friends". A few days later, Kita tells me he got around a million dollars as a token of appreciation from a gang boss for whom he had performed an important service. What kind of favor could be worth a million dollars? Kita refuses to elaborate, hinting only that it involved helping the friend gain a crucial edge over a competitor.
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