APRIL 24, 2014<\/p>\n
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Feministing Jamz: <\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\nDJ Ushka on music, migrations, <\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\nand cultural appropriation<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By\u00a0VER\u00d3NICA BAYETTI FLORES<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"Feministing](\"http:\/\/d1o2xrel38nv1n.cloudfront.net\/files\/2014\/04\/feministing-jamz.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nIf you don\u2019t know DJ Ushka yet, it is definitely in your interest to get to know her. Born Thanu Yakupitiyage in Sri Lanka, DJ Ushka is currently based out of Brooklyn (via Thailand). When she\u2019s not working as an immigrants\u2019 rights organizer, she\u2019s incorporating the music and resistance of the global south into eminently danceable mixes.\u00a0I had the pleasure of chatting on the phone with DJ Ushka a couple weeks ago, and we talked feminism, migration, and the ways DJs can participate in \u2014 and resist \u2014 cultural appropriation.<\/span><\/p>\nI also asked her to pick out ten songs or videos she was feeling. She ended up giving me eleven, and you know what? That is really great news for you.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"DJ](\"http:\/\/d1o2xrel38nv1n.cloudfront.net\/files\/2014\/04\/553412_615989185798_726765720_n.jpg\")
<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nHow does feminism \u2014 or feminisms \u2014 affect your art? Like, both in terms of the ways you produce and also the shit you have to navigate as a woman in a male-dominated DJ world.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nI mean, I think that my approach to DJing or even my entrance into the work of DJing has inherently been a feminist act, you know? I spin a lot of global music and I\u2019ve had a lot of support from men and male DJs, and a lot of friends who stepped up, and that\u2019s not a lot of people\u2019s experience.<\/span><\/p>\nBut even the fact that we\u2019re called \u201cfemale\u201d DJs instead of DJs. Like, I recently did this gig and this woman, who was well-meaning, said that she was so excited to see a female DJ. We have to switch up the idea that a woman DJ is an anomaly, that a woman who knows how to use a turntable is an anomaly. So being a DJ helps turn around this predominant idea of who spins the music, so in a lot of ways I think even just existing as a DJ for me has always been inherently feminist.<\/span><\/p>\nAlso I try both in sets of mine and in the spaces I create and the mixes that I do to include a lot of female and queer voices, and include a narrative of feminism as well.<\/span><\/p>\nThere are a lot of themes of colonization, migrations, and diasporas in the mixes you put out, and I know your day job is doing immigrants\u2019 rights work. How do these themes make their way into the music you decide to work with?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nI mean I\u2019m an immigrant, and that\u2019s informed the work that I do. I do immigrants\u2019 rights organizing, and always, beyond a theoretical level, I\u2019ve been interested in migration because it\u2019s the story of my life.<\/span><\/p>\nI am Sri Lankan and I moved to the UK when I was young, grew up in Thailand, and then came to the US for college when I was 18, so my trajectory has always been that of a migrant, always outside of the country of my passport. I\u2019m always thinking about my own migration context and also everyone else\u2019s \u2014 people who are more privileged and less privileged \u2014 people who didn\u2019t come with a visa and people who didn\u2019t come for college. I am interested in telling stories through my music \u2014 I want people to have a good time and dance and listen to a mix but also be thinking about what was the connection between, for example this song from West Africa and this champeta song from Colombia. Because even in terms of music there is so much to say about migration, and how migrations inform different music.<\/span><\/p>\nSo I had this moment when I was looking at your description of the\u00a0Open City mixtape<\/span><\/a>\u00a0where you talk about Venezuelan tuki, and it was actually the first time that I \u2014 and I\u2019m Venezuelan \u2014 had heard of tuki. So I went on this Google wormhole and I ended up reading some more about it on the Mad Decent website, and just had this moment of rage: like, when white folks are telling you about things in your own country that they\u2019ve been able to see because they have a kind of access that you don\u2019t have. I\u2019ve been home a few times in the almost 20 years I\u2019ve been here and I absorb these snippets of culture while I\u2019m there that I cherish so much, but nothing close to what white dudes on a Diplo budget can get. And I\u2019m wondering if you deal with that, how you navigate this culture of appropriation and re-working of the exotic brown in the DJ and music world more generally. How you choose to resist that, I guess.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nI learned about tuki from my friend Mariana \u2014 who is a Venezuelan artist from Caracas. So my entrance to learning about Venezuelan music was from Venezuelan DJs, not from Mad Decent. But anyone can get anything off of the internet and there are these Mad Decent and Diplo kind of popular mainstreaming folks \u2014 the ways that they are pulling from music from the global south and making music their own and kind of mainstream it, but I wanna challenge that. There are a lot of underground channels that people are sharing music that aren\u2019t about white people.