It’s a DJ tool now.
I heard it last weekend!
Uh huh. People are trying to find the highest quality file of that clip they can. And use it in ways that no one has before, and I live for that. I’m a DJ tool that’s so New York. So, Carry Nation is doing a new compilation...
The new Nervous comp?
Yeah, on Nervous. They commissioned one of the tracks by Eli Escobar with my voice on it. I’m so happy with it because I just let Eli do Eli. He knows me, he knows my community, he’s from the community. Listen, I don’t want to oversaturate myself with my voice going back and forth, giving stamps of approval, but for Eli, it was an easy choice.
It was the fourth or fifth night in a row that the door had been that crazy on a three-day weekend. At the beginning of that night, the DJs at APT were like, “you know, we just wanna capture this moment so can we put this microphone on you?” And my hair was huge that night so they just kinda hid it in my hair out of my way. Within an hour I forgot the microphone was even there.
So you forgot you were being recorded?
I completely forgot after an hour or so. I was just doing my job. I went into auto-pilot. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking; my thoughts, my taste, my curation had just become so automatic at that point.
That recording has a cyclical pattern of popularity. Someone new must have put it in their set or relaunched it by sharing it and now it’s a gag all over again. Every three years it has a moment. People start coming up to me all of a sudden like, “Hey, have you heard that thing of you at the door?” And all I say is “Of course I have.” Then a few days later, “Hey girl, have you heard that recording of you at the door?!” So it stays current. Or as Kevin Aviance says, “curnt.” Cunt and current.
You know it has almost 15,000 plays on Soundcloud now?
Oh, no I did not know that. Oh, come through honey! That’s so fab.
Yeah, it’s really made the rounds.
And it’s made the rounds in a way that different groups of people discover it at different times. It comes in waves, like I said. People find it, they breathe new life into it. So that clip sprinkles its life throughout the progression of time in New York City. The way it has become a part of the lore and legacy and lineage of culture here, I’m really happy to be a part of that.
Have you ever thought about the ways house music lends itself to your vision of self-expression? What makes house music fit into the way you process the world and your place within it?
It’s got soul. It’s got soul. It’s got soul. House music has soul. House music comes from a black form of sound. It is not only for black people; its root though, is from soul. And soul is a black form of expression. Other people have learned how to express it, but that is what we know how to do. It’s a celebration. It can sometimes be melancholic; it can sometimes be joyful, but house music is always a celebration. Period.
I didn’t know house music existed until I came to New York City. I loved songs as a kid that I later found out were house, but I had no idea what that genre meant, or where it came from, or why it would mean so much to me in the future. Now, when my favorite house tracks come on, my pageantry and my performative nature comes out and no one can say shit to me. I’m not doing a show for you, I’m doing a show for me.
House from the 80s, 90s, 2000s — they all have a different sound depending on the technology that was available at the time. The decks changed, the synthesizers changed, the computers changed. I dance differently to each era of house. 80s house, and disco before that, is where it gets really performative for me. That was such a black sound and, you know, white men of the time couldn’t take it, especially straight ones. They had to be like, “Fuck disco, I hate it!” Well, honey, that’s ‘cause y'all didn’t dance! You had no soul, you couldn’t connect to it, of course y’all hated it. You’re not having a conversation, you’re trying to devastate the sound. When that whole backlash happened, it wasn’t a surprise to black folks. Of course those white men couldn’t take it.
Really, when I dance, it’s about me being in contact and conversation and connection with the ancestors. It’s about being seen from their point of view in the sky and the stars, so I don’t have time to dance in a way that’s going to make myself tiny or small. House music allows me to connect with that, to make me feel larger than myself.