Dessa in concert; image courtesy of last.fm
I had the pleasure of catching Dessa‘s set last Friday at Red 7. She went on second, after Astronautalis and before headliner and fellow Doomtree rapper P.O.S. Now P.O.S.’s set was electric, crackling with verve, wit, and high energy. If you haven’t listened to P.O.S.’s Never Better, it was one of the strongest releases of last year.
However, Dessa’s A Badly Broken Code is a strong contender for my album of the year, bringing continued attention to the Minneapolis-based hip hop collective and troubling the acclaim bestowed upon Spoon’s Transference and Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me. If you haven’t listened to Dessa’s first full-length, get on that. Make sure you’re sitting down when you hear it, lest her flow fly at such a clip with such a force as to knock you over. The woman born Margret Wander has a way with words.
Women in American hip hop have always been an anomaly. Unfortunately, this is just as true for independent artists as those working in the mainstream. Some of these women have yet to cut an album despite doing incredible work on other (male) MCs’ albums, though I patiently await albums from Lionesque and Joyo Velarde. That said, those who are currently working underground are amongst my favorites: Jean Grae, Psalm One, Invincible, and Dessa. I like Kid Sister fine, but I want these women to run the game.
In many ways, Dessa reminds me of Grae. Both share an assured flow, pointed elocution, a deliberately casual look, and a hard-luck attitude toward love. But Dessa also brings a jazzy alto to her work, along with a poet’s ear for meter. This is much to her background as a spoken word artist, a term with a lot of cultural baggage. It’s hard for me to hear the words “spoken word artist” and not recall two characters from Medea’s Family Reunion improvising a mixed-media piece on a date or the hacky sack scene in She’s All That. Others have lampooned spoken word and its practitioners’ tendency toward self-important hackery, like Zadie Smith did in On Beauty or Dave Chappelle did in a rejected sketch for Chappelle’s Show that combined Def Comedy Jam with Def Poetry Jam.
But Dessa, much like Sarah Jones, The Last Poets, and Gil Scott-Heron before her, pulls off spoken word by incorporating it into her sound, thus expanding its aural possibilities. Dessa trades in words, which are conceptualized by some to be masculine and in contrast to a sung melody’s feminized, abject emotionality. But the way in which those words are delivered — whether as a rap, a vocal line, a verse, or some combination of all three — allow her to manipulate time signatures and rhyme schemes, giving her greater freedom to explore sound and verse. That her songs are often wry, smart, candid inner monologues about family, childhood, addiction, and relationships make me even happier that I’m hearing a female voice articulate them. Even when she threads cover songs into her own material, as she did with Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (or perhaps Jeff Buckley covering John Cale covering Leonard Cohen), I need only hear the voice and see it coming out of the performer on stage to know where it’s really coming from.
As perhaps evidenced by the clip above, witnessing her performing this sort of word jazz live was really something to behold. Her set-up was spare — simply her microphone and deejay Plain Ole Bill‘s turntables. And yet, the minimalism showcased the immensity of her talent. She was also really funny and open on stage, which helps orient where those songs come from and only adds to her magnetic presence. I especially appreciated her recounting a story about being in the lady’s room at the gig and the lights turning off. She took pride in the other occupants checking in on each other instead of running for the exit. She has a lot of faith in women and girls’ capacity for survival should the apocalypse come. I have a lot of faith in her potential as an artist. Dessa’s mic sounds nice.
