Image courtesy of Simone Amelia Jordan.
SAJ: The first song I wrote was called ‘The Beat’. It went like ‘do you ever feel the beat when you’re walking down the street?’ It was very rudimentary. But I love to write, and I very quickly realised that writing rhymes may not be my forte, but writing other people’s stories was. You’ve been writing raps for a long time now, can you describe your methodology for writing verses?
LFtL: I don’t have a single methodology for writing verses. I was never taught how to write lyrics. I was self-taught. When I started out, I would imitate the flow, style, and vocabulary of the artists I was listening to at the time because I didn’t have an understanding of my own voice and how to go about articulating my story. By doing that, I learnt a lot and picked up a bunch of different ways to write that better suit me as an artist. Now I have a few different approaches for writing verses. It all depends on the song. With that said, I always start with a concept. Failing that, I have a notebook where I collect the random lines whenever they come to mind and then refer to them when I do have a concept to see if any of those lines spark further ideas.
When it comes to concepts, I’ll focus on themes or a certain feeling that I want the song to express. Once I have that as grounding then I’ll think about my verses as a journey. Each verse is a stage in that journey that work in relationship with one another. Sometimes they feed off of or add to one another. At other times, they are different perspectives of the same concept or feeling. From there, I have different approaches centre around playing with melodic and rhythmic ideas as well as actually composing the lyrics themselves. It’s an ever-evolving process where I’m always finding a new melodic idea or rhythm pattern and discovering phrases and lines that help me express how I feel. Speaking of writing, how did you find your way into journalism? Because that’s a big shift from writing raps.
SAJ: I didn’t come from a family of educated people, technically. I come from a very, very street-smart family and if they had been educated, they would absolutely be scholars, but I didn’t come from an academic family. I always loved school and I was drawn to journalism from about the third grade. I read a book called The Reporter and I was like: ‘this is it. This is what I want to do.’ So I was very clear on that.
On a deeper level, I believe I was drawn to journalism because I was always a very confident kid and I was always very forthcoming with what I like to do, what I wanted to do and the way I viewed the world. I would always raise my hand in class but much of that confidence was slowly taken away because confident kids aren’t always embraced. Many times, the teacher would overlook me and turn to another, quieter student for the answer. I could understand why they did that but that took away some of my confidence in class. So, I had to channel that confidence in another direction. I thought, ‘well, I’m not going to talk about myself then because, obviously, that intimidates you.’ I learned that at a very young age. Instead, I will ask you about yourself, your story and I’ll build your confidence up. That’s what set me on the path to being a storyteller.
LFtL: I like that. You’re most definitely a storyteller. One thing that’s common between a songwriter and a journalist is that they’re both inquisitive. They have to be in order to get beyond the surface. Do you consider yourself inquisitive by nature or is that something you worked on?
SAJ: I do consider myself naturally inquisitive, I think most women are, we’re nosy MFs. I just wanted to know more. I always wanted to be equipped with knowledge to be prepared for anybody’s line of questioning that may come at me in any way. I used to eat encyclopaedias for lunch basically. Remember the World Book Encyclopedia?
LFtL: Yeah.
S: Oh, my goodness, you would find me in that from day to night. So yeah, it’s a natural inclination, I believe.
LFtL: That approach is very much like battle rappers’ approach. Similarly, they always strive to be 10 steps ahead because as a battle rapper they have to be prepared for what’s going to come. That honed anticipation enables them to be ready with a response.
SAJ: That must be why I love battle rap. Speaking of which, how would you describe the synergy between slam poetry and hip hop?
LFtL: There’s that competitive element that’s common in both. And that competition pushes both the poet and the rapper to get better hop at their craft. There’s also the performative component. There’s drama and theatrics involved in both. It’s part of the experience of both slam poetry and hip hop. The performer is using a combination of their written word and the delivery of their lyrics to really bring the audience into their world. There’s also style, in that each performer in both slam poetry and hip hop will have their own style in terms of both writing and performance and that characterises or defines their work. Hip hop is more reliant on rhyming than slam poetry and more bound to rhythm given it’s usually written to a beat whereas in slam poetry, while both rhyming and rhythm are important, they’re much more fluid given that the beat the poet is writing to is an imagined, internal one that isn’t restricted by a certain tempo or time signature.
And since you mentioned it, confidence is key in both hip hop and slam poetry too. The performer has to have a level of confidence in themselves and their words in order to get behind the mic to share what they have to say. That’s another way I can relate to your journey. So much of your story is inspiring because of that confidence that you have. You weren’t afraid to take the first step to do something outside of the box or to be the first to do something. That’s a part of my journey too. To be the first in my family to take a creative route and specifically in music and in English. This wasn’t the expected path for me from both my family and even from the world around me. There hasn’t been many hip hop artists from the Sikh community. There definitely hasn’t been any in Australia before me. So, it was a path full of resistance, which is funny given that so much of my work to date has featured the theme of resistance, although a different kind of resistance, and resilience. It hasn’t been easy finding my way when there was no path laid out before me by someone who had been there and done that. Which is why your story is so interesting to me.
Tell us about your journey through university and the balancing of where you wanted to head with your aspirations as a journalist as well as being a part of the emerging hip hop culture in Australia. Were you the first person in your family to go to university?
SAJ: Yeah, I was the first person in my family to go to university straight out of high school. My dream was to do journalism at the University of Technology Sydney, which I did and I’m very proud of that. It was my first time in my whole life that I was mixing with people my age from very different backgrounds. So, my entire class was made up of young people from the Eastern Suburbs and the North Shore, and I definitely felt like an outlier in those classes but I also felt very proud, as I have through my whole career, to represent a certain segment of the population whose voices often go unheard. So, I remember one story, sorry, one time I was sitting next to a girl in class and she told me she had an elevator in their house.
LFtL: Damn … an elevator?
SAJ: I said: ‘you can’t be serious.’ She said: ‘yeah.’ And she lived in some suburb like Oyster Bay or something so fancy sounding. And I got back on the 461 bus to go back down Parramatta Road from UTS (University of Technology Sydney), and I just thought, ‘wow, for the first time I was coming into contact with affluent people.’ And it was good, it was great. College/university is the time for you to expand your horizons. So, it was the right time for me, I think, to have those experiences and have my eyes opened for the possibilities that are out there, but also, for what has been denied to a lot of people like us from single-parent families and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. So that was very interesting.
I remember, watching a hip hop documentary called Basic Equipment in class and people marvelling: ‘Wow, this is happening in Sydney, this hip-hop scene?’ And I’m looking at them like ‘where am I?’ Because I would just head back to Burwood and people are rapping, or break dancing or going to under-18s parties, listening to hip hop. So that was my entry into two very different worlds.
