I'm Coco, for those of you who don't know me,
which I imagine is about 98.97% of you.
I'm a rapper, a musician, a screenwriter
and visual artist.
But I've spent the last few months
at the University of Hawaii,
where I've been researching gentrification in the Pacific,
notably urban communities
and how that starts to transmogrify and distort urban...
urban stuff at the Center for Pacific Island Studies.
I'm Maori and German-Samoan.
I made my name in underground rap and punk back home
before diversifying my bonds
and moving into comics and screen work,
and a wide range of other oppressive,
male-dominated industries. So I've a pretty sophisticated
palette when it comes to patriarchy.
The reason I believe I'm here to speak with this audience
and why I'm in this really surreal, mind-blowing situation
and really nervous... is because I believe that those
traditionally excluded from the jaundiced
music business template can now be the key figures
to restore music's holistic potential...
from how it's recorded, right through to how one releases it.
Music traditionally runs on a business model
at odds with the ancient and socially therapeutic values
of music.
And I don't think artists today should have to hide
or water down their cultural practices and world view
in the name of "white professionalism."
I don't think women and fem leaders should have to put out
outcome-driven thinking before more intuitive,
collaborative processes.
And at this point in history where abuses of power
are a daily conversation, I think we can reclaim it
by forging a more community-based recording culture.
So... I've found, from moving in academic circles, that a lot
of people would rather listen to a man with a degree
in Woman Studies before they listen to a woman,
so I can unpack my discography and qualifications
with you later but I've got 15 minutes, so I'm gonna
just get to it. You can ask me who the hell I think I am later.
So, do we have the guts to put mentoring,
increased access, authentic equality and sovereignty
before hit factory, exclusivity mentality?
These are the things that the recording history
often hinges on, so this is the question I've got.
I think we're reaching a social point in the "free world"
where the farcical aspects of capitalism and leadership,
now everyone basically realizes things are fucked up,
not just the marginalized,
not just those who are regularly struggling with equality.
Even the people who are just merely privy, or even
benefiting from those systems
can see that those systems are no longer sustainable.
And our livelihood will suffer if we don't start radically
thinking, which I personally don't think is radical at all,
but I'm gonna go on.
My entry-point into this conversation, as it will be
for a lot of you, is through music, through artistry.
That is my weapon of choice.
So we're often given, "Artists are the mirror of society"
as kind of a shtick, and I think if this is the case
we need to really clean the mirror immediately
and understand it's not just about empowering jams
and diversity aesthetics that we present to the world,
we need to actually set an example of...
how works get produced, we need to be leading
in genuine frameworks of what is possible.
So I've always maintained that the music industry
is a people-based situation
that often gets presented to me as a mysterious machine:
"It's just the way things are, we'll never quite understand it."
But it is actually just comprised of people like you and me,
and I think it's always been at the front of
destabilized markets, and re-imagined definitions of
success.
So we almost have to formally take that responsibility
as an industry to do that.
Back home I come from a cut of predominantly
Maori and Pacifica Polynesian creatives.
So for me, bringing an indigenous way of seeing to my work,
even if the work is not seen as being explicitly...
native and nature. And I was just saying I had an interesting
conversation with an American man in the Midwest
who was surprised to learn that Maori have the internet.
And we do.
So it's not radical to me, it's not until I'm in a professional
environment, which is to say, Eurocentric environments
that fetishize the plight of the individual,
that reward technical over emotional and spiritual practice...
that guards its resources for the worthy or the culturally
valuable, that I see what a different paradigm
and language I speak, what a different way that I live.
So, in indigenous cultures, particularly in the Pacific,
you should eat together, you should learn each other's
personal and familial journeys before you embark
on building something special, this to me is logical.
I find those who think a simple practice like this is
excessive,
often thinking of an audience engagement all the time, but
they don't see the potential and community engagement,
how something was created could heal and transform
those who made it and those who consume it,
which I think is the creative process equivalent of acting
local and thinking global.
