Her real name is Minya Oh, but back in the day she used the pen name, Shortie. And right now, you might know her as Miss Info. She actually is of Korean origin, and being a Asian female, she felt it better she used a pen name while writing for The Source Magazine back in the 90s. It's funny to think that she was the one responsible for reviewing Nas's Illmatic, and giving the album the classic rating of 5 Mics.
Minya Oh (Miss Info) is currently a radio personality at Hot 97 Fm, as she has been for many years now. During a recent interview with Frannie Kelly of NPR, she was asked if she thought about what it would mean to Nas to get a five mic rating back in 94, and she said...
Not at all. Not at all. There was no — and maybe the beauty of the magazine world at that time, and hip-hop at that time, and my particular position at that time, as a nobody, also protected me from thinking about the consequences of things. Which is a luxury that nobody has anymore.Even if you are a writer for a big website or a newspaper, your Twitter handle is attached and everyone can find you. So you think about those things, whether you admit it or not. And sometimes you think about those things and try to bait people into reacting to you.
But for me at The Source at that time, I actually wrote under a pen name to really give no one the tools to judge what I was saying outside of what the words were on the page. As opposed to writing down Minya Oh — obviously ethnic, possibly feminine, all types of wrong in The Source magazine — I wrote under the name Shortie: gender ambiguous, because that was the slang, still accurate, I’m very short, and you didn’t know what race I was... ….I don’t want to hear your stories of opulence. I don’t want to know about all your riches and your furs. I want to know about your pain.
There were a lot of funny stories that happened because of that. There were many angry phone calls that The Source office got from artists who were threatening to beat up “that Shortie n-word,” that I was a hateful person, that they would find me. I was glad that that was the way that I came into what I would do for the rest of my life.
But I never thought about how this would affect Nas. Maybe my editors did, because they kind of knew, “We are important enough to crown someone as the next coming of Rakim, or, the next person to, kind of, carry the mantle for New York.” There were all of these loaded titles, and I only saw them when they came out as cover lines or on the page.
I was blissfully protected…
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