EMERGENCE

The L.A. Record presents one of the most in depth interviews of Invincible since she started promoting ShapeShifters. This interview offers a solid overview of Invincible's history as an artist, her musical vision and business strategy, and her Detroit-rooted political perspective. This one is a must read.

Invincible: I Don't Need a Meteorologist to Tell Me!

by Luke McGarry
L.A. Record | May 26, 2008

Invincible first gained major notice as a member of the all-female Anomolies in 1998 but has only now—after work with just about all of Detroit’s best producers and MCs—released her first solo full-length. She speaks from tour in Philadelphia.

I moved to the U.S. when I was seven and I didn’t speak English, and hip-hop is a big part of how I learned English. I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest, Paris, Gang Starr—Detroit-wise MC Breed, BO$$ and everything that was coming out then. I’d just soak it up. I’d write down the lyrics of my favorite cats and look up the words, and by the time I was nine, those were my vocabulary. I don’t wanna say it was my escape—it was more my life support. Hip-hop was where I was able to find a place where it felt like home and relate to each emcee’s struggle. I moved to New York when I was 17 and met somebody who knew the Anomolies—I was like, ‘That’s incredible—an all-female hip-hop crew!’ And at the time I was one of very few female artists I was familiar with. They instantly became like sisters to me—took me into the crew. We grew a lot together—did mad shows. Being young and being female, I had a lot of older dudes condescending to me early on—’Who does she think she is?’ When I was younger, I let it get to me. But at this point, all that energy funnels back into me making innovative music and being a really independent self-reliant artist. Now they got mad respect for me—it kind of came full circle!

Why do you think it’s finally the right time for your first solo release?

It’s been a lifetime in the making! Most people have been hearing for ten years, but I wanted everything to represent me currently—I didn’t want a mixtape of old songs. That’s Last Warning—my bootleg mixtape I put out through bling47. Different stuff I put out over the years, whether real old school or ‘Shotgun’ with PPP and Dilla. Everything on this album starts three years ago. For certain songs, I’ve worked on for years and researched it—like go into the community and ask people how they wanted to be represented.

Like interviews?

For ‘Locust’—that song is about gentrification in Detroit and people’s vision of the future of the city from a community perspective, instead of what city developers want. I’m not originally from Detroit, so I didn’t want to speak for the community. But Finale’s on the song and he’s Detroit born and raised—he still interviewed his grandfather and I interviewed mentors of mine to make sure we had the historical perspective—the community perspective. As artists you have limited perspective on things. On the album—even though the music is newer, the concepts I’ve been grappling with forever. I have a song about growing up in Ann Arbor—that’s a story I never told. About living in Palestine and Israel and how that affected me—I never wrote about that before. There’s a joint on there about the history of depression in my family—something I never touched on. And then I have songs with Wordsworth and Indeed and the Anomolies—people might not know but we all go back ten years, and we wanted to collaborate forever, and finally came together on this project!

What did Talib Kweli mean when he said you were one of the best emcees he’d ever heard, but you dedicate too much time to activism to really be the best?

When he said that four years ago, I really was deeper into activism—I’ve always done music constantly, but at that point it was in the context of work with youth and community organization, so it wasn’t really being heard. It wasn’t picking up industry buzz or whatever—but I never stopped. I think that’s where he was coming from—’She’s not out in the industry.’ At this point I still balance art and activism. I’m not taking a break from activism, either. There’s different times where one takes precedence over the other. It’s a whole continuum.

What was it like when you turned down a million-dollar record deal?

