[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and on we go with another conversation about a Grammy nominee's work. Let's hear a little from Aja Monet's spoken word album, When The Poems Do What They Do.

[MUSIC - Aja Monet: I Am]

I am a flowerpot sitting on the subway platform

Dreaming of a Southern sky

I am the Southern sky

Bruised hues of blues and inner city with an oceanfront view

A holy ghost tongue possessed between the pews

Sleepless in the twilight

A vision board invisible to eyesight

Loose hips humming under summer porch lights

I'm the djembe drum

Rhythms spun between love-drunk knees

Alison Stewart: That was a bit of the track, I Am, from Aja Monet's record, When The Poems Do What They Do, which is up for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album at this year's Grammys on Sunday. In 2007, at just 19 years old, Aja Monet became the youngest Grand Slam poetry champion in Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her 2018 debut poetry collection titled My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter received an NAACP Image Award nomination.

Throughout her now Grammy-nominated album, Monet touches on themes such as Black liberation, love, harm, and joy, subjects that factor prominently in her work as a community organization. When Aja Monet joined us last May for a listening party, after When The Poems Do What They Do first came out, I started by asking her what theme she wanted to tackle on her debut record.

Aja Monet: The album is really a reflection of years of work as a poet. It really comes in the legacy new tradition of poets who came before me who made records. There were many poets who had made records before. I think that history has been really erased from the music industry. We think about Amiri Baraka, Jane Cortez, Sekou Sundiata, Gil Scott-Heron, the list goes on and on.

For me, it wasn't so much about needing to come to the album with a theme, as much as it was how do I reflect the years of writing poems, and being a performer who, as always, saw what I do in some form of fashion, an extension of music and blues and soul. I wanted to reflect the years of work in a really good way, and I wanted it to feel live. I wanted it to feel like a live album where people were in the room with us experiencing the poems in the movement of them.

Alison Stewart: What do you know about making an album that you didn't know before you started?

Aja Monet: Ooh. [laughs] I learned a lot. I've helped a lot of artists over the years, and I've been very supportive of other people in their process of making records, so I know. I was familiar with the record-making process, but this was really unique in the sense that, one, it was COVID, it was the middle of lockdown. There was an air of, I think, about being among each other as musicians and as performers. There was this sacredness of really appreciating and valuing what it was like to perform together again after a year or two of really being away from the thing that you feel called to that is your purpose, and so there was that.

Then there was just the awareness that recording is its own unique, special experience where you're not necessarily in front of an audience, so you don't have that same engagement. You have to bring that spirit into the room. It's really important to have good engineers. Having a great engineer is, as you know, recording every day, but having people who really, really understand what sound is and what it is to document sound and archive good sound, that's a whole other world that I really became fascinated with.

Alison Stewart: I want to play another track from the album. This one is called-- my glasses on. Sorry about that. This one is called Why My Love from Aja Monet.

[MUSIC - Aja Monet: Why My Love?]

My love be a front line

My love be a fighter

A shade that sisters and saves

My love survived the middle passage

Waded the waters

My love be grassroots

Organizes movements, the birds, the bees

My love be butterflies beaming

My love be indigenous, ocean-wide, sky deep

My love listens to the land

All natural, no preservatives

My love be homemade from scratch

Scribbled handwritten notes, adoration

My love be scripture

Be ritual, baptism, revival

A cathedral built from bare hands

A Taj Mahal, all the temples

My love creates new ways to worship

Alison Stewart: My guest is Aja Monet. That began as a list poem?

Aja Monet: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What is the process of taking a list poem and making it a piece of music? Is it easier? Is it different than other poems?

Aja Monet: No. I think that as a poet, I guess, in the tradition of Black radical tradition of making poetry, we are sonic beings. We understand that what we're doing is sound as much as it is language, and I guess sound is language, and language is sound. For me, it was musical writing it. The way that I deal with words, I see words as sounds, as a capturing sound in some way, symbols of sound, and so it's really important to think about what words sound good together. As I'm writing, I'm also saying and speaking, and so I have a really big relationship to the oral tradition.

I think that when I'm making this poem, it wasn't any different. It was just also thinking about what is love, and what are the things that come up for me with love in a sentimental way, but also in a sonic and an emotional-- what are the things you want to hear someone say when you're talking about love, and what are the things that we neglect to acknowledge as a part of love as complicated as it is? That poem came, yes, as a list poem, but it was always musical because I think language is musical.

Alison Stewart: You should say that because sometimes, I'll write something or someone on my team will write something, and it's beautiful on the page, but when you say it out loud, it maybe doesn't have the same energy that you wanted it to have. Whereas when you read it, it's like, "Oh, wow. That's really something." When you say it out loud because we're in this oral, and oral [laughs] medium, you have to make sure that it sounds inviting. You have to make sure it sounds like a good question for the guests, that they can understand what you're saying. Whereas when you read it, you're like, "Oh, yes." When you hear it, it's different.

Aja Monet: It's also your energy that you bring to it. There are certain things that-- if they read the newspaper, they read the label off of the back of this Clorox disinfectant bottle. Then they could still make you be like, "Wow, I need to go buy that, or I need to use that." I think it's also about what you put into words, what energy you put into them that can get the other person, the listener, to really feel and resonate with what you're saying because it's all vibration at the end of the day.

Alison Stewart: When did you first become aware of the blues?

Aja Monet: Ooh. Growing up with a single mom in New York City was a way to learn the blues, for sure. I think everybody knows the blues, just like everybody knows love and joy. They're human experiences that we have, where we feel sometimes at our wit's end, we feel like we can't go on, you don't see a way out or another possible avenue into a conflict or in a situation, and you want to give up. I think blues is the wailing of that exhaustion, the longing to connect, the longing to be connected.

