Dessa does Doomtree proud

Is there anything this MC, author, spoken word artist, and teacher can't do?

By Dana Raidt
Published: March 7th, 2010 | 10:00pm

For Dessa, every subject is fair game. From the universal (destructive relationships) to the uncomfortable (narrowly avoiding a tryst with a married male friend), the MC/spoken word artist/author leaves no human experience untouched. Though Dessa’s songs are highly personal, the listener can’t help but relate. She isn’t consciously trying to appeal to your emotions, nor is she out to break your heart. Dessa just calls them like she sees them.

“I don’t feel like my music is highly charged or [that] I’m trying to tug on the listener’s heartstrings,” she says on the phone from California. “I guess it’s hard for me to know what I’m actually emoting.” Whether or not the heartstrings are affected, one thing is for sure: Dessa’s voice candidly narrates the landscape of the heart and mind: tragedy, love, disappointment, and the human experience.

The story goes that it was through a foray into slam poetry in 2002 that Dessa (born Margret Wander) met artists like Sage Francis, MC Yoni, and Omaur Bliss. She helped form hip-hop group Medida and eventually was introduced to the members of Minneapolis hip-hop collective Doomtree, who (unbeknownst to Dessa at the time) happened to be her next-door neighbors. From there, Dessa joined Doomtree and quickly established herself as an MC.

Along with fellow Doomtree member P.O.S., Dessa embarked on the Every Never Is Now Tour in February. It is there that the 28-year-old is finally gaining respect for her performance, which includes songs off her 2010 debut solo album, A Badly Broken Code. Every Never Is Now is Dessa’s first national tour, and it’s also her longest.

“I’ve finally found my stride [on the tour],” she says. “At first I wasn’t sure how to fit in with these high-octane, energetic performers.”

Never one to forget her roots in the spoken word scene, Dessa happily embraces the grey area she calls “the overlap between poetry and hip-hop.” While P.O.S.’s solo work takes the hip-hop core of Doomtree and adds hyper-punk rock elements, Dessa’s solo songs are subtle and unassuming slice-of-life vignettes. Her flawless rhymes and the Doomtree-esque samples are still there. But musically, A Badly Broken Code is (like Dessa) eclectic without being scattered. “The Chaconne” layers a piano ballad over hip-hop beats and evokes the baroque style after which it’s named. The poignant, a capella “Poor Atlas” (Dessa is also a founder of a capella group the Boy Sopranos) holds its own alongside the straightforward hip-hop of “Alibi.”

Regardless of Dessa’s intentions, the emotional reactions to A Badly Broken Code speak for themselves, with “heartbreaking” and “bittersweet” among the most common descriptors. But it’s not because she’s a woman that her music automatically strikes such an emotional chord. Dessa is an equal-opportunity storyteller and her lyrics could describe the tragedy and joy of anyone’s life, female or male. In fact, to her and the rest of the Doomtree crew, being the only female member of a hip-hop group in a world where the genre is still largely considered a boys’ club “couldn’t be any less of a factor.”

”Within Doomtree, [being a woman] has never been a variable. But outside of Doomtree – yeah,” she says.

Doomtree is known in the Minneapolis scene for its democratic nature and its regard for DIY and cooperative ethics. Dessa takes care of much of the local publicity herself and says the group usually brainstorms what projects it can take care of itself before hiring out things like press releases or radio promotion. Members’ solo releases always feature other collective members, and group and solo albums (including A Badly Broken Code) are released under the Doomtree label. As was Dessa’s 2009 book, Spiral Bound, a mostly poetry and nonfiction-based collection of her writing. She says she’s slowly working on the follow-up to the book and is thinking about branching out into fiction writing.

“I like fiction,” she says. “But I’m also aware of the fact that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. …Sometimes [when trying to write fiction], it’s like, ‘my imagination’s broken’.” But she is an expert on music, and as a teacher at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul (she’s taking the semester off to tour), Dessa is sharing the Language of Rap and Spoken Word with a whole new generation of students.

“[The school] does a great job of keeping working musicians on staff,” she says. “Even being in the teachers’ lounge…that’s an amazingly fertile lunchtime.”

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Dessa MySpace page

Doomtree Records