Supa sista!
Richard Burnett
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Straight-shooting multitalented performer Ursula Rucker is for everybody
photo: Simba Madziva, courtesy Voix d'Amériques
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Philly hip-hop poet Ursula Rucker celebrates black history at Montreal's Festival Voix d'Amériques
Famed poet and Philadelphia native Ursula Desiré Rucker cannot believe she has never been invited to perform at an event during Black History Month. Ever. Until now.
"It's the weirdest thing," says Rucker, who headlines Montreal's internationally renowned Festival Voix d'Amériques next week. "Growing up, my family joked it was the shortest month of the year. But today, for me, [Black History Month] is all year long."
Rucker shot to fame in 1994 after she nervously stood before an audience on open-mic night at Zanzibar Blue in Philly, the City of Brotherly Love most folks these days call "Killadelphia."
The city is still home to famed songwriters Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff of Philadelphia International Records, which bequeathed the world Philly soul. Philadelphia also gave us American pop icons Bill Cosby and Patti LaBelle. Today it's the hometown of such hip-hop acts as Beanie Sigel, The Roots and Rucker's old friend Jill Scott.
It was Rucker's gig at Zanzibar Blue that led her to Amir "Questlove" Thompson of the Grammy-winning The Roots. "Amir asked me three times for a poem at the end of [their] male hip-hop album[s]," says Rucker, who graduated from Temple University with a degree in journalism, becoming one of the architects of Philadelphia's poetry revival before slams and Russell Simmons's HBO TV series Def Poetry Jam made headlines.
In many ways, Rucker has become the hip-hop nation's Maya Angelou - if Angelou's words were stamped "Explicit lyrics."
But Rucker isn't
R-rated so much as she is brutally frank about issues ranging from womanhood and slavery to love and politics. For instance, right now many blacks are deeply insulted by John Cameron's movie Avatar, basically a racist piece of shit white folks have made the top-grossing film of all time.Avatar is yet another "white messiah" fable - much like the films A Man Called Horse, Dances With Wolves and At Play in the Fields of the Lord - and Rucker is having none of it.
"The most important thing I try to impress upon my children each and every day is to be who you are even if others think differently," says Rucker, a married mother with four sons aged 5 to 15. "We went to see Avatar and it was the same old story as Pocahontas: The oppressor comes in and makes everything better. I don't Facebook much, but I had to post something! My 11-year-old son was like, 'Must you always be ranting about something!' But if I don't speak my mind, then that's not me!"
Rucker also speaks loudly and strongly against reggae-dancehall lyrics advocating violence against gay people. "It breaks my heart because I really love reggae," says Rucker, referencing her colleague Staceyann Chin, out New York poet and Jamaican-American political activist, as one of many examples that the opposite exists. "Homophobia is ingrained in [Jamaican] culture. But I do not accept it. Those lyrics are not cool."
Rucker, who has transfixed audiences from Tokyo to Capetown ("South Africa was the first time I experienced true call-and-response - I was in tears!"), says she won't stand for sexism either. "When I'm the only chick on the bill, I know I have to bring it. I have to represent... And if shit ain't right at sound check and they're disrespecting me, I'll flip into diva mode."
For many white folks, that clenched fist basically means black power. But Rucker is for everybody. In fact, she grew up in a mixed-race family in Philly.
"My mom is Italian and my dad is black from Virginia," Rucker says. "Growing up was pretty cool except when I was really young. I had issues with it. When I found out everyone else's mom wasn't white, I started feeling strange. Sometimes when I was little I'd be embarrassed to go out [with my mom]. Then when I hung out with my mom's family, one of my aunts would use the term 'coloured.' They were old-school."
"But then in college I got revolutionary. Being light-skinned in the 1980s was interesting in America." Those years helped shape Rucker and her sweet "song-speak" on her landmark 2001 album Supa Sista before she wowed audiences at the 2005 Amnesty International Australia Freedom Festival. Still, after all these years, Ursula Desiré Rucker has yet to headline a Black History Month event back home in America.
Which is why she is so looking forward to being the guest of honour at the Festival Voix d'Amériques here in February.
"Being a person of mixed race isn't an issue for me [anymore] - I'm so comfortable with who I am now. I'm proud of both [my racial heritages] but," Rucker says with typical fire, "I lean [more] to being black in America because that's where I'm needed most."
Ursula Rucker
Solo at La Sala Rossa, Feb. 5, 8:30 p.m.
In Body and Soul 7 at La Sala Rossa, Feb. 6, 8:30 p.m.
Festival Voix d'Amériques, Feb. 5-12
www.fva.ca
