PREVIEW
MICHELLE SHOCKED
Monday, November 5
MacEwan Hall Ballroom (U of C)
If the gentleness of Go Dub, Michelle Shocked's newest album, seems to lull you along, waiting for a voice to expand, for something more to happen, well, she would tell you that's part of the process. Splitting her time between New Orleans and L.A. with her husband of a decade, Shocked has been spending her energy gaining awareness of her cycle's ties to the moon, her ripening artistic mastery and how to beat the music industry at its own slavery game. And if that means she hasn't been putting out an album every 18 months, so be it.
"I was told some pretty blatant things when I started out that I know were wrong for me and my audience. It's taken time to develop my contradiction to that conventional wisdom. I was told (to) go as far and as fast as you can with your first album, and it's all downhill from there. I was told that all (the public) are interested in is debuts and ingenues, that they don't have the attention to follow an artist as they develop a career. But you and I know that's not true in life, much less in art. You should get better if you're doing it right."
Shocked first gained international attention as a 24-year-old singer when a fan made a recording of her and eventually sold it to Polygram as The Texas Campfire Tapes in 1986.
"I was recording on a Sony Walkman when I was 24 years old, and the man took that recording to England and made a bootleg record from it that he then contacted me about later after it was obvious that it was going to be doing too well to keep it a secret."
After the man made the deal with Polygram behind Shocked's back, she got some advice from Nancy Griffith, a well-respected singer-songwriter who told her that the ownership of her work was the most valuable thing that Shocked would ever have.
"My songs are my natural resources. Record companies promise you a lot of money up front, but what they don't tell you is that it's basically your own money. They basically buy your rights, but I didn't sell them. It was more like a period of indentured servitude."
Her time with the label lasted seven years, and when she left, she left with ownership of her recordings and songs.
"I didn't sell my birthright for a bowl of porridge," Shocked says. "The music business is a microcosm of our society as a whole. In one sense, the rights that I was fighting for are pretty advanced, as intellectual property rights. In another sense, they are as old as slavery and sharecropping. It's the imbalance of (power) between people who have money and people who own labour. The music business was set up for 55-year-old men to exploit 22-year-old boys."
Shocked's biblical allusion to the bowl of porridge may be a nod to her re-awakening spirituality. She recently began attending a church with a predominantly black congregation because of its fantastic musical draw.
"They say that 11 a.m. Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America because black folk worship at black churches and white folk at white churches. Wait a minute, y'all claim to be Christians and you can't even worship together? Music is a comfort to those who worship, so I've seen music function in the most crass sense and in the most holistic sense."
Exploring spirituality through the black church is only one path Shocked is taking to inner peace.
"I have a pretty extreme month because my cycles are such that I'm so sensitive to the waxing and waning of the moon. My greatest desire for peace in my life is to have a consistency, and not have a great day one day and the very next day be in the abyss of despair. That's been a real struggle for me."
The singer has found that small changes, like a natural diet and daily swim, even out her roller-coaster ride. She describes floating on top of the water with the rippling sunlight as being like flying. She meditates, she says, swimming through liquid air.
If all this seems a little too serious, one only needs to hear Shocked speak about how being raped made her focus too greatly on feminist issues, until she realized she was becoming self-absorbed.
"I try not to be so selfish or self-centred, to take a little pain and realize it's good for growth. If you can do it, you are like a fruit – a full cycle of birth and death with maturity. Blah blah..." she says, dissolving into a soft laugh which surprisingly contains traces of her southern U.S. accent. And as for the Buddhist advice to live only in the now to dissolve your problems?
"Now is a nice place to visit, but would you want to live there?" From the other end of the phone, that alluringly soft laughter echoes once again. |
