Mickey Avalon makes no attempts at hiding his past—be it his heroin addiction or his stint as a prostitute, which inevitably led to giving handjobs for drugs. “It was tragic that I was such a complete loser,” says the LA glam rapper. “But then again, I wasn’t exactly supposed to be a stockbroker.”

Definitely not. After befriending Simon Rex, the former MTV VJ urged Avalon to start making his own music. “At first it was really just two people on drugs fucking around,” says Avalon. But soon he was making CDs and carting them around to clubs. Before long he started performing, “and I realized that there were more people than my friends coming out to support me.”

Now 32, Avalon is no ordinary hip-hop act. Although often thrown under the glam-rap rubric, his lyrics (“I used to work nights at hotcock.com / But then I got fired when my mom logged on”) place him beyond the pale of a genre too often burdened by machismo boasting.

“I know what I like,” says Avalon, who expects to release a follow-up soon. “I’ll put myself on the line for other people’s entertainment, but I don’t do anything that I don’t want to.”

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