Q&A with Kinnie Starr

“I want to be a part of what’s beautiful about hip-hop,” Canadian artist Kinnie Starr says after recently releasing her sixth studio album, Kiss It, which she states is an ode to old school hip-hop. The album features powerful messages in not only the self-produced project, but in the self-portraits that accompany the album itself. The day of her Toronto-stop, prairie artist Starr sat down to speak with Urbanology Magazine on the new project and the method behind the material.
WHAT DOES THIS SIXTH STUDIO ALBUM REPRESENT IN YOUR MUSICAL JOURNEY SO FAR? This is my sixth record and it’s a record that I had a conceptually minimalist [approach] going into it. I recorded it all in the bush at my grandpa’s place and I’m the only one on the record, I played everything and did the programming and singing as well as the portraits are all self-portraits representative of the area where it was recorded. I’m always interested in coming into projects with a concept. My last concept was no hip-hop where this one is pretty much mostly hip-hop, electronic, new wavy hip-hop.
WHAT STORIES AND TOPICS WERE IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO COVER IN THIS PROJECT? Each song is different. One song is called, “Everything Changes”… I’m interested in how land titles change and white people come in and put a title on land and it erases the whole history of the land. So “Everything Changes” is using that as an idea. We can’t really stop the way that things move forward, but at least we can try and become aware of the actual history of the land instead of just using the current maps as information. For example, in Canada, if you travel across the country, you’re not going to know what is reservation land and what is not reservation land. Titling is often obviously just done by colonial culture and I think that is really problematic. I think that all land should be marked by its original place as well as its current place. There is a movement in some nations to rename land back to its original naming but its far and few between. Another song that I would like to talk about would be “Home Is Everywhere” and [it is] a pledge to the fact that we are allowed to be here as indigenous people. In Canada, a lot of native people will put down mixed blood people for not having a high enough blood quantum and so “Home Is Everywhere” is about the right for our story as mixed blood people to be part of our national story. We generally see native people as just one thing and that is the Hollywood Indian, but the story is very much richer than that. It’s actually 200,000 people deeper than that.
WHAT IS YOUR PROCESS LIKE WHEN YOU GET INTO THE STUDIO? I generally don’t write music in cities. In cities I’m overwhelmed and trying to find food and overwhelmed by stores and people. I write when I’m in the bush. I write when I’m alone – and especially beat making. I know a lot of people make beats in their studio, but when I generally make beats, I need a window that I can look out at. I like to look out at water or forest and that’s when my brain really opens up and I’m able to really get into the sounds in relation to what I’m seeing and I think that has an impact on the simplicity of the beat structure too.
WHY WAS IT SO IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO BE THE ONLY ONE ON THE PROJECT, SELF-PRODUCE IT AND DO YOUR OWN COVER ART? So many women think that they can’t make music. So many women are like ‘I really want to make a record but I need to raise $50,000 and I need a big producer and I need to bring some guys in to play the music,’ and I’m like, ‘no you don’t.’ I have a niece that’s really talented and it’s really important for me that she sees that auntie was able to make something without spending that extra $50,000 and without having to go into the big studios. Because once you get into the big studios, 99.9 per cent of the time, it is men and 99.9 per cent of the time, those guys are going to tell you to sound like something that is already out there. And what is that? That’s not my story.
HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE CONCEPT OF YOUR COVER ART? I just set my camera up and shot it… I have been doing nude self-portraits for quite a long time, because I used to be very underweight and I used to hide myself, because I used to be embarrassed of being underweight, because of the way people would talk about my body. So my cousin got me doing nude self-portraits as a way of trying to understand that my body was not as ugly as I felt it was. So, the photo is taken where the record was made. The couch that I’m on, three generations of family has been breast-fed on that couch. The gun that I’m holding is the gun that I learned to shoot with when I was 10. There is a big back story and I thought it was really important, because the era that we’re in, of over-sexualized everything, I feel like it’s kind of misled us to the point where we only look at women’s asses as entertainment. My butt is also used to sit on. My butt is used to run with, it’s used to swim with, it’s what makes me strong. There is so much more to our bodies than just sex and I wanted to be able to talk about that. Already, people have said, ‘Oh, you’re just perpetuating misogyny.’ And I’m like, ‘If you can’t see the story in this image, it’s your misogyny, it’s not mine. I think there is a conversation around responsible viewership that we need to start having, because we are in a sexualized time, but it’s up to people to look at women’s bodies with respect. We should be allowed to show our bodies and be viewed respectfully.