“I teach a course on music compositionthat focuses on lyrics,” says the 28-year-old rapper, born Maggie Wander. “Itfocuses on a lot of the same principles you might find in a creative writingcourse, like starting with a focused idea and adhering to the rule ‘show, don’ttell.’”
For those who aren’t literally seekinga diploma, though, Dessa’s debut full-length A Badly Broken Code serves as a fine textbook on its own. Releasedthis January, the album draws from Dessa’s background as a poet and spoken-wordartist, collecting her vivid narratives while eschewing hip-hop’s moreexhausted tropes and traditional song structures. In a sweet, jazzy voice,Dessa sings nearly as much as she raps, weaving fluid melodies into her verses.
Produced by her peers in Doomtreea Minneapolis rapcollective that has emerged as one of the city’s pre-eminent crews, perhapssecond only to the Rhymesayers collectivethe album’s beats are equallydistinguished, complementing Dessa’s shape-shifting flow with minor keys andmoody strings.
Dessa’s softer approach makes her standout in a crew whose best-known artist, P.O.S., fuses punk and hip-hop, but shesays Doomtree is too broad to be defined by any one sound.
“When we first all linked together tomake this thing called Doomtree, none of us would have been able to predict thestylistic avenues that the others would pursue,” she says. “That’s still true:I don’t have any idea what P.O.S.’s album in 2013 will sound like. That’s oneof the upshots of working in an independent collective. We’re not asked tofollow very narrow lanes.”
Dessa is the only woman in thenine-member Doomtree collective, a fact that dominates her press coverage butnot her music. Only one song on A BadlyBroken Code dwells on gender at length, a combative track called “TheBullpen.” Tellingly it’s one of the album’s more obvious moments, aby-the-numbers, “I can hang with the boys” battle rap from a singer who usuallyhas much more profound things to say.
“On tour I probably do three phone interviewsa day, and probably spend half of that time talking about my gender,” Dessasays. “It’s really the only time I talk about gender. Otherwise, it’s somethingI never talk about, the same way that I don’t talk about my bipedalism, or Idon’t talk about the fact that I have 10 fingers.
“Gender is something that’s so basic,so interwoven into the fabric of who I am, that it almost seems odd to discusssometimes,” she continues. “It doesn’t matter to Doomtree nearly as much as itseems to matter to everyone else, but I get it: It’s weird. I’m a woman in agenre dominated by men. In hip-hop, you probably have 30 men for every woman.In Doomtree that ratio is eight to one. If anything, women are actuallyoverrepresented in Doomtree.”
P.O.S.and Dessa perform at Turner Hall Ballroom on Saturday, March 20, at 8 p.m. withAstronautalis and Kid Millions.
