Texas News Reporter's Warm Up Rap Goes Viral
Kim Powell says she uses raps to better enunciate her broadcasts
— -- A news reporter in Texas is an unlikely Internet star after she was caught on camera performing a full-out version of Blackalicious’ “Alphabet Aerobics” song to warm up her vocal chords before a live shot.
Kim Powell, a reporter for NewsWest9 in Midland, Texas, was doing a sound check on Christmas Day when her quick-thinking cameraman decided to start rolling on his camera early.
“I’m lucky I had a card in the camera that time and just started recording as soon as she got up there,” the cameraman, Caleb Ramsey, told ABC News.
Powell, 24, grabbed her microphone and began reciting word-for-word the lyrics to “Alphabet Aerobics,” the hit song off Blackalicious’ 1999 album, A2G.
Powell, who has been at the station for six months, says she has used rap songs as a reporting tool since college, when she, on her own, began learning and reciting them to help her enunciate her words and prepare for on-air tongue twisters.
“That particular song I’d memorized earlier this month because they told me I’d be anchoring around Christmas and I’d never anchored before so I thought I should memorize a tongue twister,” Powell told ABC News. “It took me about four days to memorize it.”
“It’s kind of been stuck in my head ever since,” she said.
Powell says she had no idea that Ramsey was filming her until near the very end of the 1-minute-39-second song.
“I usually get a few lines in and someone will interrupt me but this time my cameraman was nice enough to let me finish and I didn’t know he was recording it,” she said.
Ramsey added the beat to the video and shared it with Powell. The two shared it with friends on Facebook and thought it would end there but then a third colleague, NewsWest9 sports reporter Andrew Keesee, asked if he could share it further online.
Keesee posted it on Reddit and YouTube, where the video, titled “Kimalicious,” has been viewed over 300,000 times.
“It’s absolutely crazy,” Powell said. “I can’t keep up with social media right now.”
Keesee says he is surprised by how the video has gone viral but not by his rapper of a colleague.
“I was impressed when I first saw it but I wasn’t terribly surprised because I’ve seen Kim be able to do that with different rap songs,” Keesee said. “She’s got this innate ability to memorize difficult rap lyrics and spout them out as if they’re her own."
