Fannypack is full of teen sass

Listening to Fannypack is like overhearing girls’-room gossip set to music. The three catty gals from Brooklyn lob insults at everyone in sight, then take verbal swipes at one another in sassy raps that could be construed as eavesdropping if it weren’t for the retro-booty beats from their two DJs.

On “So Stylistic,” the group’s street-smart 2003 debut album, the girls tackle a laundry list of issues: men who catcall at them from cars, women who wear their pants too tight, the size of their friends’ rear ends. Chronicling the lives of three everyday girls from Brooklyn, it’s an anthropological study as much as a pop record.

“To me, it just felt real. These are just regular girls doing their thing, and they have attitude,” said Tom Silverman, founder and chief executive of Tommy Boy Records, which signed the group in 2002. Since 1981, Silverman has made a calling card of exploiting what he calls “niches that were unoccupied,” introducing such hip-hop innovators as Afrika Bambaataa, De La Soul and Queen Latifah.

When he first heard Fannypack, it struck him as “the most fresh, unique, young, interesting thing,” he said. “All of the big hits of Tommy Boy have always broken with tradition. They’ve been contrarian records, and I thought this was too.”

Fannypack is the brainchild of two New York City DJs, Matt Goias and Fancy, who had been toiling away in a home recording studio without any intention of forming a band until they went record shopping and heard a 17-year-old girl yell across the mall to her friend. That girl turned out to be Jessibel, a high school senior who liked listening to Eminem and dancing to salsa and merengue but who had no performing experience.

That didn’t matter. Her thick Brooklyn accent and feisty teen attitude flipped a switch for Goias and Fancy, who thought her voice would be a perfect match for their grab-bag beats. They signed her on, and Jessibel recruited Belinda, a 16-year-old schoolmate who knew how to rap, to be the vocal focal point. Cat, a 21-year-old singer, rounded out the act. Fannypack was born, with Jessibel, Belinda and Cat fronting the band and Goias and Fancy serving as DJs and playing Wizard of Oz behind the scenes.

“There’s a reason why they’re the front people. They’re funny, and we think they’re interesting. I don’t know if anyone’s ever shown the world just real regular New York girls,” said the 26-year-old Goias, who writes all the lyrics to the songs using the girls’ real stories.

“I don’t want to write songs that are written from my point of view because if I was to write songs about my life it would be, ‘Me and my girlfriend watched four hours of “Law & Order” on Saturday night,’ ” said Goias, who also helps build the beats, using everything from salsa and hip-hop to Miami bass and new wave. “The funny thing about Fannypack is for a year I had to become a 17-year-old girl and write songs like a 17-year-old, and they liked them.”

And if they hadn’t? They wouldn’t have performed them, he said. “That’s the thing with girls who are real, real, real. You can’t make them do anything they don’t want to do.”

The result: songs that rag on cheapskate boyfriends and brag about “getting famous,” laced with snippets that have the girls dishing on ugly shirts and dissing students who have sex in the school boiler room.

A cheeky, off-color slice of big-city life told from a teen perspective and set to music that’s a throwback to ‘90s New York acts such as Deee-Lite and the Beastie Boys, Fannypack’s music seems to exist for no other reason than to poke fun -- and have fun. Even the band’s name is a joke.

“We made you say ‘Fannypack,’ ” said Goias. “We knew that a lot of the hipster kids were gonna like it, so instead of giving them some cool-sounding name to be into, we gave them the stupidest name you could imagine.”

The music seems to have trumped listeners’ aversion to the term. Rolling Stone magazine listed “So Stylistic” as one of the top 50 albums of 2003. And the group sold out its last West Coast tour, fueled almost entirely by dance-floor buzz. (They play the Knitting Factory in Hollywood on March 30.)

The group’s present tour looks to be just as successful, even though Belinda is no longer with the group -- due, said Goias, to “the standard irresponsibility that goes along with being a 17-year-old girl.” Jessibel is now fronting the band, with her 16-year-old pal Genevieve standing in for Belinda until the group finds a replacement.

Fannypack plans to do that in a rather unconventional way: through reality TV. Silverman and Fannypack’s management are currently in discussions with VH1 for a show, which they hope will air this summer.

“This is not a strive-and-succeed story of a group that’s been around 40 years. It’s a group that came together really quickly,” said Silverman, who plans to release the group’s second record later this year. “Really, this group was a reality show from Day One -- finding the members, putting the project together. Everything today is very polished and overproduced. This is real reality. It’s more like the Chinese guy on ‘American Idol.’ ”

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Fannypack

Where: Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood.

When: Tuesday, March 30, 8 p.m.

Price: $15.

Contact: (323) 463-0204.