Dessa's 'A Badly Broken Code' speaks its own language
Dessa sings, raps, rolls out rhymes like an accomplished poetry-slam veteran, thinks like the former philosophy student and published author she is, and commands the stage with the expressiveness of a performance artist.
She records for a hip-hop label, Minnesota-based collective Doomtree, but her debut album, “A Badly Broken Code,” is a mélange of rhythm loops, mellow atmospherics, straight-up rap, a little bit of spoken word, and some well-sung melodies. It’s enchanting, in part because it doesn’t fit snugly in any category.
Dessa, born Margret Wander to a Puerto Rican mother and a German father in Minneapolis, said she used to fret about where she fit when she first transitioned from the live-poetry scene into hip-hop about six years ago.
“I was wondering and worrying about producing material that would be accepted in the hip-hop world,” she says. “That concern was appropriate at the time because here I am a half-white woman from the Midwest venturing into a genre that grew up in the Latin and black communities in New York. I wanted to find a way to be respectful of that tradition. After a few years, I found my voice a little more and now I’m more interested not in whether what I do is hip-hop but whether it’s good.”
She records for a hip-hop label, Minnesota-based collective Doomtree, but her debut album, “A Badly Broken Code,” is a mélange of rhythm loops, mellow atmospherics, straight-up rap, a little bit of spoken word, and some well-sung melodies. It’s enchanting, in part because it doesn’t fit snugly in any category.
Dessa, born Margret Wander to a Puerto Rican mother and a German father in Minneapolis, said she used to fret about where she fit when she first transitioned from the live-poetry scene into hip-hop about six years ago.
“I was wondering and worrying about producing material that would be accepted in the hip-hop world,” she says. “That concern was appropriate at the time because here I am a half-white woman from the Midwest venturing into a genre that grew up in the Latin and black communities in New York. I wanted to find a way to be respectful of that tradition. After a few years, I found my voice a little more and now I’m more interested not in whether what I do is hip-hop but whether it’s good.”
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