Amber Rose’s Full VIBE Magazine Cover Story

Newsstand | hiphopucit | June 1, 2011 at 8:08 am

Amber Rose was FURIOUS about this story do you agree she should have? Let us know.

AMBER ROSE’S

LIFE DOESN’T SUCK

YEEZY TAUGHT HER WELL. FOR THAT SHE IS GRATEFUL. BUT CAN HER BRAND—FORMERLY CURATED BY MR. WEST—STAND ON ITS OWN?

ON A RECENT MONDAY MORNING, Amber Rose, the 27-year-old girlfriend of rapper Wiz Khalifa, ex-girlfriend to Kanye West and heroine to more than 500,000 Twitter followers, walks out of a midtown Manhattan Holiday Inn, heading for a massage at the Mandarin Oriental. She wears a black Moschino leather jacket decorated with giant gold buttons in the shape of lions, tights, dark Vintage Ultra sunglasses and Yves Saint Laurent pumps. She has plump lips and breathtaking curves. Her entourage consists of an assistant and a “brand manager.” She is all set, except for one small thing: She hates massages.

During the short drive uptown, Rose keeps the small talk to a minimum. Her mind is elsewhere. She has a business meeting in 40 minutes and would rather not get the massage. In fact, she insists that we conduct this interview in the hotel lobby. After some prodding, a compromise is reached: The interview can take place in the suite, but the manager and assistant must accompany us.

Rose takes a seat in a canopy lounge bed surrounded with pillows.

“I don’t really mind interviews,” she says, adjusting her shades. “But I’m still getting used to them.”

Her manager and assistant take pic- tures of themselves on the massage table. They will later post them on Twitter.

Rose talks about everything from the inspiration for shaving her head (“As a little girl, I always wanted Sinead O’Connor’s haircut in the video [for] “Nothing Compares 2 U”) to her superstar ex-boyfriend. The conversation turns, however, after the reporter mentions that like Amber Rose, she too is a proud bisexual. They talk about their shared crush on Disney’s Princess Jasmine, but then Rose’s manager chimes in:

“I don’t want any girlfriend talk. She’s in a relationship with a man right now, so can we talk about that?”

“We can talk about it,” Rose says. “It just has to be written very tastefully because when people think of bisexuals they think of nasty, freaky girls that have threesomes all day.”

Time is up. When Rose departs for her meeting, her manager asks if she could borrow VIBE’s Town Car.

A call to arrange another interview with Rose, results in her manager quickly hanging up.

Later that afternoon, a VIBE editor contacts Rose’s manager. The manager is concerned about some of the people contacted for secondary interviews. She also suspects that the reporter is trying to have sex with her client. Rose, her manager says, isn’t comfortable talking to the reporter again, so VIBE agrees to let another contributor conduct the follow-up interview with Rose.

THESE PAST FEW YEARS have been a whirlwind for Amber Rose. The former stripper has gone from living in virtual anonymity in a small apartment in Bronx, N.Y., to sitting in the front row at Fashion Week in Paris. And she has all the tools needed—sexiness, a gift for being controversial and a willingness to overshare—to succeed in an era where Snooki lands the cover of Rolling Stone (and can demand a higher speaking rate than Toni Morrison) and Kim Kardashian is named one of NBC’s People of the Year.

She is now poised to make a killing doing things that celebrities do in 2011. Amber says she’s starring in and executive-producing her reality show, Behind Her Shades (a VH1 rep denies that her project has been given a green light); will soon debut a vintage sunglasses business; she has a talk show on XM Sirius satellite radio; a book, of course, is in the works; and club promoters everywhere from Vegas to Belize are paying her just to bask in her presence.

“People all around the world pay me to come and chill with them at parties,” she says. “I really get paid a lot of money to do that. It’s mind-boggling.”

“What am I supposed to do? Crawl up in a corner and die ‘cause I’m not with Kanye anymore? Am I supposed to go back to the strip club and not take these opportunities that I have?“

Amber Rose is just as shocked as you are at her rags-to-riches story.

“When me and Kanye fell in love, I never thought that I would be famous. I never heard of that before: A girl dates a guy and she becomes famous all around the world. I never thought that could happen,” she says. “I think God just knew everything that I been through in my life and He felt like I deserved this.”

Rose and West broke up in 2010, but she became an even bigger celebrity in the aftermath. She has no choice, because unlike other reality stars such as Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and the Kardashians, Amber Rose doesn’t have the comfort of being independently wealthy. She has to stay famous even if she says she doesn’t want the fame.

“As far as fame, I’m not concerned with that,” she says. She thinks that viewers will relate to her story. “That’s going to be the great thing about my show. I don’t have rich parents and it’s a struggle. I can’t just call my dad and be like, ‘Dad, my money is a little messed up. Can you buy me a car or a house?’ It’s not like that for me. I feel like more people will relate to my story than the Kardashians or the Hiltons.” -VIBE