Digital Sleepover 2 Interview: Magi Merlin, Mags, and Naïka Champaïgne on Hip-Hop Culture, Soul, RnB and more
Have you heard? We're having a sleepover, and you're invited! Digital Sleepover 2, is our latest upcoming collaboration Hip Hop You Don't Stop and Strange Froots. On September 19th at 8pm EST we'll be livestreaming a roundtable panel disucssion from the Also Cool HQ with JU!CE, Khadijah, Faneva, and Magi Merlin, followerd by an online dance party.
As we did with our previous Digital Sleepover, we're raising funds for our communities: half of the proceeds will be donated to Maison d'Haiti to help with relief efforts in recovering from the earthquake, and half will go to sustaining the ongoing work of Also Cool (staff, web maintenance, etc.), at the very kind request of the Strange Froots crew. You can donate to the fundraiser here.
In anticipation of the event, we caught up with Mags, Naïka Champaïgne, and Magi Merlin to chat about Hip-Hop culture, different genres, and more.
Mags & Naïka Champaïgne of Strange Froots
Malaika Astorga for Also Cool: Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Hip-Hop, R&B & Soul music?
Magi Merlin: Growing up, my parents mostly played classical music when I was around. I also heard some old-school R&B from my dad and some pop stuff from my mom, but my parents were never that music-oriented. So, as I grew up, and after realizing that I wanted to pursue music, I made sure to listen to all genres of music in an attempt to find what resonated with me the most. I naturally found myself drawn to Neo-Soul, alternative R&B, and Hip-Hop; the voices in these genres really spoke to me. Being a blank slate and not having much outside influence in what I was listening to at a young age almost made my connection to these genres stronger because it felt like we chose each other.
Naïka Champaïgne: My relationship with Hip-Hop, R&B and Soul has been through the sounds being played in my house. My mom had numerous R&B CDs, Hip Hop CDs and was a HUGE fan of Prince. Hearing soul and R&B specifically on Sundays meant my mom was cleaning. It just always has been part of my life. I can’t tell you when, where or how it was brought to my life because it’s just always been there.
I have a really intimate relationship when it comes to those genres because I always wanted to know more; who sang this? Who wrote this? Who sampled this? Who composed this? What are the different ways they performed it? My mom sometimes would be surprised that I knew this artist, because I was not born during their time, but I was just a kid (and always am to this day) that searched for the artist. I started their discography from the beginning to the end, with the artist’s bio, with the album bio, creative process, writing process and lyrics all open next to me while I listen to the songs, in order to fully grasp the music. My relationship with Hip-Hop, Soul and R&B differs in terms of what/who I’m composing for.
With Strange Froots I focus a lot more on Hip Hop ways of writing and flowing and the more 2000s girl group R&B vocals harmony, and as a solo artist I focus more on the Soul vocalization and melody composition.
Mags: All of the Hip-Hop and RnB I grew up listening to I got from my older siblings, mostly when they would pick me up from school or when I had to tag along with them and their friends hanging out in the 90s, if not simply from having MTV or VH1 on the tube. My family also was really REALLY big on CDs and cassette tapes; my earliest memories of those include TLC’s CrazySexyCool, Michael Jackson’s Dangerous, Brandy’s debut eponymous album, Whitney Houston’s My Love Is Your Love, and the soundtrack to the 1995 film Waiting to Exhale (which included a lot of the aforementioned artists on top of introducing me to some of RnB’s staples like Toni Braxton and SWV). My dad was a huge part of my musical upbringing, in many genres, but he bought me my first CDs when I was in elementary school: Nelly’s Nellyville (which is all Hip-Hop with a few Cedric the Entertainer skits), and the soundtrack to the Will Smith 1999 film Wild Wild West (which was mostly Hip-Hop, with a bit of RnB and Latin-infused music).
Within Strange Froots I’d say a lot of my artistry as an MC is heavily influenced by Missy Elliott, as a singer I might say Brandy, Nelly Furtado and Destiny’s Child (especially for harmonies), and as a group member overall influenced by TLC who often merge genres.
via Magi Merlin
Also Cool Mag: Have you found that RnB & soul music are often considered hip hop? Why do you think people want to expand the definition of hip hop?
Magi Merlin: I have not personally considered these genres a part of Hip-Hop at all. When people lump genres like these together, it is partially because a large portion of the R&B and Soul community collaborates with the Hip-Hop community. There is a reoccurrence in the names associated with each other, so people may make a subconscious combination of all the people they've seen together, regardless of genre. However, I also feel like it also might be rooted in an assumption that because most people participating in these communities are BIPOC, there is an assumption that they all participate in the same space.
