Jamila Woods Quotes
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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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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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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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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 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'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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I wish that more people, especially young people, were taught about self-love at a younger age.
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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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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 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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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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I read this book when I was young. It's about a black girl growing up in Heaven, Ohio. The cover has a black girl with clouds behind her. It was the first book cover I ever saw with a girl that looked like me.
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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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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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My art gets called political, as opposed to my intending it to be political. I think that's something that happens with black artists or marginalized voices trying to speak truth. Because there are things in the status quo to speak out against, speaking out against them will inherently be political.
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The beach is still a public place, and that's an amazing grace about Chicago. We have so many problems, but the water always stays. That inspires me and keeps me inspired about the city and keeps me hopeful.
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I'm interested in figuring out what freedom songs would sound like in 2016.
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My hope is that 'Blk Girl Soldier' is a freedom song for black women today who are fighting the macro- and microaggressions of daily life in our city/country/world.
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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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My mentors were very good.
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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 don't sound like other people. My voice isn't as loud and can't do certain things athletically.
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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 don't create from a place of me making art for art's sake, but wanting my work to actually do stuff... tangible things.