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen you break down concerns about appropriation of music genres by certain labels \u2014 the concern is really about power. For me as a DJ \u2014 and as someone learning to produce, and who is associated with other DJs\/producers \u2014 I think it\u2019s extremely important to credit who\/where you are sampling your music from and also whenever possible, making sure that those local voices are highlighted. Maybe because of something you sampled an artist from Ghana or Sierra Leone or Colombia or wherever gets to tour and profit as well. You also have to\u00a0know<\/i>\u00a0what you are playing. I play a lot of music from everywhere \u2014 sometimes I don\u2019t understand the language \u2014 when possible, if I know someone who does speak that language, I\u2019ll ask them what the song means or I\u2019ll do a lot of research into the history of how that genre was created, so at least I know the region, the form, etc. By knowing what you are playing, you ensure that you aren\u2019t just contributing to some \u201cmelting pot of global music\u201d but are specifically highlighting different styles and how they go together.<\/span><\/p>\nThe issue that people have with Mad Decent or Diplo is this \u201cChristopher Columbus discovery of music\u201d thing they have going on \u2014 original artists are rarely at the forefront and people question their intentions. A couple of years ago, Venus X, of Ghethogothik fame, called Diplo out on Twitter for recording her set at a ghe20g0th1k\u00a0party and playing a similar set himself later. It\u2019s a long story but I think that calling out was so important \u2014 because clearly that\u2019s not about collaboration, that\u2019s about stealing ideas \u2014 and in this case, a extremely successful white deejay stealing from a woman of color. People are of course influenced by each others styles \u2014 but just be transparent about it, give credit where credit is due. Chief Boima writes about this in a piece called \u201cGlobal Genre Accumulation<\/span><\/a>\u201d that I think everyone should check out.<\/span><\/p>\nI actually was really glad that in the end I actually first learned it from you \u2014 that I got to first hear about this genre that emerged after I left from a woman of color and immigrant, and not from fucking Diplo (god, I hate Diplo<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nYeah, and you know \u2014 like tuki \u2014 some of the music that is becoming more popular is from working class places. Tuki is from the barrios, from predominantly black folk. So I wanna acknowledge that and I wanna look into the histories of that music. And you have these larger labels that take in this music and are into assimilating it into the larger genre of global bass but there are histories that are important to know. I don\u2019t want people to think that I\u2019m about this melting pot. I want people not to assume that we\u2019re all the same, but to have people go out and learn these trajectories and migrations and histories.<\/span><\/p>\nSo what is your process for making a mix? Do you kind of keep track of and write down songs that fit a theme for a while, and then go for it? Or do you sit down and research it all as a project, or some combination?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nIt\u2019s a combo \u2014 I take so long to make mixes \u2014 I spend so long listening to things, messing around and seeing what mixes with each other. Like for the\u00a0Foreign Brown<\/span><\/a>\u00a0mixtape, looking into the lyrics was important. So\u00a0I started with a song by Lido Pimienta about la migra. There is this Los Rakas song\u00a0Africana<\/span><\/a>\u00a0where they talk about skin color, and I liked how they talk about something that really affects the whole world. I included this song by Tribe Called Red talking about the Idle No More movement, and the women involved in that. I was trying to connect all these songs that connect these movements across the world, but also make it danceable.<\/span><\/p>\nComing from a policy-heavy world there is a way that we think that it\u2019s really separate from our everyday lives. Like you can be on the dance floor and you can be political. They often think that the dance floor is so different, where you go to party and not think about things, but for me they are the same \u2014 I am political on the dance floor too.<\/span><\/p>\nWe recently did\u00a0this interview with Gordon Voidwell<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who was talking also about something similar \u2014 the dance floor as a liberatory space.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nIt can be so beautiful \u2014 there is this collective we just DJ\u2019d with in Chicago and there were 850 people at this event and all the proceeds went to an immigrants\u2019 rights org. And all these things are connected you know? Like this week the deportation record is at 2 million.\u00a0New York state still can\u2019t pass the DREAM ACT<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and give undocumented students the chance to go to college.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd you know, the world is so crazy, and there is all that happening, and for these few hours on the dance floor you can feel all those things and express that anger but also feel really good.<\/span><\/p>\nAny songs or videos you\u2019re feeling these days?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe Wizard ft Nyanda & Chedda \u2013 Like A Pro<\/span><\/p>\n
