Nicole Richie's Rap Persona Was Inspired By Britney Spears And Crystals

It’s a unusually rainy morning in Los Angeles, and Nicole Richie’s residence garden is blooming. “Let's visualize, tomatoes are beginning to come in, and sugar snap peas. We’ve got some eggplants, some garlic; rosemary and thyme, all of the time,” she tells MTV News by phone, listing off what would be a near-complete grocery list. The 36-year-old Residence of Harlow designer and actress, who became a household name in the mid-2000s for her role alongside socialite-heiress Paris Hilton in the reality series The Simple Life, added amateur farmer to her extensive resume nearly a decade ago while she started cultivating a tiny plot with companions. “We began working on an edible garden, just one or two things, some strawberries, some blueberries,” she explains. “I just fell in love with it. It’s just so cool!”


Inspired by Oprah’s recurring #HarvestDay hauls, Richie shares aspirational photographs of her own harvests on social media. One post depicts a handful of blushing, pink eggs pulled from her private coop. (She guiltily notes, as if being asked to pick between children, that she has two preference chickens from her flock, Popsicles and Dixie Cup. “I don't know what breed Dixie Cup is, however she's just so tiny and pretty, and she has a very beautiful face,” she says.) Another picture flaunts a bounty of purple carrots and lush, green mint cradled in a woven basket, while the caption calls out a demand system that creates unnecessary food waste based on produce’s aesthetic qualities (“Everything in this basket could be thrown in a landfill... Doesn’t seem right.”). United by the hashtag #NikkiFresh, the images have speedily earned the reality star a cult online following, with fans flooding the Instagram feed with records of their own journeys toward healthier living.


Right now, the moniker that became a movement has evolved once again, this time into a completely fledged identity: a rap star by the name of Nikki Fre$h. Documented in the Quibi series by the same title, which launched the video-streaming platform last week (April 6), Nikki Fre$h is Richie’s musical alter-ego, the unlikely product of the reality star’s dueling passions for ‘90s hip-hop and communing with nature. Spitting rhymes about saving bees from extinction (“Bee’s Tea”), tidy water access (“Drip Drip”), and the healing power of crystals (“The Gem Song”), the artist has innovated the entirely new genre “Parent Trap,” which encompasses exaggerated, socially conscious bops written for “teachers, rabbis, Virgos, yet mostly moms and gays,” she explains in the series’s premiere.


“Wellness has a new voice,” Richie declares in a pitch to Good Charlotte’s Benji Madden and her hubby Joel Madden. The brothers run the production organization MDDN, which oversees the show’s music, and the scene marked the couple’s first time acting on camera with each other. “Joel has no problem being on stage, nevertheless being on camera isn't his preference thing at all. So, I had to do a bit of convincing,” Richie says, revealing that the moment was based on a real meeting that, despite being wedded to the producer, she had to schedule beforehand. “You know once you converse with your partner at house, it's like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ So, I made an appointment at their office,” she explains. The mission? To negotiate a comedy-rap album. “I met with them and around four other guys. I brought a Rupi Kaur poem read to begin off — [her book] The Sun and Her Flowers was a big inspiration in back of this.”


Fre$h’s mission is two-parts comedic and one-part educational. Each episode is under 10 minutes long, per Quibi’s universal format, and sees Richie and her sidekick-assistant Jared (Jared Goldstein) engage with a different allocate — like tidy water access, or food waste — and meet with experts in the wellness space (Bill Nye, for one) to offer humorous blips into potential avenues for bettering one’s mind and body, and getting in tune with environment. Every episode culminates in a couture-clad music video, with a song that speaks to the theme, all of which will be collected and released as a nine-track album, Unearthed, later this month.


Richie collaborated with songwriter Sarah Hudson (who’s worked with Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Dua Lipa, on her recent album Future Nostalgia), along with her partner, an experience she describes as "intimidating, and terrifying, and exhilarating, and frustrating.” “But once we noticed our groove, we just had the ideal time,” she adds. Serving deadpan vocals over a rolling trap beat, Fre$h’s sound is a dilution of Richie’s ear for Jay-Z and MC Hammer, and also because the pop icons like Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, and Salt-N-Pepa on which she was raised. “I hope that people... Turn me into the female Snoop Dogg,” she says. “I'm going to prepare music about what sits in my heart and my soul. Crystals, consuming food well, broccoli, chickens, and my eggs.”


According to a 2018 report, the wellness industry, which includes activities like yoga and healthy consuming food meant to promote physical and mental wellbeing, is worth more than $4.5 trillion globally. Though some critics have denounced the trend as dieting by any other name, and while Richie is nevertheless one of its multiple celebrity ambassadors — like her friend Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress-turned-lifestyle guru and star of Netflix series The Goop Lab — she is adamant that her endorsement comes from a place of authenticity. While not altogether crucial, Nikki Fre$h is a self-aware look at a lifestyle, and the material culture that surrounds it, that serves its star well. “If it’s making fun of anyone, it’s making fun of myself,” she says. “Being connected to the earth, being at one with the universe, and the significance of consuming food good food: Those are things that are really key to me, that I really do value and put at the front of my priorities my life.”


case in point, several of the situations depicted in the series are dramatizations drawn from Richie’s own experiences. In the third episode, a standoff over homemade honey between her and her father, the musician Lionel Richie, was modeled soon after a disagreement the two had over backyard-beekeeping. “I had surprised my dad with two hives. They were actually my beehives. I just was also scared to have them at my residence, so I put them at his, and wrapped it up in a bow, and mentioned it was a gift to him,” she says. The moment is documented in Richie’s 2014 reality series Candidly Nicole, from the same team beyond Nikkie Fre$h, and through which she met her current beekeeper. “I got a telephone call saying that the bees were beginning to sting people, and so they had to be removed. However, here's the thing: I know my bees. My bees would never sting people. They're sweet, lovely, and hardworking ladies. They just don't have time to do that.”


But the choice to launch a comedy series in the middle of a pandemic was not one Richie took lightly. A devoted mother to 12-year-old Harlow and 10-year-old Sparrow, she’s adapting as best she can, by cooking veggies from her garden, sticking to a schedule, and spending time with those closest to her. “I didn’t know what Zoom was up until three weeks back. Right now, I’m some order kind of expert,” she says. “I’m attempting to find, for my kids’ sakes, the small pleasures. We’re watching movies, we’re reading.” She recommends the memoir Untamed by Glennon Doyle Melton. “We’re going outdoors once we can.”


“It feels like the universe is just demanding stillness from us,” she adds. “Just take a moment to feel all the feelings, and have those feelings be OK, and not have the ability to run away from them.” She hopes that viewers will find a brief escape in Nikki Fre$h, along with to inspire the same passion for Mother Nature that she’s instilled within herself. “I hope that people find laughter. I also hope that folks are inspired to connect with nature, to reconnect with nature, to connect with it for the initial time, and to really understand that we are a segment of nature, and we're not above it.”


So, although it’s raining in Los Angeles, and although the world is a storm, Richie would motivate you to take off your shoes, step out onto the dirt — a full 6 feet from others — and look up at the sky. “We should get back out there and have our feet in the sand, our hands in the dirt,” she says. Up until then, Richie will continue sharing pictures of her fresh kale and flawlessly imperfect carrots. “You feel at peace. Because we are a piece of nature.”