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LifestyleTranscript
00:00I want to give opportunities to people that didn't have what I had. I know my
00:05journey and I know how hard it was and still is. My hope is that I left enough
00:11pavement so that that ride is just a little bit smoother, a little cuter, the
00:16hair still stays in place, the clothes are not tattered, and that would be a
00:23beautiful thing to have with my name is that I opened up doors for others.
00:28Hey everybody, I'm Dawn and I'm at my Essence shoot.
00:43I feel that I fully stepped into my own as an artist when I started my trilogy album
00:50and I had something to prove to myself. I had so much to say. Doing three albums and
00:56telling my story in a trilogy was pretty powerful and it began the journey of my
01:00independent career and I did it with a shoestring budget with nothing and it
01:04began the tenacity, the story of me, and really the artistry of how I would
01:09approach my art.
01:23As an independent artist what I've learned most about navigating this monster of an
01:27industry is um you have to believe in yourself in a way that is so aggressive and
01:35so tenacious and so unreal because the world will tell you you're not supposed
01:40to be there. So you have to know who you are in such a way that when there is a
01:44door that closes you can open a window. When there is a window that closes you can
01:48go through a crack and that hunger, that tenacity will steer you in your journey of
01:55your independent life.
02:00My futuristic approach to my art comes from Afrofuturism. I think people don't know how
02:07much African culture and our ancestors tell the story of futurism. I learned that through
02:12my culture in New Orleans, through the indigenous culture that we have here. Our stories are
02:17our own and most times people try to strip you of your stories first. But here in New Orleans
02:22we carry those stories. We tell these stories every day. Using tech to tell that story has
02:28been fun. Quiet as it's kept there is a huge tech community here. It's like it's here and
02:32we're pushing through. I've been able to travel around the world and see that tech and apply
02:37that to my art and show the culture of New Orleans in a very new and progressive way.
02:42I've been able to tell the story of the Indian, the story of New Orleans the night war, the story
02:48of our flood, the story of our pain and our resilience and our pride through futurism.
02:54I just choose to use that tech to speak to the indigenous, to speak to the ancestral, to
03:00speak to my culture. I try to use them to tell beautiful stories about my past.
03:04My album Second Line is very much the story of my culture and beyond that I've had multiple albums
03:14that have been love letters to New Orleans. New Breed was that as well. My father is in a band
03:19called Chocolate Milk which is a 70s staple in New Orleans and his music was in the New Breed album.
03:25So with Second Line, Second Line was special because it talked about house bounce dance music
03:33and the ownership it had for black culture. And so Second Line was a respect, a homage to what our
03:40culture had already been a part of that somehow they had sifted us out of it. And so it was a
03:44celebration of who we were in the Second Line, the name itself, how we celebrate death, how we celebrate
03:51life. It's just so our own that I was saying that I was celebrating a death to the old concept of what
03:59house and dance is. I wanted to pay that respect but also dance into what it really is.