She’s a size 16, loves plastic-jewel-encrusted sweaters, lives with her parents, and marries gay couples in her spare time—but Leslie Hall, a white rapper from Iowa, sees herself as a peer of “Britney, Rihanna, Beyoncé, we’re all doing the same thing,” she tells CNN. Hall became a self-proclaimed “ce-Web-rity” after launching a site devoted to the aforementioned “gem sweaters” in 2004, started rapping to fund the site, and is now in talks for an HBO show.
“For a temporary time, when you discover something on the Internet, it's like the greatest thing you've ever seen,” says Hall, who performs on a homemade stage wearing outfits involving gold lamé and stuffed white tigers. “I think I get lucky with those first-timers. They're just like, 'Oh, my God, I've never seen this before in my life.' It's like a nasty chain letter that just hasn't stopped yet.” (More Jay-ZTV stories.)