At first it was just some battle minded "I'm the illest" type shit. Later I found the Art of War and read about invincibility's deeper meaning: knowledge of self, strengthening of your weakest links, knowledge of the enemy, and most importantly the foresight to resolve conflict and be victorious without battle.illRoots.com: Okay your thoughts of this wack ass Miss Rap Supreme Show?
Invincible: Honestly I haven't watched it cause I don't have cable but from the little I could find online: besides the fact that it perpetuates the stereotype that women are constantly in catfights and hating on each other…its comedy! I'm happy they got Yo-Yo on there too. Ego Trip was my favorite magazine in high school…I collected like every copy, so I know what their approach is: complete mockery of everything. I can't be mad unless people take it seriously. Last week I was spitting to a group of youth and one of them was like: "you remind me of so and so on Miss Rap Supreme!" and I laughed cause I already know this show will be most people's limited frame of reference to female emcees. On the other hand I think it will make us who are really doing it look even iller because the mockery of mediocrity on the show is the only image people have to compare us to, and we will shine as a result. By the way this cat Dart Adams wrote a dope blog: http://poisonousparagraphs.blogspot.com/2008/04/dart-adams-presents-supreme-rap-misses.html
(I would add many more to this list too…especially Helixx, Pri, Miz Korona, Indeed, Herawin, Kandi Cole, Stacy Epps, athenA, Njeri Earth, and Theory)
illRoots.com: I'm not going to gas you up too much but you have got to be one of the illest emcees I've heard regardless of gender. If you could collab with one producer, who and why?
Invincible: I'm my worst critic so thank you for the feedback! As far the producer: it's already in the works! Waajeed and I are planning to do a full project together very soon…He layers and arranges his production in a cinematic way, and I write visually so it's a perfect fit. Also we are both workaholics and independently minded with our biz so that helps too.
illRoots.com: Why the name INVINCIBLE?
Invincible: I started out freestyling with a homie who wrote graff and I would dabble in it. We were messing with different names that begin with the letter I (my birth name is ilana) that looked good tagged, and that was the top pick. At first it was just some battle minded "I'm the illest" type shit. Later I found the Art of War and read about invincibility's deeper meaning: knowledge of self, strengthening of your weakest links, knowledge of the enemy, and most importantly the foresight to resolve conflict and be victorious without battle.
illRoots.com: Define Hip-Hop?
Invincible: Hip Hop is how I learned English, it's how I was introduced to most of the ideas and people that have transformed me over the years. At its best- it's a culture and outlet of expression and resistance for marginalized voices and stories that have been silenced, from NY, to Detroit, to Palestine, and beyond. I think it gets defined too narrowly, it's less about the style itself and more about the communities and struggles it grows out of. How will kids in struggling communities sample Hip-Hop in 30 years from now and what new culture will it evolve into?
illRoots.com:Females have always had such a hard trail into this industry why do you believe this is so?
Invincible: These lazy labels don't know how to market female emcees, how to reach our audience, or how to make sure we are supported to do our best. It's like the immortal technique skit: "there's a market for everything; pet psychologists, chocolate covered cockroaches, river-dancing, nipple rings….and you can't find a market for cultured hardcore reality in Hip-Hop?". I've had so many wack experiences with labels trying to switch up my style, image, marketing gimmicks etc and it's the same for every female emcee I know.
On a more personal note I know a lot of incredible female artists with more family responsibilities than your average dude, so they have less time to focus on the music hustle.
The solution is putting our music out and marketing ourselves in ways that correspond with our message/music. That's the model I'm trying to create with my label EMERGENCE. I want to support dope female artists, (and artists across the board who shatter the stereotypes they're pushed into) to be able to be successful without compromising themselves or burning out.
illRoots.com:Your first album you ever bought?
Invincible: First tape: Low End Theory (A Tribe Called Quest) [Notice she said Tape, I still have those...]
-first CD: Sleeping with the Enemy (Paris).
illRoots.com: Your Opinions on Society as a whole?
Invincible: That's a huge question, but overall I think we're in a state of emergency and crisis, and at the same time at space where new resistance and ways of living as self reliant communities will emerge out of necessity to deal with the problems facing us. In Detroit organizing community we have a saying "Detroit is what the rest of the world has to look forward to", meaning that the post industrial abandoned poverty and unemployment (and violence that is caused by those) will be felt everywhere; since industrialism started in Detroit and then spread every where, so will this stage of it. On the other hand, people in the D are coming up with some of the most brilliant solutions to these issues, including reclaiming abandoned property and turning into community spaces, growing their own food, creating their own cooperative economics network of small community run businesses instead of waiting for more factory or data entry or casino related jobs to be created, solving conflicts with community alternatives to the corrupt police force, etc. We hope these models can be useful in other places dealing with similar challenges, and ideally people can look forward to Detroit as a futuristic solution oriented self-reliant city.
Invincible "Sledgehammer" Live
I also look at all work to build new types of communities as prison abolition work. When we build relationships with each other based off mutual support, mutual respect, trust, and non-violence, then we are planting seeds so that within the next century we can make prisons and police un-needed, and obsolete, and abolish the whole prison/military industrial complex by creating long lasting sustainable alternatives to those systems.
illRoots.com: New album, solo effort, "Shapeshifters", crazy single "Sledgehammer", the prowess of this song?
ShapeShifters is my first solo album, and I could say technically I've been working on it my whole life, but this actual group of songs started out when I heard the Sledgehammer beat on a LabTechs beat cd. The concept behind this song is how people don't want to pay attention to the realities and injustices around them until they are directly impacted to the point they have no choice, and smashing through those isolating walls we build to desensitize ourselves, so that we can actually affect change these situations for the better. Its also a direct call to stop the building of the apartheid wall being built by Israel to imprison Palestinians (with US tax dollars), as well as the racist wall on the US Mexico border, both built by the same corporation!
illRoots.com:Just like my good friend K-Salaam you seem to be artist and activist, describe your purpose to make this music?
Invincible: K-Salaam is dope! My homegirl Suheir Hamad put me up on him. For me the music is just one piece of it, though a huge piece, I see my role as an artist inseparable from being a community organizer who uses Hip-Hop as a tunnel/bridge builder to shift the actual reality. The title of the album (ShapeShifters) speaks to that too, one of the meanings of the title is about Hip Hop's potential to spark change.
illRoots.com: Give me one Good Book to read?
Invincible: "Parables of the Sower/Parables of the Talents" Octavia Butler inspired the title track on the album.
illRoots.com: Most Underrated Emcee Alive?
Invincible: Finale, Helixx, Pharoahe Monch.
illRoots.com: Explain to me your writing process and how you've developed as an artist from being in a group to going solo?
Invincible: Pri from my crew the ANOMOLIES taught me how to write visually, where you brainstorm the video first, and then write the song. With some songs the next step after that is either freestyle a bunch of flow patterns and then fit words in after, or freestyle on the topic and collage together my favorite lines. With other songs I take as much as 5 years to write because I research and interview people about the topic and plot it out. This is how I approached the songs People Not Places, and Locusts on the album for instance, since I knew they were controversial topics and wanted to be as accurate as possible. ANOMOLIES is a crew not a group, and PPP is a production team that featured me on their first album, so I've always been a solo artist, with chosen fam that holds me down.
Go Check out more from this extremely talented emcee at www.myspace.com/invincilana
