 |
|    |
Entertainment
Heavenly harmonies – God-des and She
New York-based lesbian hip-hop-and-soul duo God-des and She have been making music together since 2000. They quickly garnered a strong online following, but really hit the big time when they performed their sexual manifesto, “Lick It,” on the 2006 season finale of Showtime’s The L Word. The combination of God-des’ rapping – intelligent, poignant and often funny – and She’s rich, soulful choruses and harmonies has helped solidify the pair as a powerful musical team. God-des and She headlined the Babes Around Denver (BAD) Women’s Pride Party at Tracks on June 25, and sat down with me before the show to talk about music, pride and breaking barriers.
Sunnivie Brydum: You’re just finishing up a tour of Prides all over the nation – what has that experience been like?
God-des: Man, we love doing Prides. It’s one of our favorite events to do, because people are just so happy to feel like they can be themselves and come together. And every time we’ve played a Pride, it’s just been awesome.
SB: Stand Up is the latest album available for purchase, but rumor has it you have another album slated for release this fall?
God-des: We have a new album that we haven’t totally named yet. We might name it Three, which to some people might not be the most interesting name, but we have a lot of reasons we might want to call it that.
SB: Any insight on those reasons?
God-des: I mean, three is the magic number, y’know?
She: It’s our third record; we mixed the record at [Public Enemy’s] Chuck D’s house, which had lots of threes in the address; the three of us mixed the record; [God-des] is going to have threes in her age...
God-des: Just one three! I’m a Pisces, so my birthday’s three. And we were on the Season Three finale of The L Word, which I just thought of.
She: Oh, yeah, that’s new! I didn’t even think about that one!
SB: How do Stand Up and the potentially titled Three differ from your other albums?
She: [Our first record] has a totally different vibe … But now, [God-des] is so much more melodic in her rapping, and I’m so much more rhythmic in my singing … Us influencing each other over time has been this slow evolution of changing the actual sound of God-des and She, and that took three records. And it’s going to continue to change. We have a rock song on this new record that sounds like John Mellencamp. And why not? We’re really looking to be on Super Bowl Sunday, and hit the Grammys and be anywhere that any other artist should be. People try to categorize us as “gay hip-hop.” And it’s like, “No, we’re hip-hop. We’re gay. That’s it.”
God-des: I think that our sound on this record … is a lot different because we’re doing beats and music that people have, literally, never heard anything like. We’ve sent it to a lot of industry people, and it’s kind of like we’ve come up with this new sound, which is really cool.
She: They’re just like, “What do we do with you? How do we market this?” So there are all these obstacles that we have to overcome. They want us to fit in this little box – they want me to look like Britney Spears and they want God-des to wear, like, a dress. Which is funny, I’ll go ahead and say it. It’s funny. [Both laugh.] But we’re just trying to be who we are … People should just be able to be whoever and however they are.
God-des: I always try to defy people’s expectations and stereotypes all the time. I’m just myself, whether I’m going to wear some Dickie’s shorts and rock a baseball hat or if I’m going to wear some skinny jeans and makeup. I don’t feel like I need to be any one way. We grow as people, so it’s funny hearing people make comments about it, but I just laugh.
SB:So how do you manage to combat those stereotypes and those people wanting to box you into a certain category?
God-des: It gets really frustrating for us because the whole thing is that I’ve been out for a lot of years, and I’ve been very out in my music. When I first started rapping, it was so important to me to give a voice for gay people. It was so invisible. [But] it gets really frustrating that people try to define us by our sexual identities or our gender identities. We’re just musicians. We’re just like everybody else. And we love that gay people can feel inspired and feel comfortable when they listen to our music. But our music is so universal. We just want people to like it.
She: Especially those people who want to buy our music. We really like those people. [Both laugh.]
For more information about God-des and She or to purchase any of their albums or merchandise, go to www.god-des.com
or myspace.com/goddes.