First of all, a million is not a million—it’s a million-dollar loan. And it’s not only a loan, but it’s from a person who’s gonna tell you how to spend every cent in ways you disagree with. I recently started my label Emergence to release the album—it really comes out of the spirit of a lot of independent labels, most importantly bling47. Waajeed is the type of dude who teaches people how to fish. The first record I did with him that he was able to pay me for, he was like, ‘Look, I’m paying you for this, but I want you to spend this on buying a laptop and ProTools.’ So I got my laptop and my ProTools and my mic and from that point I was able to make my album. This is my vision for how I want my label to run—I’m not out here trying to sign people. I’m trying to create a model so other people can sign themselves. How can I market and release my music in a way that complements my music? The way marketing and distribution typically happens is dry and formulaic even if someone is making innovative music, and that’s contradictory. The name is Emergence because the concept of emergence has to do with redefining leadership. People look at the way change happens—the fearless leader like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in the forefront—but in the reality of how I see change taking place in the world and music, I see it as something from the ground up, with horizontal leadership—many people playing many roles. That’s what I see happening with Detroit hip-hop and the women in hip-hop movement. There are ton of women MCs on the rise, a ton of Detroit artists on the rise—I see it emerging. I wanna be someone that can support that—by this label model that other people can use pieces of and apply to their own success. That’s a lot more important than helping promote a huge label’s success—they’ll be alright without me. I want to create a path where artists can be all good without relying on these labels.

Why do you feel like Detroit has infinite potential?

We got a couple unofficial mottoes—one of them is ‘opportunity in crisis.’ Detroit’s official city motto is ‘rising up from the ashes.’ That says a lot about the city—we say we’re a city that’s had so much crisis, but there’s an opportunity to create something brilliant out of necessity. Hip-hop came out of the worst era the Bronx had ever seen—the worst gang era, the worst abandonment era—and when people come to Detroit they say, ‘This looks like the Bronx back in the day!’ Or ‘This looks like post-Katrina New Orleans!’

How’s that feel when that’s the first thing someone says?

We get sensitive—a lot of suburban people really hate on Detroit. There are a lot of racist undertones. I mean, yeah, it looks crazy—you think it must have just got hit by a hurricane or had a war. But our favorite motto—’Detroit is what the rest of the world has to look forward to!’ Detroit was the first city to be industrialized—the first freeway in the country was in Detroit—and to have all the abundance that came with industrialism and spread world wide. Other cities internationally were built on the Detroit model. And now we’re the first city to be completely hit by post-industrialism and the side-effects, whether it’s poverty, unemployment or violence. But people out of necessity are creating their own ways of being self-reliant. There’s no jobs, so people are creating their own businesses—building up cooperative economics in the city. You got a lot of issues with schools, so people are coming together—starting their own schools, or transforming other spaces for community education. We got one of the worst foreclosure rates in the country—last week I was called by one of my mentors because someone was wrongly evicted and they needed help moving her back in. We broke the locks and moved back all the stuff the foreclosure people put in the dumpster—took it from the dumpster back to the house and turned the plumbing and lights back on. Certain neighborhoods are starting to feed themselves—people got Southern roots and are bringing those skills to the table, feeding themselves because there’s few grocery stores. In that sense, we’re what the world has to look forward to—we’re in a position to create pilot programs to create small scale solutions that will hopefully evolve to sustain the city. Like in L.A.—I go and meet with the Bus Riders’ Union, and I got a couple friends at Jordan High School in Watts, and when I tell them what’s going on in Detroit, they relate. And when they hear solutions, their’s aspects of the solutions that can work for them. Whenever I tour, I try as much as I can to link up with groups dealing with similar issues—exchange models and strategies.

What do you see for the future of America?

I could never call the largest scale of it—obviously we’re on the verge of something huge right now. I think change really does happen from the bottom up. I’d like to see what I’m explaining to you about Detroit as far as self-reliance and community in other cities and other neighborhoods. I see that as a much more common thing. I don’t think people are gonna have a choice. It’s not a romantic progressive alternative—it really will be out of necessity, whether it’s because we’re out of oil or whatever. We might as well start planning now—like preparing for the storm. You can wait til it hits and it’ll be a shambles after, or be like, ‘I can already see it on the horizon—I don’t need a meteorologist to tell me!’

INVINCIBLE’S SHAPESHIFTERS IS OUT NOW ON EMERGENCE. VISIT INVINCIBLE AT EMERGENCEMUSIC.NET OR MYSPACE.COM/INVINCILANA.