I think I learned it very young, but it connects when you hear music that really touches on that, and gets you to express something that maybe you couldn't have expressed before. I think of everything great in American music comes from the blues. The blues is probably the greatest invention we've ever had as American people, as a culture. I think really honoring that the blues, you can find the blues in almost any song coming out of this country.

Really, the blues is African if you think about really the first blues, [laughs] that African people sang on the shores of this land. I think the blues is integrated in so much of the music we hear in hip-hop, in R&B, in soul. Tina Turner talked about someone that was a blues musician, and really took it into the extent of what we call rock and roll. The blues is the first rock and roll. It was the first time to rock the ship of this country. I think that if we trace any music in America, we would always find the blues.

Alison Stewart: My guest is poet and performer and musician, Aja Monet. The name of the album is When The Poems Do What They Do. We're having a listening party. Let's listen to another track from the album The Devil You Know. What would you want our listeners to listen for as we play a little bit of this, about a minute or so?

Aja Monet: Oh. The devil's in the details, and we should be paying attention because there's a lot that's happening right now that we need to be aware of, and we can always do something about it.

Alison Stewart: This is The Devil You Know.

[MUSIC - Aja Monet: The Devil You Know]

The devil you know

Taxes the air we breathe

Privatizes the water

Profits off homelessness

Strangles the land and injects hormones in animals

Rapes the people and rewards the rich

Charges you

For being sick

Sends a bill to your loved ones with interest when you die

Laughs at us coughing up our lungs

Gulping water, lead dripping off our chins

Buys private ships to the moon

Dancing with your demons

The selfish, individualistic part of you

The one who rather not have a foot on your neck

Or who shows up to the rally

After sipping sweet comfort at a corporate gig

That pays you just enough to die a little slower

Tired and community fostering care

How being black

Or woman

Or queer

Or trans

Or other

Or human

Or inhumane

Computer or code

Able-bodied, ten fingers, ten toes

Running

Or right or wrong

How none of it matters

Alison Stewart: That is Aja Monet. Who are we hearing? Who are the musicians on that track?

Aja Monet: Yes, we have some incredible musicians that were a part of this album. Christian Scott on trumpet. We have Samora Pinderhughes on keys. We have Luques Curtis on bass, we have Elena Pinderhughes on flute. I don't know if she's on this specific one. We have Weedie Braimah on djembe and congas as the band. I think that's everyone. Oh, Marcus Gilmore. How could I forget? Marcus Gilmore on drums. The legend himself, who's actually based here in New York, so yes.

Alison Stewart: Now, there's a short film that goes with The Devil You Know, about nine minutes. Did you storyboard that project? How did you begin to try to figure out what the imagery would be for that piece?

Aja Monet: Oh, that's such a good question. I was working with an incredible filmmaker named Kahlil Joseph in LA. He has this project called Black News and he's working on a film. He brought me in and asked me if I would like to be a part of the process, and in that process, I got to see his editing team. He has this crew called Parallax. I've always wanted to be a filmmaker or at least direct at some point. It was really beautiful to see that really, the film is made in the editing. Working with some of the editors, I knew that, at one point, I would love to use the process at which they use, which is, they work a lot with archival, and I'm an archival head. I'm always archiving things on--

Alison Stewart: Oh, really?

Aja Monet: Before it was a thing on social media, I was always saving videos, clips, things like that, photos.

Alison Stewart: You got a lot of folders?

Aja Monet: Yes. Oh my God. Think I'm a hoarder, but it's all archiving, I promise. Then when it came to doing this, we had documented the album-making process at Westlake Recording Studio in LA. We had film crew. Sister Vashni and Imani, they both came and filmed, but we didn't know for sure how we would use the footage. When I look at some of these songs, a lot of them, the power in them is the presence of the performance and the actual live performance. I knew I wanted to bring that for people. I knew I wanted people to experience that. It's also going to be part of a larger film. That edit that we put out for The Devil You Know was a sketch that we did that was for the vision of a feature-length film.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Aja Monet: We were experimenting, and one of the editors made that experimentation with some of the archival that we've been gathering. I had described the vision for this visual that I had, and he literally created the most accurate representation of what I saw in my head. Yes, it's a really powerful piece and I hope people really do get to enjoy it.

Alison Stewart: Our last track we're going to play is Yemaya. Am I saying that correctly?

Aja Monet: Yemaya, yes.

Alison Stewart: Yemaya. Tell us about it.

Aja Monet: Yemaya is the Orisha of the ocean. She's a feminine mother of all Orishas. She's a Orisha that's dear to my heart. For those who don't know Orishas, these are the gods, goddesses of the Afro-Cuban or Yoruba religion. This poem was a poem that is, for all intents and purposes, very true to an experience I had when in ceremony, and I knew that I wanted to do something, an homage to her. I want to shout out Jadelle, who's the incredible vocalist at the end who helps me conjure this praise of Yemaya.

[MUSIC - Aja Monet: Yemaya]

I went to see someone about my pain and he told me

That I had to meet the warrior at the edge of sea

"Do not carry anger that is not yours"

Says el brujo

And just like that

The sand is a quiet prayer rug under folded knee deep washed ashore

Rain passing the cheek

A lick of salt from the lip

Longing for the wide arms

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with poet, Aja Monet, about her Grammy-nominated spoken word poetry album, When the Poems Do What They Do. That is All Of It for this hour. We'll have more Grammy-nominated performances when we come back after the news, including New England newcomer, Noah Kahan, up for Best New Artist. We'll also hear about a nominated jazz album called Love in Exile. Stick around, there's more All Of It on the way.

 

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