At the start of the 2010s, the earth beneath the music industry was still quaking. The digital-spurred downturn of the previous decade hadn’t quite been solved, and the platforms that artists and labels would soon rally around—Spotify, Instagram, SoundCloud—were still emerging. In 2012, the industry was bringing in only a fraction of the tens of billions it made during its apex in the late 1990s, but for the first time in 13 years, its global sales figures actually went up—albeit minutely, at less than one half of one percent. The internet had exploded everything, and before it would remake the music industry, only a pinprick of light was on the horizon.

Thousands of miles away from music’s power centers in New York and L.A., a teenager was leaning into that potential. Kathryn Beckwith had launched her career as a joke. In 2011, when she was 18, she recorded and shared with the internet an EP called The Lizzie McGuire Experience under the name Kitty Pryde. She was living in Daytona Beach, Florida, working at Claire’s, and studying public relations in college. Before she knew it, in the spring of 2012, “Okay Cupid,” her talk-rap song whose corresponding video featured a decidedly teen-girl aesthetic, started racking up plays.

“I never even thought about music as a job,” she says now, speaking over the phone from her home in Baltimore. But it did become a job, pretty quickly. Kitty went from getting coverage on trendy blogs to being featured in the New York Times; her inner lower lip, tattooed with the word “PRINCE$$,” was everywhere. She had gone viral, completely by accident.

She released more music, found a manager, toured a bunch, and quickly became the internet’s favorite white girl rapper to hate. Some people were compelled by the apparent paradox of a suburban white girl rapping over a borrowed J Dilla beat; many, many others were repulsed by it.

“When things go viral, the context is completely lost,” Kitty says. In her case, that context was the lightheartedness with which she was approaching her music and her persona; she’d never pretended to be anything other than who she was. It didn’t help that social norms at the time were shifting, just as technological ones were. As viral trends were taking hold, what we now know as “cancel culture” was fomenting.

Kitty’s proximity to black culture—coupled with glaring, if age-appropriate, knowledge gaps—made her an early target: A 2013 incident in which she misunderstood a reference on Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s “Drunk in Love” spurred thinkpieces and several days of Twitter discourse, but her thoughtful, nuanced Tumblr apology barely registered. “When I first started making songs, every single time anyone would write about me it was focused on the fact that I was a young girl,” Kitty says now. “And sometimes that I was a white girl, which I think is definitely a valid criticism that I took the wrong way at the time.”