In a candid interview, the Canadian artist shares how her experiences in modeling, sex work, and rock and roll paved the way for her subversive raps
It’s the day before Halloween and Dana Dentata is deciding what to wear. She’s not preparing for an ordinary costume party, however. As a culmination of their multi-year professional relationship, Marilyn Manson has invited Dana to be the opener for his October 31 show in Las Vegas. The 29-year-old regards this event as a symbol of resilience throughout her tumultuous music career, and as such, intends to dress the part. Opting to sport white angel wings in lieu of her customary black ones, she plans to celebrate sharing the spotlight with her childhood hero. “I’m still going to look really fucked up, though,” Dana clarifies. Through the magic of costume prosthetics, she notes that her “whole head is going to be cracked open and sewn shut.” Taking theatrics one step further, she has cast a trusted friend to play the demon who accompanies her in her performances. “I know some Juggalo guy from Boston,” she explains. “I trust him because whoop whoop, family. If he’s down to clown, he’s going to be reliable.”
Dana’s resume spans modeling in Italy, performing in the all-girl band, Dentata, becoming the face of American Apparel, dancing at one of Toronto’s premier strip clubs, and, of course, rapping under her current moniker. While being unapologetically herself has been the one constant in her nine lives, finding acceptance has been an arduous journey. It began as she negotiated what she describes as the “trashy ass suburb,” Etobicoke, which makes up much of Western Toronto. Much of her time was spent smoking under a bridge with the stoner kids, who, despite their preference for Sublime over heavy music, served as the closest fit as far as friends went. Dana didn’t always go to school, but when she did, she made sure to spin any assignment into a change to unpack her fascination with Marilyn Manson. “I would just troll the assignment and make it something else entirely,” she recalls. “I feel like school should teach you how to do your taxes, not memorizing pi or whatever.”
Instead of a formal education, Dana was schooled by her beloved shock rocker. She pinpoints her exposure to Manson to watching his music videos play on Much, which she refers to as Canadian MTV. “I just remember looking at it and feeling like I’m not supposed to look at it, like it was bad, and I felt scared, but I couldn’t look away,” she says of Manson’s vision. “I’ve always gotten an adrenaline rush when something feels bad — that’s how I inevitably ended up in the strip club world.” After reading his 1998 autobiography The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, Dana made the next transition into The Satanic Bible, noting that as she read its tenets, she felt as though she had discovered a reflection of her own beliefs. While exploring the dark underworld was formative, Dana remained a musical omnivore, embracing Britney Spears and Spice Girls alongside 50 Cent and Limp Bizkit with the unlikely help of her mom. “She got me Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and Hot Dog Flavored Water at Costco and the cashier was like ‘this is rated R’ or whatever, but she didn’t care.”
By the time she was 14, Dana went from being a consumer of music to becoming an active member of the local scene. Traveling to downtown Toronto every chance she got to attend concerts, it wasn’t long before she networked her way into becoming a tambourine girl for a ska band. “They’d play these shows and I would just get hammered and play the shit out of the tambourine and I would smash on the drums and shit,” she says. Dana then began exploring guitar, printing Nirvana tabs off of ultimate-guitar.com, which would ultimately facilitate her involvement in Dentata. Yet, her budding music career was at odds with another path: high fashion modeling. After a family friend recommended she speak to an influential photographer, an underaged Dana found herself sporadically traveling to Italy, South Korea, and Ecuador on her own. While these trips were seemingly opportunities of a lifetime, the truth was that she wasn’t living out her own dream as much as she was a sense of obligation perpetuated by those around her.
“They would send me to all these places, and I would end up not really doing anything because when I would go to the castings there would be like 150 girls in line waiting,” Dana recalls. “Then I was like ‘why would I wait in this line when there’s no drinking age here and I can go get Jägermeister?’” Aside from ordinary teenage distractions, the emergence of the modeling industry’s notorious underbelly further tarnished Dana’s impressions of the field. “A 16-year-old-girl should not be alone in a different country,” she emphasizes, particularly when they are subjected to continued scrutiny. In addition to her ability to work “coming down to a measurement,” the industry’s eversion to her dyed black hair and dueling work with Dentata was an ongoing issue. “I remember one time they did a photo shoot and they hired a whole team to make me look not edgy; this was before Instagram, before they wanted cool models and non-model models.” After growing tired of having her identity continually stifled, Dana called it quits to pursue dancing and music. She recalls her agent’s biting response: “‘If you think you’re going to be some Elvira type, no one gives a shit.’ That was the last thing she said to me.”
