An interview with CanarySing

Canary Sing, the Seattle-based duo of artist-activists Hollis Wong-Wear and Maddy Clifford, will be the headliners for the next Equilibrium spoken word performance at the Loft on May 15.

They took time out from promoting their EP to answer some questions about craft and their busy lives.

The View: A Twin Cities hip hop artist/singer/poet/activist Yvette Rodriguez has said that hip hop has been/can be misogynistic. While she can’t condone that, she can’t abandon the art form. “I am hip hop,” she says. How do you feel about the genre and its portrayal of women?

Hollis: Hip hop is more than a genre; it is a culture. It is one that started in a particular historical moment—South Bronx, mid-1970s—and has now radiated out to all corners of the country, and crossed nearly every border in the world. It has given marginalized, silenced people the opportunity to make noise, collect in community, and make themselves known. It is a culture of artistic dialogue across forms, languages, and experiences. It’s really incredible!

Hip hop is what you make it; hip hop is how it’s shaped. We enter into the culture with a deep love, appreciation and respect for its history, knowing that women’s voices have traditionally been shut out of the discourse. While obviously there’s flagrant incidents of disrespecting women that are easy to point out, hip hop is no worse in oppressing women than, say, warfare, or governmental legislation where decisions on women’s bodies are made by men. We’re working to represent ourselves and be respected as women no matter what cultures we walk between.

V: How did you find your voices? What spurred you on as young(er) artists?

Maddy: Finding our voices was definitely a process. Young women are conditioned to speak when spoken to, to question and to compromise. This is something that women can celebrate, but it can also be limiting especially when claiming one’s artistic abilities.

We were both very creative children. We performed in plays and wrote our own scripts as aspiring playwrights. In high school, we both competed in our first slam through an organization called Youth Speaks, which is based in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle.

Although the idea of numerically scoring poetry is outrageous, it ultimately encouraged us to maintain confidence, perfect our craft and collaborate with other writers. Spoken word definitely prepared us for the hip-hop community, which pushes the emcee to capture an audience’s attention for as long as possible. For an emcee, confidence is key—if you aren’t feeling your own lyrics then who else will?

Youth Speaks’ motto is: “the next generation can speak for itself.” Once we started speaking for ourselves everything else fell into place. Going to college.  Standing up for the things we believed in. What spurred us on was learning just how to utilize our voices.

V: How do you continue to find your voices? Who do you read, listen to, glean inspiration from?

Maddy: I can only speak for myself (but I have a good feeling that Hollis would agree) that spreading love and liberation provides constant inspiration. I feel motivated to get up in the morning when I think about the world we can create when we encourage young people while learning from elders with experience and expertise.

Also, we definitely find inspiration in one another. That’s the beauty of being in a duo—constantly collaborating with a fellow artist that you admire.

I’m flipping through a poetry anthology called Poets of the New Century. For music, I am currently listening to my favorite local rapper La (Language Artz) and Def D’s album “Gravity.” And for my dose of fiction I’m reading a novel by Daniyal Mueenuddin entitled In Other Rooms,Other Wonders.

Hollis: In terms of what we read now, I just finished Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler per Maddy’s recommendation, and she just finished Random Family by Adrienne Nicole LeBlanc per my recommendation. Both books deeply examine the resilience of women through seemingly impossible circumstances. They’re also both written by incredibly thorough, visionary female authors who were pioneers in their field. We take courage from these women, whether written characters or the writers themselves.

Maddy: Whenever Hollis recommends a book to me I know it’ll be good!

V: How do you juggle traveling, working, working on craft, being good to yourselves?

Hollis: It’s a great question, and it’s an act we definitely haven’t gotten down pat. One skill I’ve been working on is being patient. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, both by all the logistics and time we put into our art, and also by all the amazing opportunities we have to perform and the ideas we have swarming between us. Giving ourselves space and time to carefully, intentionally make decisions is far more empowering than doing everything Superwoman-style at the speed of light. Sustainability is key. That’s where the real growth lies.

The goal is that one begets the other: that our work is our craft, that our work takes us to all the places we want to go (lots of places!), and that our work innately nourishes and sustains us as we continue forth.

V: What words of encouragement and wisdom do you have for young artists?

Maddy: I would recommend that young artists learn how to communicate their needs to adult artists and adults in general.

I would tell youth to reach out to poets that they admire and ask for feedback. In turn, adult artists—that really know what’s up—will learn and gain encouragement from future generations that are being impacted by {the older generation’s} body of work.

If a youth can’t get in direct contact with an adult artist, a good way to develop is to imitate. This doesn’t mean stealing ideas without credit, it means trying out compelling styles. If youth imitate lots of different artists, they’ll find their own style in the process.

V: Tess Gallagher has given this advice to writers: “Listen for the music, don’t drone, trust your jumps, and cut, cut, cut (or alternately) expand, expand, expand.” How would you describe your philosophy of writing poems and songs?

Maddy: What is so amazing about the lyricism of hip-hop is that it allows a writer to do all of the things that Gallagher mentioned—cutting and expanding—precisely because an emcee must fit her poetry into bars. We enjoy trying to fit complex or seemingly indescribable meanings into a structure. We also love to recite these meanings and play with different cadences, known as flow.

Our philosophy of writing is the untraceable quote: “write what you know.” In hip-hop, it’s easy to tell when an emcee is “frontin.” For us, a song will spark from experiences or memories that we share as women of color. For example, we wrote “Club Hit” as a response to being of legal drinking age, and consequently trying to navigate the bar and dance club scenes—spaces often oversaturated with mindless party music. We thought: what would happen if we made politics danceable and fun? The result was declaring that Canary Sing can “cut a rug and remain unplugged from the matrix.”

Canary Sing will appear at Open Book for the Equilibrium spoken word performance May 15, 8 p.m. Special guest Khary ’6 is 9′ and music by DJ Nak. $5/$3 students and Loft supporting members.