Rachele Cermak | Life Stream & Portfolio

Hip-Hop/Spoken Word Issue, June/July 2009, Page 9, Groove

On the first Monday of every month the Artists’ Quarter in Saint Paul, Minn., hosts a slam poetry night. I watch Desdamona, tonight’s featured poet, prepare to address the audience. An hour earlier, as we sat in the Great Waters restaurant, she told me she’d be performing new material nobody’s ever heard before. She felt a little nervous because it had been awhile since she performed without all of the bells and whistles incorporated with music. But tonight presented the perfect venue to promote her new spoken word album, titled “Inkling,” scheduled to be released in May. As she took to the stage, she emitted pure confidence and composure, a true veteran of the craft.

Desdamona has been performing spoken word in the Twin Cities since 1997. Her first encounter with a St. Paul mic was at Jazzville. As she recalled the night, she said that she was one of only four people performing. She had shared one poem and one piece designated to be a hip-hop song. That night a man name Black Power insisted that she come back because the next week, more people would be at the club and they needed to hear her. That was her first introduction into the world of performance poetry, she said.

Before moving to the Twin Cities, Desdamona grew up in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Small town may be stereotypically known for rambunctious teens getting into trouble, but Desdamona never took part in the negative distractions that could have slowed her down. Instead, she stayed focused on the creative outlets her school had to offer like dance, choir, and band, anything that allowed her to express herself.

“It’s so easy to get lost in all the things that are going on, and to have that creative outlet, it can help ground you,” she said. She advises that everyone needs to find a creative outlet because it helps form the person you are by boosting confidence and self-esteem and by promoting consistency.

Desdamona said that being consistent has helped her overcome some of her career struggles. One of the biggest obstacles in her career was getting over the desire to want everyone to like what she does. She knows that even if others don’t like what she does, if she’s consistent, at least they’ll respect her.

“I can’t make someone like me. I am who I am,” Desdamona said. “You either take it or leave it. It’s important to learn not to be upset over it. We don’t all have to get along but we also don’t have to be mean to each other. And, at least let each other live.”

Standing on the stage, the room silenced as she spoke. The first piece she read wasn’t exactly what I had expected from her. As she warned, she was going to switch it up tonight. The words caressed the audience softly and a round of applause filled the jazz bar’s dim-lit air.

Being a woman in Hip-hop and spoken word, said Desdamona, gender has definitely been a factor in her career. As a woman, people assume she’s in the background. When on stage with a man, people automatically thinking she must be his wife or girlfriend instead of his musical partner. At shows, sound technicians treat her differently because she’s female.

“Hey, I’m a professional,” she said. “I know what I’m doing… I’m here and I’m getting paid to do this. It’s not like I have to shove it in someone’s face, but it shows that we’re just not on the same plane.”

This frustration has motivated her to work with young women to build their skills so they can collectively contribute more to the hip-hop scene and the overall community.

Desdamona spends a lot of time going into schools to teach and lead workshops with youth.

“When a kid realizes their voice is powerful, that they can do something, they can create a change, and that people will listen to them, it just does something for self-esteem,” she said.

Desdamona also has a passion for helping the next generation grow into a positive, proactive group. This is part of the reason why she helped found the B-Girl Be summit in the Twin Cities. The festival, which operatss through Intermedia Arts, was conceived in 2005 and brought together women who practice the four main elements of hip-hop: breakdancing, graffiti art, emceeing and disc scratching and mixing. The festival hasn’t been held since 2007 and has an unknown future, but has influenced young women three years in a row.

“I never wanted B-girl Be to last forever,” Desdamona explained. She said she wanted it to build a female identity in the scene. And now that it’s happened, she wants to see some of those younger girls start to do their own thing.

While B-Girl Be isn’t around in its original convention, the founding members are further developing the portion of the summit that focused on creating curriculum to bring into schools. But with the tough economic times, everything is at a bit of a standstill, Desdamona said.

One festival that is going strong is the We B-Girlz Berlin festival. Desdamona was asked to be a performer at the show in 2008. Many of the same artists from B-Girl Be were there, and people couldn’t stop talking about the Minneapolis event. Desdamona expressed excitement about the buzz and was surprised by the audience turnout at the Berlin event.

“More male supporters were there,” she said. “Here [in Minneapolis], guys were like, ‘Can we come if it’s all girls?’ And I’m like, that’s such a silly question. Am I invited to your shows? Yes. It’s not like because it’s all guys on stage that only guys can come. But over in Berlin it wasn’t even an issue. There were tons of guys there and totally into it. I thought, ‘Wow, I wish we could see this in Minneapolis.’”

