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Starr fishes and sea sponges >> The prefab gab of chunk-hoppeuse Kinnie Starr by MITSIKO MILLER
Somehow, it just feels like someone is trying to shove a big fat prefabricated belief down your throat. That kinda takes away all their credibility. Especially when you're supposed to be "interested in erasing lines that separate people in the mind, treating people fairly while trying to erase my own misconceptions." This is what Vancouver musician Kinnie Starr's bio constantly repeats in all possible ways. All these thoughts raced through my mind as I hung up the phone after interviewing Starr. For someone who sells herself as a politically aware, anti-tampon industry feminist musician, her arguments struck me as inarticulate and lacking in depth. If something is really important to you, you have to be able to explain why, right? Without all the generalizations. "In my own way," she says, "I want to see more women do their best. And accept their bodies, get past the social structure." She justifies this remark through personal experience. "I feel very limited by my physical appearance because I get bothered (by men) a lot. So I've learned to hate my body because it brings me trouble." Therefore, feminism has become an instrument "to become self-sufficient and emotionally stable." This must be what Paper magazine's Nora Burns was referring to when she wrote that Starr possessed a "righteous free thinking mixed with adolescent insecurity." During our conversation, Starr revealed herself to be dramatically spontaneous, even impulsive. This quality happens to be a dynamic and constructive instrument for her art. She likes to break musical barriers, blending different musical styles that don't naturally fit together: hip hop, spoken word, heavy alternative rock, dance hall, dub, old-school heavy blues, Stevie Wonder funk and folk. Even her lyrics are hybrids of languages. Kinnie Starr's voice raps to the rhythm of a brewed compound she calls "chunk hop." I asked if she considered what she does to be folk music. "Rap music is folk music, because it comes from, and is all about people and a community. Folk is all about people," she stated. She points out that hip hop loses its meaning when the music industry grabs hold of it. "Stuff gets urbanized when corporate industries kick in. So there's less substance, less meaning." Substance seems to be a big issue for Starr. "I strive for warmth and feeling in my music," she says. Even though she uses machines to craft some of her beats, she alters them to generate a less mechanical feel. "I want to give it a groove and escape from the frigid dryness of metronomic beats. I recorded in a little boathouse where the sound was very resonant. So the vocals, the guitar, the beats have a very warm feeling." Once again though, Starr's adolescent attitude shows through. "When men at a big studio found out that I wrote my own lyrics and music and produced my album, they couldn't believe it. It was an education for them to see me do everything myself." Starr might be surprised to find out that she's not the first woman to put a record together, nor the first person to deal with the majors' thick-skulled tampering. Despite Starr's apparent hostility toward the labels, she nonetheless signed with Mercury a year and a half ago, after the release of her first album, Tidy. Since then, Starr has been working hard on lyrics, beats and learning how to produce her own albums. "I'm not a skilled musician, and I need to learn a lot about things, like recording." Starr performs with Annabelle Chvostek, Pigeon-Hole, Alexis O'Hara, Alex Boutros and Kaarla Sundstrom at Jailhouse Rock, Friday, July 31, 8:30pm, $7
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There's one thing that really irritates me: people who complain and, worse yet, denigrate others by making sweeping, simplistic statements. For instance: "I feel that the pop culture represents women as divas," or "Most women don't know that there exist alternatives to using tampons, like sea sponges "