Zebra Katz

IT is fairly safe to say that very few of the several hundred people attending the Rick Owens fashion show in Paris this month had heard of Zebra Katz, the performance artist whose song “Ima Read” played for roughly 11 minutes on the soundtrack. The minimalist lyrics that blared over the catwalk are unprintable here, but they consist of variations on threatening slams against someone who is being read, in the sense that “being read” has been used for decades in voguing communities. That is, to insult someone in the *****iest terms imaginable. “Ima cut that ...” So it was a natural fit for fashion people, who took to social media to broadcast it widely. By the end of the week, a video for “Ima Read” had been viewed on YouTube more than 200,000 times. “For me, it was the perfect culmination of where that song could go,” said Ojay Morgan, the artist behind the song. Mr. Morgan created the character Zebra Katz more than five years ago as part of a senior thesis project at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. “Ima Read” was originally recorded as a statement on black culture and performance, a tribute to the movie “Paris Is Burning,” but audiences did not seem to get it. Many people thought he was misogynistic or worse, though another version, a duet with a female rapper, Njena Reddd Foxxx, added some complexity to that argument. When Mr. Owens contacted him a few weeks ago, shortly after the song was released online by Jeffree’s, a new imprint of Diplo, Mr. Morgan said he was pleased that it would be heard in the context of a Paris fashion show. “I basically gagged,” he said, meaning that in a good way. Until a week ago, Mr. Morgan, 25, was the staffing director for a catering company. Now he is performing at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Tex. “When the song hit Paris, it completely skyrocketed,” Mr. Morgan said. “All these people in the fashion industry that I looked up to had to listen to that song, and I knew a lot of people weren’t going to get the context right away. You have to do the research to get what I’m saying.”