and cultural appropriation<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By\u00a0VER\u00d3NICA BAYETTI FLORES<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nIf you don\u2019t know DJ Ushka yet, it is definitely in your interest to get to know her. Born Thanu Yakupitiyage in Sri Lanka, DJ Ushka is currently based out of Brooklyn (via Thailand). When she\u2019s not working as an immigrants\u2019 rights organizer, she\u2019s incorporating the music and resistance of the global south into eminently danceable mixes.\u00a0I had the pleasure of chatting on the phone with DJ Ushka a couple weeks ago, and we talked feminism, migration, and the ways DJs can participate in \u2014 and resist \u2014 cultural appropriation.<\/span><\/p>\nI also asked her to pick out ten songs or videos she was feeling. She ended up giving me eleven, and you know what? That is really great news for you.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nHow does feminism \u2014 or feminisms \u2014 affect your art? Like, both in terms of the ways you produce and also the shit you have to navigate as a woman in a male-dominated DJ world.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nI mean, I think that my approach to DJing or even my entrance into the work of DJing has inherently been a feminist act, you know? I spin a lot of global music and I\u2019ve had a lot of support from men and male DJs, and a lot of friends who stepped up, and that\u2019s not a lot of people\u2019s experience.<\/span><\/p>\nBut even the fact that we\u2019re called \u201cfemale\u201d DJs instead of DJs. Like, I recently did this gig and this woman, who was well-meaning, said that she was so excited to see a female DJ. We have to switch up the idea that a woman DJ is an anomaly, that a woman who knows how to use a turntable is an anomaly. So being a DJ helps turn around this predominant idea of who spins the music, so in a lot of ways I think even just existing as a DJ for me has always been inherently feminist.<\/span><\/p>\nAlso I try both in sets of mine and in the spaces I create and the mixes that I do to include a lot of female and queer voices, and include a narrative of feminism as well.<\/span><\/p>\nThere are a lot of themes of colonization, migrations, and diasporas in the mixes you put out, and I know your day job is doing immigrants\u2019 rights work. How do these themes make their way into the music you decide to work with?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nI mean I\u2019m an immigrant, and that\u2019s informed the work that I do. I do immigrants\u2019 rights organizing, and always, beyond a theoretical level, I\u2019ve been interested in migration because it\u2019s the story of my life.<\/span><\/p>\nI am Sri Lankan and I moved to the UK when I was young, grew up in Thailand, and then came to the US for college when I was 18, so my trajectory has always been that of a migrant, always outside of the country of my passport. I\u2019m always thinking about my own migration context and also everyone else\u2019s \u2014 people who are more privileged and less privileged \u2014 people who didn\u2019t come with a visa and people who didn\u2019t come for college. I am interested in telling stories through my music \u2014 I want people to have a good time and dance and listen to a mix but also be thinking about what was the connection between, for example this song from West Africa and this champeta song from Colombia. Because even in terms of music there is so much to say about migration, and how migrations inform different music.<\/span><\/p>\nSo I had this moment when I was looking at your description of the\u00a0Open City mixtape<\/span><\/a>\u00a0where you talk about Venezuelan tuki, and it was actually the first time that I \u2014 and I\u2019m Venezuelan \u2014 had heard of tuki. So I went on this Google wormhole and I ended up reading some more about it on the Mad Decent website, and just had this moment of rage: like, when white folks are telling you about things in your own country that they\u2019ve been able to see because they have a kind of access that you don\u2019t have. I\u2019ve been home a few times in the almost 20 years I\u2019ve been here and I absorb these snippets of culture while I\u2019m there that I cherish so much, but nothing close to what white dudes on a Diplo budget can get. And I\u2019m wondering if you deal with that, how you navigate this culture of appropriation and re-working of the exotic brown in the DJ and music world more generally. How you choose to resist that, I guess.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nI learned about tuki from my friend Mariana \u2014 who is a Venezuelan artist from Caracas. So my entrance to learning about Venezuelan music was from Venezuelan DJs, not from Mad Decent. But anyone can get anything off of the internet and there are these Mad Decent and Diplo kind of popular mainstreaming folks \u2014 the ways that they are pulling from music from the global south and making music their own and kind of mainstream it, but I wanna challenge that. There are a lot of underground channels that people are sharing music that aren\u2019t about white people.