Who was it that said that girls couldn’t be dirty? Or stanky, for that matter? Whoever it was, please don’t tell Joi Gilliam-Gipp. Not that she’d listen anyway. New wife of the Goodie Mob’s Big Gipp, daughter of former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Joe Gilliam, and the second lead vocalist — following Dawn Robinson — of the late but not lamented neo-soul supergroup Lucy Pearl, Joi operates at the nexus of several decades of nastiness. Quirky, impish, and most certainly unrestrained, she represents a new vision of the Southern belle, one that has little to do with lineage, propriety, or whiteness.

To those paying attention, Joi has always been a soul diva par excellence. Her debut album, 1994’s The Pendulum Vibe (Capitol), has been criminally out of the catalogue for years; its follow-up, which sports the aerobic title Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome (Capitol), was mishandled by the label and never got a proper release. But Joi refused to go quietly: she responded by guesting on a handful of albums by Atlanta hip-hop stalwarts and even assisting Curtis Mayfield on his most recent album.

Fortunately for her, there was OutKast’s Stankonia (LaFace). When Andre 3000 and Big Boi made it acceptable, and commercially viable, to be odd, the rest of their Atlanta homies stepped up to the plate. Last year’s Dungeon Family album was a bizarro mélange of post-P-Funk and techno textures, and the upcoming album from Cee-Lo (also of the Goodie Mob) sounds like what might have happened if Rick James had spent his mornings in church and his evenings on street corners.

Joi needed a license to ill, and with the new Star Kitty’s Revenge (Universal) she gets it. The disc’s decidedly lascivious, showcasing its chanteuse in full sexual bloom. Joi may be small-breasted and small-bootied, but she plays that to her advantage on the spoken interlude "Y’All Better Be Glad," sweetly boasting that "It just would have been absolutely unfair if I would have had both of those . . . the rest of y’all wouldn’t have stood a motherfucking chance. End!"

Such erotic arrogance is too often absent from contemporary black music, unless you count the numb strip-club repetitions of Miami bass or Detroit ghetto tech. But Joi’s just reporting what goes on in her day-to-day life. Her swell pairing with Big Gipp is like the storied union of Andre 3000 and Erykah Badu, except that it appears to be working out. In the latest issue of Oneworld, Joi and Gipp are photographed in a lengthy compromising spread, and the subject inexorably turns to sex, especially that of a kinky nature: "We’ve done our fair share of, you know, experimenting," Joi ’fesses in the interview, reminiscing over a wild ménage à trois and the feathers-and-lace parties she and Gipp used to throw. "I am very serious about sexuality," she states without a hint of temerity, "and I think I’m going to be very serious about sexuality till I die."

On Star Kitty’s Revenge, she gets freaky without once losing her dignity. "Munchies for Your Love" is downright sweaty, as Joi duets with a Barry White sound-alike. Soft-porn synths dominate "Lick," a virtual how-to guide for pleasuring a woman on which Joi beckons her partner to "explore my inner warmth of pleasure." "Techno Pimp" proves to be the true spectacle, though. On this funkafied dance-floor seminar, which cruises at over 100 bpm, Joi inverts traditional gender roles. Speaking brash like a pimp, reversing the degradation, she’s both witty and sensitive, a master of sexual psychology.

Here, as on the rest of the album, she’s more dominatrix than submissive. If her man can’t take it, then so be it. "Get On" examines the sexual politics of the break-up. "My screams of passion will no longer be for you and I," she boasts without regret over moody jungle rhythms meshed with sprightly guitar funk. Even when she’s not fucking you, she’s fucking you. And here’s the prize: "I want a vision of me making love inside of your head/But not to you, to someone else with my legs behind my head/My love won’t wet him but my legs will squeeze him tight and just wait/You think I’m done, I’ll make you just watch me over and over and over and over again."

Joi certainly sings bad-ass songs, but in the haze of her pheromonal outbursts, it’s easy to overlook her voice, one of the purest in soul music. On "Agnus Dei," she lets it rip chamber-music style, flexing her well-trained chops; on the next track, "Jefferson St. Joe," her tone is both wide and pristine, the perfect comedown at the end of this raucous affair. But she saves the best for last, letting her four-year-old daughter Keypsiia sing a short, cheerful number to conclude the album. All her experience, it seems, is in fact nothing more than innocence run wild. And Star Kitty’s Revenge is what good young girls are made of: sugar, spice, and everything nice.