Kashgrab
Records
Lil' Niki
Lil’ Niki was born Natalie-Nicole Beatrix
Maskaev-Duchamp on Boxing Day, 1981 in Montreal, Quebec to Jacques Duchamp
and his Uzbek wife Olga Maskaev. Her farther worked as fur trapper, making a
meager income, and was frequently absent for many months at a time. Her
mother worked as an exotic dancer and occasionally had to
resort to prostitution to support herself and young Natalie-Nicole. Life was
rough and her father was abusive - he would frequently beat Natalie-Nicole
and her mother with a sack of doorknobs.
At age 12 Natalie-Nicole, now calling herself Niki, ran away to join Cirque
de Soleil. In July 1996, after two years on tour, Niki was seriously injured
when she fell from a pair of stilts into the large latex butt of another
performer. It took several minutes to extract her during which time she was
deprived of oxygen. She lapsed into a coma for three months. When she woke
up, despite no prior music training or evident talent, she had a four octave
vocal range and could sight read sheet music. However, she lost the ability
to distinguish equivalent words in different languages and to this day is
only able to speak in a jumble of French, English and Klingon.
With a generous insurance payment, Niki returned home to Montreal and began
singing in local clubs. At Jazz Fest in 1997, she caught the eye of Prince
(Prince was not performing at Jazz Fest; he was “just in town for some
poutine”). Niki became a member of Prince’s entourage and spent the next 18
months traveling with him. Unfortunately this led to few musical
opportunities. While Prince was considering Niki for a lead role in a
planned musical based on the Batman soundtrack, her primary job while
on tour was to perform surprise Quality Assurance inspections on local
Target stores (part of the “Cleanliness is Next to Princeliness” campaign).
Fortunately Niki was able to leverage her sexually transmitted fame into
bigger singing gigs and was eventually picked up by Kashgrab Records. Her
2000 debut album Black Satin became an unprecedented critical and
popular success. By 2002 it had sold 40 million copies worldwide and
eclipsed Shania Twain’s Come on Over as the best selling album by a
female artist. This sparked a running feud between the two performers. When
they were scheduled to appear together at the 2003 VH1 Divas concert, Twain
famously walked off the stage shouting, “I refuse to work with this whore
frog trash!”
Lil’ Niki is currently working on her follow-up to Black Satin,
tentatively titled White Silk. She and her husband Richard Dean
Anderson split their time between Los Angeles and Montreal, where Niki and
her mother now own and operate a full-contact strip club on Boulevard
Saint-Laurent.