Two years ago, April Mills appeared to be the state’s great young
hope to break into the national rap market. After two accomplished
mixtapes, the statuesque 22-year-old, who recorded and performed as
XXzotic, distinguished herself locally not so much by rapping dirty —
and not just dirty, but bawdy enough to make Tipper Gore’s head explode
— but by making everything she rapped, even lines like “behind closed
doors you can call me your ho,” sound menacing. Her debut album,
financed by Next Page Entertainment, a fledgling local label with no
apparent aversion to spending national-type money, was on the horizon.
The remix of the debut’s single, “Caught Up,” featured a guest verse
from rap legend Pimp C, which seemed to make it a candidate for radio
airplay beyond Arkansas.

Today, Mills lives in Houston and works with young women with mental
disabilities. The “Caught Up” single never seized ahold of any outside
markets. Mills has split from Next Page, and says she’s resigned to the
idea of never releasing the album she recorded for the label. She’s
currently preparing a comeback. Little Rock, she says, doesn’t “spark”
her anymore.

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“I can’t get anything from the air anymore. My spirit is dead there.
There’s not venues or stuff going on. I can’t run into anybody. I can’t
go to any mixers. I can’t go anywhere to get my picture in any
magazines.” She says she’s settled, maybe for good, in Houston, long a
Southern rap Mecca.

But Little Rock (and North Little Rock, where she was born) will
always be home. And for the first time in eight months, she’ll return
home to perform, with local acts 607 and Suga City opening, both of
whom have also long been described as on the verge nationally.

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All Mills will say about the fallout with Next Page is that she
wasn’t the one to walk away. The split, she says, evolved gradually but
came to a head late last year. Since then, with little interruption,
she’s busily worked to carve out an independent path for herself. She’s
secured a business license for her new, one-woman label, XO South, and
learned, with some initial help from Houston producer Kojack (Lil
Flip’s “This Is the Way We Ball”), how to make beats and produce
tracks. She’ll release a self-produced mixtape sometime this fall. And,
to fully assert her new independence, she’s come up with a new
performance name: Nina James.

“I said to myself, ‘OK, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, even when you
want to consider the new class, Alicia Keys — names that last forever.’
When someone says, ‘What’s your name?’ I can say, ‘Nina James,’ without
kind of shrugging my shoulders, like, ‘XXzotic,’ knowing that their
first thought is going to be, ‘Oh, she’s talking about sex.’ I’m tired
of that. I’m another person. Nina James just gives me room to bend.
I’ve been doing a lot of singing lately. So if I’m at a neo-soul event,
if I want to go perform at a church — wherever I want to be. Nina can
be ‘hood, it can be gangsta, it can be classic. And then, there’s ‘Rick
James, bitch!’ So a lot of the time you’ll hear ‘Nina James, bitch!’”

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Mills says her new material, which she’ll unveil on Friday, is “way
more positive,” but “still bumping, still raw.”  She plans, too, she
says, to interact with the crowd more. “Even though I’m a great
performer, I used to be stuck in performance zone; I didn’t really
talk. I couldn’t find a balance. This show is going to be a lot more
personal. I hate that over the years, I’ve deprived people from getting
to know me.”

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