So, I'm often asked, Who is allowed in the booth?
The studio culture allow wahine, which is Women,
and LGBTI to compose and work at high levels of industry,
because as we can see from the revealing influx of
women of different racial and religious backgrounds
that have recently been elected this week in this country,
there's an understanding that the laser-like focus
of someone directly affected by an issue
are the ones best trusted to articulate a problem.
So conversations of... progression and new waves
and music's constant hunger for a revolutionary sound
I think can only be associated by inclusion and taking those
two commonly ostracized and involving them.
And I don't see this involvement as a charitable act, either.
Our world view is something you need right now
to pop-culturally survive, we know it and so do you, so
I'm not suggesting you hire a girl Friday with an ethnic twist
you need to go beyond that. I'm suggesting you elect and
incorporate people
at all levels of their music making
process and give them leadership opportunities. Trust them.
If they don't have the confidence then we should
be mentoring
so they're able to practice and express their talent
and give us access to the re-imagined system
inherently in their muted DNA.
So this will then be seen in the lyricism,
the aesthetics, the narratives of not just the story-telling
but in the oral-audio plain too.
We'll see new possibilities of structuring the music itself,
and I really don't think that's an exaggeration.
Pop culture has been at the gate keeping mercy
of white male understandings of taste
for the last few centuries at least, and this isn't a secret,
I hope it's not a secret to you.
Because the cats out of the bag, if it is.
And if you think that doesn't distort the ideologies
surrounding definitions of good taste, high quality,
respectable processes, industry standards,
what is technically gifted
then you need to be incorporating minorities to your
practice, which... and even the semantics of minorities,
these are majorities with a colonial avatar,
we'll go into that another time,
And the same way you may need exposure
to these perspectives
because they offer new ways of seeing,
which are often as old as the hills,
they've just literally been suppressed or cropped
out of view.
So you can look beyond a pretty voice on the hook
and start thinking about who are we allowing
to create the cultural canon right now, and amplifying those
who could politically transform this climate.
It goes beyond the superficiality of diversity initiatives,
which are very popular. It needs to be systemic,
it needs to be in our music criticism,
in our engineering rooms, in our music videos,
in our management, within every single facet
of the industry, so for me personally...
I feel a responsibility, as a visible artist in my home country,
to pull resources because I know first-hand
how painful it can be to not have access to opportunities
that you know you inherently deserve if it weren't for your...
signify here.
I think I started off this talk with my Maori introduction
because it grounds me,
as well as it being a decolonial thing, it connects me
to the grander fabric of which I'm just a small part,
my history, the people who made me.
So this helps me imagine this room as less of
an industry thing, and that connects me in more of a
potential community member.
This makes it accessible and kinder to someone like me
who has a fairly precarious cultural cache
when it comes to the biz, you know.
So, as an indigenous wahine
who occasionally creates shards of culture
I advocate for wahine-centric leadership
because I see the positivity it creates.
I lead from a place of intuition. I prioritize the process.
I want both collabers and the audience
to have a connection and a memory with me or the work,
and if I can't give them that
I can at least give them insight into my stories,
something they may not have known about.
Because in trusting my leadership, seeing my codes,
my semantics which create my narratives,
and narratives upholster my entire reality.
So coming from a culture that prizes oratory tradition,
story-telling to me isn't really a joke.
Even if the end result is, Oh, baby, you drive me crazy."
I know that a lot of love went into that
and a lot of thought, at least.
There's an idea that women do a lot of emotional labor
or invisible labor in the creative process
and I just call that 'labor' because I see the perspectives
of other people getting dressed down often
and it's very real, it's a very valuable input that an industry
infested with misogyny and constant gentrification
needs to treat as real labor.
So, in conversations of re-imagining what is possible
for the future of music, I think it's very tangible,
I think it's very simple and it's very practical.
You recruit and you genuinely listen, not just performatively,
you include those who've had their voices, their bodies
and their land stolen or legislated to death.
I think it's the least the music community can do.
Thank you.
