Angel Haze ist indigener Abstammung und heißt eigentlich Raee‘n Wahay. Sie wuchs im extrem religiösen Umfeld der apostolischen Kirche in Michigan auf, welche sie selbst als kultische Gemeinschaft beschreibt. Mit 16 Jahren verlässt sie ihre Familie und zieht alleine nach New York. Dort fängt Angel an Musik zu machen. In ihren Texten verarbeitet sie zu großen Teilen die traumatischen Erfahrungen, die sie in ihrer Kindheit und Jugend durchlebt hat. Mit der Single “New York“, welche ein Sample von Gil Scott-Herons “NY is Killing Me“ beinhaltet, schafft sie den Sprung in die kommerzielle Musikwelt. Gerade tourt sie mit ihrem aktuellen Album “Back To The Woods“ – die Chance haben wir ergriffen und uns auf ein Interview vor der Show getroffen.
Eine Review zu Angels „Back To The Woods“ gibt es hier.
Interview: Annina Bachmeier &
Martin Willibald Meisl
Fotos: Alexander Gotter
The Message: In „Impossible“ you rap about the difficulties of being black in America, about ���whitewashing“ your blackness. Can you tell us more about that?
Angel Haze: White America wants to whitewash my blackness, ‚cause they have no better agenda. I think that in America blackness is still relatively new, I am afraid – I don’t know anything about being overseas, but like the shit that we go through, the shit that Miley Cyrus goes through is completely different and that’s really difficult for me.
The HipHop scene in Detroit is pretty male dominated. How did you get your foot in the door?
I think men are boring. It’s crazy that there is such a variety of boring men rappers. I rap better than 80% of these dudes and I’m being modest. It‘s just boring that you cannot get that exposure, because it’s always men, men, men. If you sell sex as a woman than maybe, but it‘s not about talent. I think it’s lame that the industry is not a talent based thing, but about how well you sell yourself. It sucks.
You say about yourself that you identify as queer, what’s your definition of that?
I try not to allow any sort of label to be switched on me, I don’t identify with being a female and I don’t identify with being a man, I just identify with being myself and I experience shit in my own way. When I am making music it’s about who I am, it has no gender and I think that’s what’s cool about it. If you look at my fans, dudes or chicks or transgender people, they can connect with me because at some point I have been transparent enough as a person. I think it sucks to be a female rapper, because you don’t get the same account as if you were a man, but I think I have done well to disregard any sort of femininity or masculinity. Because for me it’s just about being who I am 24/7, that’s it.
What kind of problems did you have in the past with identifying as being queer?
I have been this way since I was young, it was worse when I was a child, like the worst. I think when people close to you, from whom you seek approval from, don’t give it to you, the world does not matter at all and so for me it’s kind of easy to be out here and be myself. I mean, it gets kind of weird when people ask me about it, because I always have been living that way. I don’t think about myself as anything other than an experience. I am brought here to do whatever the fuck I am doing with the world and with my fans and with my music and with art. And that’s what I see myself as.
In contemporary society it’s kind of difficult to find your very own personal identification – from the beginning, you are either treated as male or female without any question. How did you experienced that, how did you find out?
Yeah, the roles are so tight, it is really forced on you. It is either pink or blue, you grow up, you play with Barbies or you play with action figures. But I never knew this shit – my mum never let me have toys. I think that’s why I don’t identify with anything, but I also think it came my way with experience and learning. I think we are in such a time where everybody is becoming so emerged with different faces what a person can be like, this guy for example (points at my colleague Martin) could open his mouth, no offense, and be more of a girl than I am and I would not be able to dispute that, because I don‘t know your personal life and I don’t know your struggles and I don’t know where you come from. Everything is inscribed into the person, you find your way through when you open up, when you allow yourself to feel who you truly are or what you truly are and I don’t see any problems with that. I think that’s dope. Fuck gender, that’s not a thing, scientifically that’s not a thing. It’s ridiculous.
You speak about the problems with your mother pretty often. After all what happened, do you wish to have a connection with her?
Yes I do – every fucking day of my life. I am only learning and experiencing family through friendship. I am 23 years now and I have been through so much shit with my mom, that it seems almost impossible that we could reconnect and by saying this I try to choose my words wisely. But I think the world is bigger for me and if she cannot understand or love whoever she gave birth to, that’s her own problem.
In interviews you said often, that „Dirty Gold“ kinda disappointed you.
No, I love it! People ask me all the time, what “Dirty Gold“ means to me and what it means compared to “Back To The Woods“. I cannot say that I value “Dirty Gold“ over “Back To The Woods“, but I value it so much, as without it I would not have gotten to make “Back To The Woods“. I think it was a situation that I was not completely comfortable with but it does not take away from the music. I mean I wrote that shit, every fucking credit on the album is Angel Haze, so I cannot distance myself from it. But I do not love it emotionally as much as I love “Back To The Woods“, cause I was free then. There was no one who told me what to write about. It was just me.
There are a lot of artists who struggle with mental health issues, not only musicians. You too talk about your problems with mental health pretty freely. To what extent do these issues affect your art?
I didn’t realize until this past year that I was actually crazy. People are telling me that all the time and I am just like shut the fuck up – just because I am not doing what you want me to do. But I am actually crazy and I think my emotional instability helped my art a lot, because I can feel one way one day and the next day I can feel completely different about it and I am trying to learn to see those sorts of crippling defuncts as a thing that makes me better. Cause I don’t fight myself. I think a lot of times you get crazy cause you fight who you are truly and I don’t do that cause I was born that way and I just have to figure out how to live with it and flow with it. So yeah – it affects my work and it affects everything, like the quality of my person – sometimes I am a shit person and then sometimes I am great, but that’s just life.
Imagine yourself as not having any mental health issues. Where would you be now?
I would probably be making some real poppy shit, like happy shit. I wish I could even think about my brain as unbroken, but I think the more I accept myself, the lighter my load becomes with my music. My newer shit sounds like my brain is breathing instead of being strangled by demons and that’s great. I love that shit cause it means I grew.