The gender barrier isn’t the only problem Desdamona can see surfacing in the Minneapolis area. Negative competition between performers occasionally rears its head. It’s one thing to have competition that motivates someone to push themselves and do better, said Desdamona, but it’s another to trample over your peers because of the fear that there is limited opportunity.

Desdamona’s next goal is to travel more, whether it be because of her music or in support of her other endeavors. In late April, she went to Seattle to attend the Langston Hughes African-American Film Festival where a film of B-Girl Be was featured. She is currently planning to go on tour and play in New York, Seattle and California, but no dates are set yet.

With the release of “Inkling” in May and big plans to travel in the near future it seems as though none of that enters her mind as she recites her piece, “Miss America,” to a crowd of local slam poetry enthusiasts. As the last breath is exhaled and the end of the night draws near, the 40 or so people respectfully hoot and holler at a woman who has done so much to make a name for women in the scene. She smiles because she receives these sounds as a symbol of praise, admiration and respect for everything she has done in her career. And I cheer loudly to thank her.

Hip-Hop/Spoken Word Issue, June/July 2009, Page 6, Discover

I sat at my sticker laden laptop inside the Black Dog Café at 5:35 p.m. on a Monday. Most of Saint Paul, Minn., becomes a ghost town after 5 p.m. so I’m surprised to find there is much commotion inside. Among the table tops of computer screens lie an assortment of plates, coffee mugs and a few magazines. I waited anxiously. I couldn’t remember his name.

More attentive to my surroundings than my e-mails, my eyes latched onto a man. He was of vague resemblance, but I wasn’t sure if he was the same man from the Artists’ Quarter I met a week ago. I looked down and kept clicking away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a paper sign placed on a table to my left. BHCCOS it read. I quickly Googled the acronym.

“Brutally Honest Constructive Criticism on Slam hosted by Matthew Rucker will be held Monday March 16 at the Black Dog,” read the Web site.

Well, at least I was at the right spot. And, at least now I knew his name.

Writing has always been a release for me. During my first dose of depression in eighth grade, my counselor told me writing would help organize my thoughts. All the way up until my senior year of high school, words become a positive way to vent my teen angst. But throughout all of those years, I was never able to put form behind it.

I had always felt poetry was fluffy, too rule-driven, and boring. I just didn’t belong with the craft. I wrote as though the words would someday be lyrics and, judging by what was on the Top 40 Charts, I didn’t have to try very hard to complete a “song.”

Then a part of my soul changed. I wasn’t angry or depressed anymore, so what came out of the pen wasn’t an explosion of emotions. In fact, it actually became hard to write because I didn’t know what to record if the ink wasn’t being bombarded with tears during the process. I learned that some sort of form must be applied to channel my words and motivate me to continue to share my perspective.

That’s when I was introduced to hip-hop. Not Chamillionaire or Sisqó one-hit-wonder hip-hop, but true, bold, brilliant lyricism right in my own backyard of Minneapolis. I watched at shows, listened 40 times over to their tracks on my iPod and learned. This was the form I was craving. This was exactly how I wanted my words to flow. That right there, I would think to myself. What she’s doing, I want to be able to do that!

I have never been a musician, though. My love affair lies with the words. I wanted to perfect my form of self-expression and dispel the played out lyrics and redundant rhyme schemes my notebook had been plagued with. Then I came across slam poetry. It is the most raw, judgmental experience of exposing your heart you’ll ever go through. This is where “performance” poets can die or flourish. I asked myself, Do you think you can really grow to be so talented that you can lead and compel an audience with only the tone of your voice and the words your tongue releases?

I sat at the Black Dog in front of Matthew hoping that I could learn to perform like those I admire.

“First step: Be conversational – loose track of all things confining. Rhyming does more to hurt a poem than help it, unless you know how to use it right,” Matthew says.

What? I thought that poetry was all about rhyming. I mean, that’s how songs are written. Once I heard this, I knew all of my poetic attempts needed serious revisions.

“Make sure you have something to say for at least two and a half minutes.” Matthew continued. “In fact, just write something out that’ll take five minutes to speak and then cut.”

Well, that wouldn’t be too difficult; I’m always getting in trouble for talking too much. In kindergarten, I was the one who always got the red card for being too social.

“Memorization is not all that important,” he told me. “Project your voice, but don’t yell. Revise constantly. Respect your audience. But above all else – you need to have confidence in yourself.”

