Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Milk Carton Diary™: What Ever Happened To Vita?

There I was sitting and channel surfing, a regular routine of mine on a Sunday afternoon, when I stumbled upon my favorite pastime channel, VH1 Soul. The video that was playing at the time was Ja Rule's "Down For You." The video was for the song that appeared on the Murder Inc's compilation Irv Gotti Presents: The Inc. and had all of the Inc's hottest artists at the time: Ja Rule, Ashanti, Charlie Baltimore and Vita.

Right after asking where in the world is Charlie Baltimore (I later recalled viewing a video of Charlie in an interview about a year ago discussing Biggie's biopic Notorious) I asked myself what ever happened to Vita?!

A lot of people might not know who Vita (real name LaVita Raynor) is especially if they started attending kindergarten in 1995, but to those who have been Hip-Hop fans for sometime now, are very familiar with who Vita is. She was a petite firecracker with a voice and flow that made her appear 5X bigger than her actual size.

She was signed to The Inc and was scheduled to release an album under the label in 2001 but it never happened.

She did appear in a bunch of songs that appeared on the label's compilation album The Murderers.

Also worth mentioning, she acted in the 1998 Hype Williams film Belly which also starred Nas, DMX, Method Man and TLC's T-Boz

So with that in mind I decided to do a bit of research to see what I could dig up about the missing Vita and boy was it hard.

There isn't much information out there about her besides a Wikipedia page, and you can't always rely on Wiki especially when there aren't any sources listed. Apparently from 2005 to 2006 Vita was affiliated with The Game's The Black Wall Street label but nothing came of it.

But before that, rumors suggested way back when that Vita decided to leave Murder Inc because she didn't feel she was getting much attention as their artist. Apparently, Irv and company were focusing the majority of their attention on their shinning star Ashanti and put a lot of money mainly behind her.

That's understandable as at the time Ashanti was doing big things, but Vita had immense talent that was sadly being overlooked.

Things were a bit different back then as opposed to now. Today, you can make a name for yourself and appear on other artist tracks as a featured artist and still be a household name, in the 90's and part of the early 00's if you didn't have an album you wasn't worth mentioning which is probably why Vita disappeared.

I did find a Myspace page that says it belongs to her but I wouldn't count on it. There is this rumor that she returned back to her hometown of New Jersey and currently resides there. The interesting thing is that her sister Kima - who was 1/3 of Bad Boy's former powerhouse group Total - has been keeping a low profile as well.

The last song I can recall Vita being on was N*E*R*D's "Lapdance."

After that, I've got nothing...

Where are you Vita?!

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