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen you break down concerns about appropriation of music genres by certain labels \u2014 the concern is really about power. For me as a DJ \u2014 and as someone learning to produce, and who is associated with other DJs\/producers \u2014 I think it\u2019s extremely important to credit who\/where you are sampling your music from and also whenever possible, making sure that those local voices are highlighted. Maybe because of something you sampled an artist from Ghana or Sierra Leone or Colombia or wherever gets to tour and profit as well. You also have to\u00a0know<\/i>\u00a0what you are playing. I play a lot of music from everywhere \u2014 sometimes I don\u2019t understand the language \u2014 when possible, if I know someone who does speak that language, I\u2019ll ask them what the song means or I\u2019ll do a lot of research into the history of how that genre was created, so at least I know the region, the form, etc. By knowing what you are playing, you ensure that you aren\u2019t just contributing to some \u201cmelting pot of global music\u201d but are specifically highlighting different styles and how they go together.<\/span><\/p>\nThe issue that people have with Mad Decent or Diplo is this \u201cChristopher Columbus discovery of music\u201d thing they have going on \u2014 original artists are rarely at the forefront and people question their intentions. A couple of years ago, Venus X, of Ghethogothik fame, called Diplo out on Twitter for recording her set at a ghe20g0th1k\u00a0party and playing a similar set himself later. It\u2019s a long story but I think that calling out was so important \u2014 because clearly that\u2019s not about collaboration, that\u2019s about stealing ideas \u2014 and in this case, a extremely successful white deejay stealing from a woman of color. People are of course influenced by each others styles \u2014 but just be transparent about it, give credit where credit is due. Chief Boima writes about this in a piece called \u201cGlobal Genre Accumulation<\/span><\/a>\u201d that I think everyone should check out.<\/span><\/p>\nI actually was really glad that in the end I actually first learned it from you \u2014 that I got to first hear about this genre that emerged after I left from a woman of color and immigrant, and not from fucking Diplo (god, I hate Diplo<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nYeah, and you know \u2014 like tuki \u2014 some of the music that is becoming more popular is from working class places. Tuki is from the barrios, from predominantly black folk. So I wanna acknowledge that and I wanna look into the histories of that music. And you have these larger labels that take in this music and are into assimilating it into the larger genre of global bass but there are histories that are important to know. I don\u2019t want people to think that I\u2019m about this melting pot. I want people not to assume that we\u2019re all the same, but to have people go out and learn these trajectories and migrations and histories.<\/span><\/p>\nSo what is your process for making a mix? Do you kind of keep track of and write down songs that fit a theme for a while, and then go for it? Or do you sit down and research it all as a project, or some combination?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nIt\u2019s a combo \u2014 I take so long to make mixes \u2014 I spend so long listening to things, messing around and seeing what mixes with each other. Like for the\u00a0Foreign Brown<\/span><\/a>\u00a0mixtape, looking into the lyrics was important. So\u00a0I started with a song by Lido Pimienta about la migra. There is this Los Rakas song\u00a0Africana<\/span><\/a>\u00a0where they talk about skin color, and I liked how they talk about something that really affects the whole world. I included this song by Tribe Called Red talking about the Idle No More movement, and the women involved in that. I was trying to connect all these songs that connect these movements across the world, but also make it danceable.<\/span><\/p>\nComing from a policy-heavy world there is a way that we think that it\u2019s really separate from our everyday lives. Like you can be on the dance floor and you can be political. They often think that the dance floor is so different, where you go to party and not think about things, but for me they are the same \u2014 I am political on the dance floor too.<\/span><\/p>\nWe recently did\u00a0this interview with Gordon Voidwell<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who was talking also about something similar \u2014 the dance floor as a liberatory space.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nIt can be so beautiful \u2014 there is this collective we just DJ\u2019d with in Chicago and there were 850 people at this event and all the proceeds went to an immigrants\u2019 rights org. And all these things are connected you know? Like this week the deportation record is at 2 million.\u00a0New York state still can\u2019t pass the DREAM ACT<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and give undocumented students the chance to go to college.