Author: DC
Wordcount: 1,067
My mother was born in the 1950s, grew up and grew into the 1960s, and got her first adult job in the 1970s. She used to tell me how difficult it was being a young professional woman during that time. The technical barriers that had stopped woman progressing in the workplace had been removed, there were no longer rules dictating that management had to be a boys club through-and-through… but it still was one. Ten years before women couldn’t be promoted to the top of organisations, whereas now women could be but just weren’t. Over and above the process elements of promotion and career advancement, however, women like my Ma struggled just to be female in a male-dominated environment. She found it very tough to be an individual, with women instead forced to adopt one of three roles if they were to survive and prosper:
- the sex kitten. You could be provocative and sexual, using your femininity and allure as a tool to get to where you wanted to be.
- the ice queen. A women could be tough and uncompromising, which would attract a lot of negative attention and allegations that you were a “bitch” but at the same time projected an air of cool professionalism
- the tomboy. Some women got by because they presented themselves as “one of the boys”, willing to go along with whatever their male cronies were planning[1].
Over time, Ma noted that some of her friends and colleagues got so used to having to act one of these three roles that they actually started to become the person that they had to pretend to be. The irony of it was that exactly the same thing happened to Ma, although she hadn’t spotted it. As she tried, successfully in the end, to develop her career and take on more responsibility she adopted an icy persona, a “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” tough-lady character that she even started to bring home with her. While she could still be warm and loving, there were moments as I got older when I felt more like an employee and less like her son.
Many of the same issues that my Ma faced when trying to pursue her career have also been very relevant for women trying to force their way to stardom in the pop and rap music worlds. They have been forced to play particular roles in order to impress talent scouts, would-be managers, record executives, and then ultimately fans – or they feel that they are forced to. Undoubtedly, however, it’s easier to succeed in music if you are willing to play the game and adopt a pre-defined persona. Interestingly, the three roles that women in business often find themselves playing are the same as those that their musical counterparts are forced to adopt. You have you sex kittens, the Lil’ Kims and Keshas and Foxy Browns, whose material seems to range from moderately sensual to downright filthy. You have your ice queens, the Lady Gagas and Rihannas, who seek to distance themselves from us mere mortals by means of fashion and attitude. And lastly your have your Katy Perry and Pink tomboys (Perry’s last album was even called “One of The Boys”) who pride themselves on acting like guys, even down to kissing girls.
That’s what makes it so amazing to hear any album by a female artist with a truly individual voice, who hasn’t felt the need to fit into a generic mould in order to succeed. On “A Badly Broken Code”, the new album by female rapper Dessa, an affiliate of the Minneapolis-based Doomtree Collective, you get character and a hugely individual presence. It’s as if Dessa has made it her mission not to be pigeonholed, to talk about all of the different and contradictory aspects of being a girl in the modern world. Dessa and her characters are all over the place and conflicted (“she’s a latter-day saint / but she’s a Saturday sinner”), and they face and make difficult choices (“the pills keep her awake / her man can’t make her happy but he helps to still the shakes”).
This complexity is reflected in the nature of the music that Dessa makes. Her beats are intricate and varied, with smoky jazzed-up sections butting up against thumping beats and r ‘n b flourishes. Similarly entangled are her lyrics, as Dessa has no place for Trina-style sex-rap or Charlie Baltimore-esque thug posturing. Her rhymes are either oblique and literary or straightforward narratives detailing the exterior and interior lives of everyday – if artistic – people who are both noble and selfish, tormented but occasionally blissfully happy. Even her stage name clashes slightly with the tales she tells, with the lady who goes by “Dessa Darling” admitting that “I once kept an angel / in a box beneath my bed”. What a darling. Describing her words does them no justice whatsoever so instead, here’s the opening verse of the song that to date might be her best work, Mineshaft II:
“15 years from tonight, you have to make a decision,
The greatest love of your life is going to call during dinner,
From the home of the girl that he’s living with now.
And the guilt, he’ll say it’s killing him,
He’s wilted in the middle,
And he knows how bad he acted,
Knows he can’t have you back but the fact is,
You can’t be happy when you’re angry,
And you’re so angry, he’s says you’ve stayed so mad,
And he heard it on the street that you moved back in with your dad,
That you’re drinking something awful, and that makes him sad”
The greatest thing about Dessa is that while she’s a woman rapper with a distinctly female voice, she realises that to be a great female artist you have to do more than simply sing about being a woman. She defines herself primarily as a person, as a human, so her subject matter is far more universal than many female artists allow theirs to be. She and her characters are actors in a bigger drama, while at the same time being particular people facing particular problems. And writing about that, letting yourself be that, may be the way to reach and touch more people than most modern artists ever get to. As Dessa says on the gorgeous, jazz-inflected Dixon’s Girl, “it’s not much, but my money’s on you”.
[1] Think Peggy Olsen in Mad Men during Season 2, when she starts drinking scotch and mocking the less fortunate girls of the office
No comments:
Post a Comment