'I might be saying 'My Neck, My Back.' But I'm still saying, 'Respect me, please me, make me feel good.' I ain't gon' be like, 'I'll suck your dick, pay me,' and it's all about money. 'I don't approve of it, just thinking that whoring is something to be proud of,' she says. Khia sees a big difference between her brand of blatant sexuality and that of her posturing peers. 'I can be a bitch because I'm dealing with a lot of corporate people. 'I'd rather be called a bitch than a ho,' Khia explains, taking pains to make her terminology clear. It's not exactly what you'd expect from a woman whose last hit song demanded a tongue bath for the most intimate crevices of her body. More somber tracks on the album include 'Forgive Me for My Sins,' 'For the Love of Money,' and 'I've Been Called a Bitch,' the chorus of which proclaims that Khia has never been called a ho and never will. I know they gonna love those songs, coming from me.' Definitely, it's for the thug misses, for the ones who try to be so tough. 'I have my off-the-chain sexual songs,' Khia says, 'but I always try to put some conscious songs on there too. The first single, the woozy 'Snatch the Cat Back,' is beginning to get radio and television airplay. There's plenty of us who ride big and ball and fall just like the guys do.' Lil' Kim ain't the first person to go to jail. It's a Gangstress move, 'cause look at me now. But I didn't want to put myself on the album cover butt naked. 'I was smiling, defiant, gangsta-leaning back in the day. 'I was bad I didn't even care!' Khia says. In others, Khia beams happily, as though she's posing for holiday photos in a mall photo booth. In some, her eyelids are heavy and her expression is resigned. The photos, taken between 19, look like a hairdo hall of shame. To prove how real she is, Khia used a mosaic of her 19 mug shots as the cover of her new album. Khia's also taken to addressing the haters as bluntly as possible, facing up to her turbulent past, and making bold statements about many of her peers in the rap game. She recently dropped her sophomore album, the gritty, multifaceted Gangstress, released on her own label, Thug Misses Entertainment. Maybe, but four years after her breakthrough hit, Khia is back to give the gossip mill something to grind about. All they do is make up these ridiculous stories.' Radio personalities are there to make jokes and stir up gossip, just like the tabloids and the magazines.

'You know what? I been dead, so I'm so used to it,' Khia tells New Times. It's no wonder that when you ask the surprisingly ebullient and eloquent hip-hop starlet to address some of the increasingly hard-to-believe rumors that circulate about her, her tone becomes bluntly jaded. Then an urban legend circulated that Khia had passed away, either from the debilitating results of AIDS or by the hands of an enraged ex-lover.

Then she experienced conflicts with her label that resulted in her 2003 follow-up album, Street Preacher, being shelved indefinitely. First there was the well-publicized beef with Miami rapper Jacki-O over their self-dubbed 'Queen of the South' title. Her debut album, Thug Misses, sold 800,000 copies independently. Despite the song's explicit exhortations, it became an international mainstream hit for the young Tampa rapper (born Khia Finch). In 2002, 'My Neck, My Back,' Khia's bass-heavy ode to oral pleasure, took over the urban airwaves.

Khia finch