Confidence – a word commonly plastered on the posters in high school health classrooms. Gaining it has always been an internal battle for me. Some days I feel invincible; other days, I take every innocent comment as a personal attack. I realized that no matter how much I paid attention or how well I learned to write, if I can’t find an undeniable belief in myself, I’ll never be able to reach my goal of sharing my perspective with an audience.

I started attending more slam competitions than hip-hop shows. I watched as the poets took to the stage. I watched the way they moved, how they calmly collected the words they were about to use to entrance the audience. I sat close in hopes that the confidence they emitted would somehow soak into my skin. But it didn’t.

No, this kind of confidence can only emanate from my heart and, luckily, that’s also where my passion lies. I realized that if I can write with passion, the words will inevitably be laced with confidence. The more I believe in my piece, the more strength I will have while reading it,I thought to myself.

I intensely worked on revising my first piece. I made sure to attend every slam-oriented event that I possibly could, and I always stopped by the Artists’ Quarter on Monday nights for a chance to talk with Matthew about revisions.

After one of the open mic nights, we had a minute to talk. I could already notice that my choked up, dry throated, twisted gut feeling wasn’t as apparent while I was reading as it always had been. I took a breath and started to read the page that was filled with words printed in Times New Roman but written with a determination that no font could translate.

“I don’t feel connected to it,” Matthew said afterward. “It’s too rhyme-driven still. Make it more conversational. Include more images, and maybe that’ll help let the audience in.”

Wow. Really? I thought. But I didn’t get frustrated or offended. Instead, I listened. I knew that to get better I needed to apply every concept that someone critiqued me on. Every ounce of feedback is an opportunity to learn, and disregarding it is only cheating myself.

A month went by, and there was another scheduled date for the BHCCOS workshop. I attended, and once more it was only him and me. I had written a new piece to give my mind space from the original one. After I read both, Matthew noticed a pattern in my writing style.

“You’re giving a narrative, only telling the audience what happened but not showing what you felt,” he said. “You can’t be afraid to be naked on stage. You need to expose everything you don’t want to because that’s what the audience thirsts for.”

It made perfect sense. I was only gaining the confidence to speak about situations, not to express how I felt during them. But the odd part is that, in life, I have no problem telling someone what I think. Then it hit me. I never have a problem sharing my opinion when I’m talking about what they’re feeling, but to share my honest secrets requires a whole new level of confidence.

I sat at my computer and revised for hours. Nothing would come out right. Each line was too narrative. I didn’t know how to describe how I felt about something that I had tried to repress. I wondered how my dad, my mother, even my stepbrother, would feel if they were sitting in the audience. I kept pressing backspace so my cursor would delete what I never could share face-to-face. My previous writings were all meant to stay safely on the pages of notebooks, but this one was being written to be performed. That thought put my mind in a shell.

It was the night of the Soap Boxing Grand Slam. The Artists’ Quarter was lined wall-to-wall with bodies. Seven poets were competing to be on the Saint Paul slam team that would go to nationals. Not one forgot a word, not one put emphasis where it shouldn’t have been; they ripped their chests so far open with each breath they exposed the vocabulary skeletons surrounding their hearts.

As I watched the audience’s response I finally understood what Matthew meant. I can’t be afraid of being naked on stage. These people came here to have a poet’s voice caress the back of their throats so they choke up, tickle their irises so their tears well – they came here to relate,

I went home and stared at my computer screen. I wrote every line to answer the question “why?” instead of “what?” People want to connect and learn from those around them. The audience would be more critical of me if I didn’t share my emotions.  The knowledge of this helped me gather the confidence needed to share my perspective through poetry.

Texting is practically ubiquitous in this day and age. My friend’s grandpa, who has a hearing loss of almost 100 percent, recently started to use texting as his way to communicate to his grandchildren, instead of talking on the phone.

SMS messaging has it’s own language as well and conversations like the following are common:

Wht r u doin l8r?
Btw, u no whn r hmwrks due?
Idk ethr.
Sry I d/n cme 2 ur prty. Wht hpned?
Omg! Lol.
Y r my rents yelln @ me? I g2g.

Most of us have had conversations like this before. We tap quickly away on the face of cellular devices instead of engaging in face-to-face interaction. Since my upgrade to a Blackberry about five months ago, my phone never lets me be detached from my world – I’m also never quite all there. The constant distraction of being completely accessible, constantly interacting, and skillfully multitasking is something to which the “Millennial” generation has grown accustomed.

Since its commercial release in 1995, the use of text messaging has skyrocketed. UK mobile users sent almost 4 million text messages during one day, New Years Eve 2008, according to the Mobile Data Association. In the United States, 79 percent of teens (17 million) own a cell phone and 42 percent say they use texting because it’s fast, according to a recent national survey conducted by CTIA – The Wireless Association and Harris Interactive. But according to that survey, the biggest reason teens use short message service is because it gives them the ability to multitask, which is a statistic at which legislators cringe.

