Paripatetic Production: Dessa

Dessa at the North Dakota Museum of Art

To open my series on interesting cultural producers, I turn to an artist of various stripes from Minneapolis, Dessa. Dessa is a great example of the 21st-century peripatetic producer. She’s a recording artist—a name we give musicians who’s principle mode of production (and therefore earning scratch) is based on cutting records. It’s almost certainly an industry term, and so maybe it doesn’t apply to Dessa. Her albums, after all, all come courtesy of Doomtree Records. Doomtree is a hip-hop collective that includes Dessa (they just released a new track today). What is a hip-hop collective? Sometimes it’s a crew or a clan or a label or a publishing house or a houseful of people or a performance group. It is whatever its members need and want it to be at a particular moment. In many ways, then, we could argue Doomtree is a prime example of the kind of institutional signifier we need in a multimodal age: it flexes and bends. It isn’t beholden to industry jargon but is instead nimble enough to leverage that jargon when it suits individuals within the institution. You can listen to more of what the collective means by checking out Dessa and her clan in the KEXP studios.

And you can find Dessa in numerous other formats. She has published writing under the Doomtree imprint. The collective is releasing a gigantic tome of images and stories of their first ten years (because why not?). She recently announced that she was working with a Minneapolis-area jewelry artist to make things. What kind of things? They’ll see. First, they produced matchstick earrings, which likely serves as a material cue for one of her songs, much as this piece of merchandise refers to another track. We could read this as cloying consumerism, or we could recognize it as something more catholic: a kind of experimentation in the totalizing possibilities of cultural production. And as she experiments, so does she function as peripatetic teacher: she’s taught production at music schools, she’s hosted a Minneapolis-area television show, she’s presented at conferences, she’s spoken at commencements. She’s done the things recognizably interesting people get to do, and she’s kept on getting more interesting.

I must admit, while the Doomtree collective scratches an Arts & Crafts itch I have as a condition of my academic background, my first interaction with Dessa was as a musician. I am a fan, or at least I think I am. At the end of a recent performance, Dessa thanked a relatively small crowd of North Dakotans for coming out for a blend of what she called “highly literary rap” and clarinet-heavy pop-songs in ¾ time. I think I like Dessa because she turns phrases like “I run on whiskey and risk” and “in a room full of thugs and rap veterans, why am I the only one who’s acting like a gentleman?” But I wonder if, at times, she isn’t just too clever. I wonder this because she self-identifies as a “literary” rapper, and I have visions of EthanHawke, Jewel, James Franco: artists whose successes in one venue seemingly opened up other venues that might not necessarily have been justified.

But here’s the thing, the only reason we’re uncomfortable with rappers claiming a literary mantle is because we want those old categories to maintain a kind of legitimacy and exclusivity. Saul Williams has a book ofpoems that’s essentially the liner notes to one of his albums, but in that comparison, we miss out on what’s unique about the audio tracks and what’s unique about the page. Of course, if James Franco has taught us anything (and there's no telling if he has), it's that chasing the interesting can look a lot like goofing off or mocking your audience. I think both Franco and Dessa are self-aware experimenters in paripatetic production and while I wouldn't necessarily say one is better than the other (Dessa's better) or that one is smarter (Dessa's smarter), I am comfortable saying Dessa provides a more serious, aggressive, and expansive kind of experimentation.  Dessa is working through the limits, tensions, and possibilities of cultural production. As she transcends those boundaries, so might she also represent one of the first transcendent figures in a media landscape that will ultimately reward the kinds of experimentation that disregards what is common for what is newly possible.