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd you know, the world is so crazy, and there is all that happening, and for these few hours on the dance floor you can feel all those things and express that anger but also feel really good.<\/span><\/p>\nAny songs or videos you\u2019re feeling these days?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe Wizard ft Nyanda & Chedda \u2013 Like A Pro<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t know DJ Ushka yet, it is definitely in your interest to get to know her. Born Thanu Yakupitiyage in Sri Lanka, DJ Ushka is currently based out of Brooklyn (via Thailand). When she\u2019s not working as an immigrants\u2019 rights organizer, she\u2019s incorporating the music and resistance of the global south into eminently danceable mixes.\u00a0I had the pleasure of chatting on the phone with DJ Ushka a couple weeks ago, and we talked feminism, migration, and the ways DJs can participate in \u2014 and resist \u2014 cultural appropriation.<\/span><\/p>\n I also asked her to pick out ten songs or videos she was feeling. She ended up giving me eleven, and you know what? That is really great news for you.<\/span><\/p>\n How does feminism \u2014 or feminisms \u2014 affect your art? Like, both in terms of the ways you produce and also the shit you have to navigate as a woman in a male-dominated DJ world.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n I mean, I think that my approach to DJing or even my entrance into the work of DJing has inherently been a feminist act, you know? I spin a lot of global music and I\u2019ve had a lot of support from men and male DJs, and a lot of friends who stepped up, and that\u2019s not a lot of people\u2019s experience.<\/span><\/p>\n But even the fact that we\u2019re called \u201cfemale\u201d DJs instead of DJs. Like, I recently did this gig and this woman, who was well-meaning, said that she was so excited to see a female DJ. We have to switch up the idea that a woman DJ is an anomaly, that a woman who knows how to use a turntable is an anomaly. So being a DJ helps turn around this predominant idea of who spins the music, so in a lot of ways I think even just existing as a DJ for me has always been inherently feminist.<\/span><\/p>\n Also I try both in sets of mine and in the spaces I create and the mixes that I do to include a lot of female and queer voices, and include a narrative of feminism as well.<\/span><\/p>\n There are a lot of themes of colonization, migrations, and diasporas in the mixes you put out, and I know your day job is doing immigrants\u2019 rights work. How do these themes make their way into the music you decide to work with?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I mean I\u2019m an immigrant, and that\u2019s informed the work that I do. I do immigrants\u2019 rights organizing, and always, beyond a theoretical level, I\u2019ve been interested in migration because it\u2019s the story of my life.<\/span><\/p>\n I am Sri Lankan and I moved to the UK when I was young, grew up in Thailand, and then came to the US for college when I was 18, so my trajectory has always been that of a migrant, always outside of the country of my passport. I\u2019m always thinking about my own migration context and also everyone else\u2019s \u2014 people who are more privileged and less privileged \u2014 people who didn\u2019t come with a visa and people who didn\u2019t come for college. I am interested in telling stories through my music \u2014 I want people to have a good time and dance and listen to a mix but also be thinking about what was the connection between, for example this song from West Africa and this champeta song from Colombia. Because even in terms of music there is so much to say about migration, and how migrations inform different music.<\/span><\/p>\n So I had this moment when I was looking at your description of the\u00a0Open City mixtape<\/span><\/a>\u00a0where you talk about Venezuelan tuki, and it was actually the first time that I \u2014 and I\u2019m Venezuelan \u2014 had heard of tuki. So I went on this Google wormhole and I ended up reading some more about it on the Mad Decent website, and just had this moment of rage: like, when white folks are telling you about things in your own country that they\u2019ve been able to see because they have a kind of access that you don\u2019t have. I\u2019ve been home a few times in the almost 20 years I\u2019ve been here and I absorb these snippets of culture while I\u2019m there that I cherish so much, but nothing close to what white dudes on a Diplo budget can get. And I\u2019m wondering if you deal with that, how you navigate this culture of appropriation and re-working of the exotic brown in the DJ and music world more generally. How you choose to resist that, I guess.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I learned about tuki from my friend Mariana \u2014 who is a Venezuelan artist from Caracas. So my entrance to learning about Venezuelan music was from Venezuelan DJs, not from Mad Decent. But anyone can get anything off of the internet and there are these Mad Decent and Diplo kind of popular mainstreaming folks \u2014 the ways that they are pulling from music from the global south and making music their own and kind of mainstream it, but I wanna challenge that. There are a lot of underground channels that people are sharing music that aren\u2019t about white people.