As she gained her footing in the strip club as a cocktail waitress, Dana’s music career struggled to pick up traction. Bands falling out of fashion and her love for acrylic nails influenced her decision to put down her guitar and work with a producer, but she quickly found the music business to be just as oppressive as fashion. “Getting into the rap world was really dark and there were a lot of fucking men taking advantage of me and being absolute psychos,” she says. “That has never stopped until this day but that’s when that started.” Pressured to sing instead of rap, Dana produced an EP made up of a handful of industry-friendly vocal tracks, but she would quietly record what she wanted to when certain backs were turned. The most intimate manifestation of this process would be her unreleased track, “Psycho Slut,” which candidly details a sexual assault she experienced over an unnerving beat fit for a horror movie score. “I’m really proud of it and it’s really honest and real, but people went so far out of their way to make sure I never put it out,” Dana recalls. “They’d have women in the industry e-mail me and tell me I needed to say it softer and more poetic and bury it underneath meanings and bullshit.” She refused.
During one shift at the strip club, she found herself swept into modeling once more. She was scouted not by an Italian fashion house, but by multi-million dollar American Apparel — an infamous staple of the early 2010s. It was not long before she was making her rounds between Los Angeles and Toronto before ultimately landing at founder Dov Charney’s mansion. Her main advertisement featured her in a see-through mesh bodysuit and an introduction which noted her love for “men with big muscles, stripper clothes, and high heels.” While the image being put forth garnered controversy, it was ultimately the burst of Charney’s sexual abuse bubble that facilitated his downfall, and so, Dana’s exit. She left his home to regroup in Toronto for the holidays, which led to her return to the club, but this time, as a dancer. This period inadvertently became a formative time for her music, as she states, “I just really learned a lot about how different sounds will make women move and feel and how different kinds of beats will make a woman react.”
“I’m really overcoming a lot of the hardship that I’ve been through, and I fucking made it.”
After a multi-year relationship with a club patron caused pervasive unhappiness, Dana was more motivated than ever to finally achieve her musical vision. While most men had not been ready to hear it, she finally established a lasting connection with one man who was. “I was in L.A. and this creative director named Willow invited me out to the bar one night and said that there was going to be some interesting people there,” she explains. “Then I go and it’s just Marilyn Manson sitting there.” Little did Dana know, she would not even need to introduce herself, as her presence at Manson meet and greet when she was younger had made a lasting impression. “The first thing he said when he saw me was ‘you cut your hair.’” As the party continued to Willow’s home, Dana took the opportunity to play some of her work from a folder on her phone, which included some of her vocal tracks, as well as another song she had recorded on the sly: “Trust No Dick” (TND). “I was like ‘how did you do it?’ like totally geeking,” she describes. “I played ‘TND’ and he was like that song, that’s what you need to be doing because that’s you being you and that’s all you need to worry about.”
As Dana continued to push forward under her true identity, she was in a turning point in the world. “I’m surprised it took long as it did,” she says of the #MeToo movement, which pushed to deinstitutionalize sexual assault and harassment, particularly in the workforce. While she emphasizes that it was only just the beginning, she candidly notes, “it changed my life.” With a call to give women a platform both in and outside of the music industry still underway, it is truly Dana’s time. Accordingly, she moved to L.A. once more, earning a visa through side work with a jingle company. While business discrepancies initially prevented her from releasing her work, she broke her silence in 2019 with her November drop, Daddy Loves You. The six-track EP includes her latest single “lil Blood,” whose self-directed visual depicts an all-female fight club. With a tone both mocking and menacing, Dana prophesizes an important adage: a period doesn’t stop anything but a sentence.
After having to pave the way to a place that many now take for granted, Dana hasn’t forgotten her long hard road out of hell. “I’ve been trying to explain what I do now to these rooms full of producers and these people for like six or seven years now,” she reflects. “It’s taken a really long time because I’ve tried to describe it, but sometimes you can’t describe; you just have to do.” The conversation shifts back to her show the following evening – perhaps the most grandiose display of Dana’s vision to date. While descriptions of charred demon skin and stitched angel skulls keep her mood light, it is clear that she has finally reached an opportunity by which she is strikingly inspired: “This is such a beautiful moment in my life because I’m going to do this amazing thing with this person I love so much. I’m really overcoming a lot of the hardship that I’ve been through, and I fucking made it.”