Lady Sovereign: Little Rapper with a Big Voice

By Christian Bordal

Published January 29, 2007 at 1:00 PM EST

Lady Sovereign, who is about five feet tall, calls herself "the biggest midget in the game."

The diminuitive British rapper Louise Harman, known as Lady Sovereign, is the first foreign female artist signed by Jay Z's Def Jam label.

Despite her regal title, Lady Sovereign grew up in a public housing project in London, and wears her working-class credentials on her musical sleeve. She comes out of the grime scene in Britain, the stripped-down dance-club hip-hop genre that spawned Dizzee Rascal and The Streets.

Her debut album, Public Warning, has performed well in the United Kingdom and is now available in the States.

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Christian Bordal

Christian Bordal is a Norwegian-American (via Australia) musician, radio producer, and freelance music journalist who contributes regularly to Day to Day. He's very good at making faces and making a fool of himself, and he once impressed his NPR editors with a drunken recitation of the gibberish poem "Jabberwocky." He briefly considered launching a career performing at children's parties, but he finds his own children to be trouble enough. In addition to this list of remarkable professional accomplishments, he is a producer at member station KCRW in Los Angeles.