A popular thought forming among Minnesota legislators is that the “multitasking” abilities portable electronic devices offer is actually a rising public safety concern. Representatives Frank Hornstein, Linda Slocum and Jim Davnie were a few of the authors who introduced a bill in March 2007 to ban texting while driving on the state’s roadways. In that same month, Hornstein and Slocum joined Mike Jaros in authoring another bill that would require the use of all mobile devices in vehicles to be hands-free. As of February 2008, the latter bill was being reviewed by the Transportation Finance Division and is currently laid over in committee, so it’s not clear yet if that bill will become law.

What is clear is that legislators are paying attention to the statistics. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that distraction is a factor in about 25 percent of all crashes. Hornstein believes texting is the most extreme distraction for young drivers, according to a report from the Minnesota House of Representatives.

It’s not a surprise that our cellular phones can be a distraction. The text message service alone is an exciting new frontier for political candidates and companies to reach their targeted markets and is also one of the easiest ways for people to communicate with each other.

During the last presidential race, President Barack Obama’s campaign realized this potential and utilized the new communication avenue. The campaign’s Web site featured a mobile page where people could opt-in to receive text updates – like the eagerly awaited announcement of Obama’s vice presidential running-mate. Supporters who signed up to receive the information had given the campaign access to their mobile phone numbers, which the SMS application organized by zip code. Later, the campaign called supporters in key states to rally “get out the vote” support. So not only were people interacting when they received the periodic campaign updates, they were also being called upon to use their phones to take action.

Now, by simply sending a text, we can voice our opinions, choose our American Idol picks and play text2win games, like sending “booty” to 55427 (standard text messaging rates apply). Obviously no purchase is necessary, so why do companies initiate these mobile marketing giveaways? Besides being able to easily compile mobile numbers and increase brand recognition, companies are using text messaging campaigns as a way to directly and effectively reach their customer bases. Instead of the message being lost in the clutter of the infamous inbox, text messages gain personal attention. Potential customers sign up in attempts to win prizes, and the company – provided it’s not a scam – retains their information in hopes of targeting its market better. It’s an extremely successful new tool, so the chances of it disappearing are slim. But by opting-in to these campaigns, we’ve also opted to have one more thing dividing our attention.

Although I’ve never come close to surpassing my 500-text-message limit, in December 2008, a 13-year-old Californian girl made the most of her “unlimited” plan. According to the New York Post, she sent 14,528 messages in one month. That equates to about a message every two minutes if she was awake for 16 hours a day.

Her defense? She said she was bored. She also admitted to texting her friend who was sitting right next to her at a birthday party. Stories of this kind of text messaging use show that younger generations are becoming fully aware of how to integrate this new form of communication into their lives. But all of this convenience demands “attn,” which could lead to dangerous situations due to a lack of full attention being paid to one of our most crucial activities – driving.

This is why, in Minnesota, after Hornstein’s bill gained much support, Statute 169.475 was passed. It made it law as of August 1, 2008, that if you engage in driving while texting (DWT), you could be fined up to $300. Minnesota is one of seven states with this law.

This occurred right around the same time that I purchased my new 3G phone. Now, if I am tempted to answer the chime emanating from my cell while I’m driving or interact with any of its e-mail, Web browsing or messaging features, I could receive a petty misdemeanor.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said North Carolina teenage drivers often ignore bans on using cell phones and texting because of the lack of adequate enforcement of the law. Some law enforcement officials say it’s difficult to know if the driver is just using the speaker phone feature or placing a call. They hope that by making it a crime, drivers will be persuaded to keep their eyes on the road. According to a WCCO report, after two months only a handful of tickets had been issued statewide. Most of them had been given only after the driver had been pulled over for a different violation. One officer recalled an account of when a teenage driver received a ticket because she had continued to text while the officer approached her vehicle:

“WT no DWT. OMG!”
“BTW,” he replied, “you’ve just received another citation.”

It’s obvious the messaging and mobile Web use have reached an all-time high. So, just as with other technologies in the past, it is starting to become regulated by the government. But even though it’s now illegal, I still see drivers distracted on their “smartphones,” so no matter the laws enacted or the future of potentially distracting features, the responsibility will always come down to the decisions of the driver. Instead of the government regulating personal choice, it would be much more effective if drivers acted responsibly and kept their eyes on the road, regardless of whether or not the police were watching.

Published 15 June 2009. All Rights Reserved.