Jamila Woods Quotes
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I have a band called M&O. We were working on our first album in 2011 or 2012. We were looking for people to collaborate with, and I met Chance through a Young Chicago Authors poetry slam.
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I always loved singing because I grew up in a very musical family. My mom wasn't able to do music professionally because her parents wanted her to get a 'real job,' but she played guitar.
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I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.
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Part of our pedagogy is, you report on what's going on in your neighborhood and your city.
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I'm nearsighted, in part, because I would read past my bedtime in the dark. I didn't want my mom to see that I was still awake.
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Naming something, putting it on record, in a lyric, feels like affirming people. Ideally, that's what politicians should want to do: to put laws or policies in place that speak to people's experiences, to make them feel heard.
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My mentor made me say a poem over and over. 'Stop! That's not your voice. Start again.' I was sobbing by the end, but it drilled into my head that my voice is important.
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It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.
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The good things about Chicago save me on a daily basis, like getting to work with my students, seeing a beautiful part of the city, or seeing the people that I love.
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That's important for artists to remember: some people would like to be spokespeople, but others would like their art to speak.
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My mentors were very good.
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I wish that more people, especially young people, were taught about self-love at a younger age.
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I think a lot of people, in general, have whatever mechanisms they have in order to go through the day. For me, I do just literally have post-it notes and other little messages to strengthen me on hard days, or just on regular days, to remind me - to remind ourselves - of our dopeness.
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My entrance to music was singing gospel in church, and to hear that gospel language in a hip-hop song was cool.
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I've seen Chance and the Social Experiment build their own careers in the way that's most authentic to them.
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It's important to me that there's not just one story told about our city. 'LSD' is an ode to Chicago, a song for the complicated love I have for my city.
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When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.
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I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.
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I really value what Closed Sessions is doing to build the Chicago music scene and am excited to partner with them for my first solo project.
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I started writing poems on a Xanga page. I always loved writing. I also had a Deviant Art page, actually, because my crush had one, too.
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I don't sound like other people. My voice isn't as loud and can't do certain things athletically.
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The lake was always my orienting point when my dad was teaching me how to not get lost. The lake is east, so you'll always know that. It's a weird thing where you can kind of feel where you're at in Chicago, and when I was downtown, I was like, 'Oh, it feels more open over here. That must be east.' It felt like a little secret thing.
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I hold strongly to my identity as a Chicago artist and want to do whatever I can to participate in creating a strong community here so that artists don't feel pressure to move somewhere else to succeed.
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I don't create from a place of me making art for art's sake, but wanting my work to actually do stuff... tangible things.