NC: I find that R&B and Soul have been considered to be Hip-Hop because they are Black music. Hip-Hop, R&B and Soul are Black music. Hip-Hop beats sample a lot of R&B and Soul music. And I think the reason why people want to expand the definition of Hip-Hop, it recreates familiar Black sounds into an entire culture of being more vocal, direct about what is on their mind. Hip Hop is a way for Black people to express so much. There is something very ancestral about Hip-Hop while also very much grabbing the old to create something new, to redirect something to a new lens but honoring what came before us, what is now and what could be and that is why Hip-Hop is always expanding and people want to expand it.
Mags: I think there is a double-edged sword to bunching soul and R&B music in with Hip-Hop. On the one hand, it makes complete sense that so many of our diasporic rituals, social cues, cultural references, schoolyard antics and the like all come from these genres, and especially so from the 1970s to the early 2000s; on the other, this expansion allows for non-Black entities to further homogenize us and place labels on us that may not even apply.
Strange Froots in our early days (before we started regularly rapping) would often get booked on lineups that didn’t make sense for us at the time, simply because we were three Black kids from a youth center in Cote-des-Neiges performing over beats, regardless of whether we were singing or doing a form of poetry. There is a correlation between Hip-Hop, Soul and R&B to the point that they often are categorized under the “urban music” genre, for obvious reasons; that doesn’t make them the same, and folks would be wise to know the difference. It’s also worth noting just how much overlap and collaboration there is between R&B artists and rappers, such as Ja Rule and Ashanti. RnB hooks and interludes over rap songs were all the rage in the 90s and early aughts.
Mags & Naïka Champaïgne of Strange Froots
AC: Do you think that the different genres have been gendered at all? Or hold any specific perceptions? What has your experience with that been like?
Magi Merlin: For sure, I think that Hip-Hop is predominantly occupied by men. Obviously, this is changing, and there is a visible shift, but I think that both Rnb and Hip hop were very gendered. I personally am very lucky to not have any negative experiences in the genre that I occupy space in. I am not a rapper, but I do feel like female rappers might have a harder time and may feel like they need to "prove" themselves in order to be respected by their male peers. Of course, this is usually the case in any career field dominated by men so Hip-Hop, producing, songwriting is no different!
NC: I do think they are extremely gendered– and if we are moving away from being extremely gendered we are still holding heavily onto the binaries of gender expression (feminine and masculine). And that also ties into colorism. Light-skin Black folks who are R&B and/or Soul artists will get more recognition, more clout, more opportunities because R&B and Soul are perceived to be more soft, more palatable to popular culture, and more feminine. That is highly linked to skin colour; colonialism and white supremacy see anything that is closer in proximity to whiteness to be more soft, good, gentle and dark skin to be aggressive, hypermasculinized, harsh (and that is also why dark-skinned femme and the standards of beauty and desirability do not favour them at all). You will not see as many dark-skinned Black folks in the R&B and Soul genre at the top.
Mags: I think the gendering of the genres also extends to the audience on top of the artists. There’s this idea that rap music is known for expressing a lot of bravado, material wealth and is more explicitly sexual, which not only reaches mostly men in terms of aspirations and relatability, it can be often paralleled to the dehumanization of dark-skinned folks, whereas many R&B songs are made up of more romantic or melancholic content, that feminine audiences find appealing. All of this typically applies, even if the RnB singer is on the darker end of the spectrum (eg. Omarion, Mario, Joe...), or the rapper on the lighter end (Ludacris, Nelly, etc). As I mentioned before, many R&B artists would be featured guests on rap songs, and more often than not, if the genders were different, it was a light-skin female RnB singer over a dark-skin male rapper’s song, furthering the image of near-subordination from the former.
In my experience, while Strange Froots was in its infancy, many of the girls that came through to NBS Studio (where the group was born) were asked to simply sing while the boys did their raps. Even now, I’m not sure I can think of a Froots song where I sang more than the others rapped (lol); maybe that’s something I need to work out in my subconscious.
via Magi Merlin
AC: Who are you most excited about in Montreal's hip hop, RnB & soul scenes?
Magi Merlin: I love FERNIE!! They are super fantastic RnB such a sweet ass VOICE! I've been super into Skiifall lately as well. Not sure if Kayahoax falls under hiphop, maybe experimental rap but she's sick too! Also always listening to jamvvis and DO, The Outcast.
NC: OOOOH okay so Backxwash, Malika Tirolien, Shem G, Elle Barbara (‘Délice Créole’, love the Disco Soul vibes), and Elena Stoodley.
M: I think Janette King is someone who tows the Hip-hop/R&B line so beautifully, Shah Frank is another RnB artist people ought to look out for. A lot of people know Basics for his rap career but did y’all know this man can sing??
Tune in to Digital Sleepover 2 on September 19th at 8pm EST.
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