<\/span><\/p>\n When you break down concerns about appropriation of music genres by certain labels \u2014 the concern is really about power. For me as a DJ \u2014 and as someone learning to produce, and who is associated with other DJs\/producers \u2014 I think it\u2019s extremely important to credit who\/where you are sampling your music from and also whenever possible, making sure that those local voices are highlighted. Maybe because of something you sampled an artist from Ghana or Sierra Leone or Colombia or wherever gets to tour and profit as well. You also have to\u00a0know<\/i>\u00a0what you are playing. I play a lot of music from everywhere \u2014 sometimes I don\u2019t understand the language \u2014 when possible, if I know someone who does speak that language, I\u2019ll ask them what the song means or I\u2019ll do a lot of research into the history of how that genre was created, so at least I know the region, the form, etc. By knowing what you are playing, you ensure that you aren\u2019t just contributing to some \u201cmelting pot of global music\u201d but are specifically highlighting different styles and how they go together.<\/span><\/p>\n The issue that people have with Mad Decent or Diplo is this \u201cChristopher Columbus discovery of music\u201d thing they have going on \u2014 original artists are rarely at the forefront and people question their intentions. A couple of years ago, Venus X, of Ghethogothik fame, called Diplo out on Twitter for recording her set at a ghe20g0th1k\u00a0party and playing a similar set himself later. It\u2019s a long story but I think that calling out was so important \u2014 because clearly that\u2019s not about collaboration, that\u2019s about stealing ideas \u2014 and in this case, a extremely successful white deejay stealing from a woman of color. People are of course influenced by each others styles \u2014 but just be transparent about it, give credit where credit is due. Chief Boima writes about this in a piece called \u201cGlobal Genre Accumulation<\/span><\/a>\u201d that I think everyone should check out.<\/span><\/p>\n I actually was really glad that in the end I actually first learned it from you \u2014 that I got to first hear about this genre that emerged after I left from a woman of color and immigrant, and not from fucking Diplo (god, I hate Diplo<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, and you know \u2014 like tuki \u2014 some of the music that is becoming more popular is from working class places. Tuki is from the barrios, from predominantly black folk. So I wanna acknowledge that and I wanna look into the histories of that music. And you have these larger labels that take in this music and are into assimilating it into the larger genre of global bass but there are histories that are important to know. I don\u2019t want people to think that I\u2019m about this melting pot. I want people not to assume that we\u2019re all the same, but to have people go out and learn these trajectories and migrations and histories.<\/span><\/p>\n So what is your process for making a mix? Do you kind of keep track of and write down songs that fit a theme for a while, and then go for it? Or do you sit down and research it all as a project, or some combination?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s a combo \u2014 I take so long to make mixes \u2014 I spend so long listening to things, messing around and seeing what mixes with each other. Like for the\u00a0Foreign Brown<\/span><\/a>\u00a0mixtape, looking into the lyrics was important. So\u00a0I started with a song by Lido Pimienta about la migra. There is this Los Rakas song\u00a0Africana<\/span><\/a>\u00a0where they talk about skin color, and I liked how they talk about something that really affects the whole world. I included this song by Tribe Called Red talking about the Idle No More movement, and the women involved in that. I was trying to connect all these songs that connect these movements across the world, but also make it danceable.<\/span><\/p>\n Coming from a policy-heavy world there is a way that we think that it\u2019s really separate from our everyday lives. Like you can be on the dance floor and you can be political. They often think that the dance floor is so different, where you go to party and not think about things, but for me they are the same \u2014 I am political on the dance floor too.<\/span><\/p>\n We recently did\u00a0this interview with Gordon Voidwell<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who was talking also about something similar \u2014 the dance floor as a liberatory space.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n It can be so beautiful \u2014 there is this collective we just DJ\u2019d with in Chicago and there were 850 people at this event and all the proceeds went to an immigrants\u2019 rights org. And all these things are connected you know? Like this week the deportation record is at 2 million.\u00a0New York state still can\u2019t pass the DREAM ACT<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and give undocumented students the chance to go to college.<\/span><\/p>\n And you know, the world is so crazy, and there is all that happening, and for these few hours on the dance floor you can feel all those things and express that anger but also feel really good.<\/span><\/p>\n Any songs or videos you\u2019re feeling these days?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The Wizard ft Nyanda & Chedda \u2013 Like A Pro<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n