There's a certain young lady in my life that I sometimes call "Sassy Cassie" because at times she can be a bit bratty, even if her name is not Cassie. That moniker might be better suited for Cassie Steele, who shows she can be more than a bit sassy on her recently released second album, Destructo Doll.
If you're a TV junkie, you may already be familiar with Steele. The 19-year-old Canadian singer/actress was featured in the 2007 MTV film Super Sweet 16: The Movie and plays Manny Santos in Degrassi: The Next Generation, the same teen drama that also counts up-and-coming hip-hop star Drake as a cast member. I have to admit, I've never seen an episode of Degrassi and "Manny Santos" sounds like the name of a baseball player to me, but I've been hearing plenty about Ms. Steele. Possibly because she's hails from Canada and her music packs plenty of 'tude, Steele has already earned comparisons to Alanis Morissette. Granted those are some pretty large shoes to fill, but Steele may just have the pipes to pull it off. Check out the video for "Mr. Colson," one of the 10 tracks penned by Steele on Destructo Doll.
As you saw in that video, Steele has that sexy/psycho thing going on, which is simultaneously attractive and somewhat frightening. It would seem like good advice to not get this girl angry or she may rip the stuffing out of you just like the poor doll she destroys in the "Mr. Colson" clip. As Steele puts it ever so bluntly in her Twitter bio, "I go the opposite of soft." OK, we get it, Cassie. You go hard and have plenty of angst. You might be curious as to what makes such a sweet young girl so aggressive. I'm only making an assumption, but in my role as an armchair amateur psychologist, I think Steele's angst can be attributed to the pressures of childhood stardom combined with the fact that her Manny Santos character appears to be one of the most hated on a teen TV show. "Everyone loves to hate Manny because she's the girl who everyone slightly envies; she does what she wants to do, when she wants to do it," Steele once explained. "She kind of got over that phase, but when she was younger she was all about that. People envy her because she has the balls to do it."
I think the same could be said of sassy Cassie Steele. She has the balls to rock-which she even does in the acoustic take of "Mr. Colson" below--and that's something you can't say about every other teen actress/musician.