Rapper Speech Debelle is a complicated cultural figure to get your head around. Born Corynne Elliott, Debelle rose to global prominence last year after an upset victory at The Mercury Prize, a British music industry award that is subject to intense cultural scrutiny and curiosity. Because her first record chronicles her teen years spent sleeping in hostels and friends’ basements after being kicked out by her single mother, it’s tempting to consider her story an archetypal rags-to-riches narrative. But her childhood was decidedly middle class, even “spoiled.”
Winning the £20,000 prize and being annoited by the cultural elite in Debelle’s country would suggest a star on the rise. And yet her album has sold poorly, moving only 10,000 units in her native country and barely registering here. The backlash to her victory has also been fierce, including some hushed accusations of “tokenism” in giving a black woman the prize (Ms. Dynamite and Dizzee Rascal received similar backlash as the other two black rappers to have been picked for the Mercury) over more likely candidates, like Florence and the Machine and Glasvegas.
Debelle’s public remarks following the award would suggest an arrogant new talent poisoned by immediate success: she predicted “five Grammy nominations” within the year and declared that she had been “expecting” the prize all along. Yet in our conversation, she comes across as a pragmatist, worried about the fleeting nature of success in mainstream pop music. Complicating things further is her music—verbose, deeply confessional poetry overlaid with unconventional beats. Live drumming, oboe, and acoustic guitar take prominence instead of samples and drum machines. In all these ways, Debelle seems caught between worlds: success and obscurity, confidence and anxiety, hope and uncertainty.
Before her first North American show DETAILS during Canadian Music Week, Debelle talked to Chris Berube about the music industry, taking advice, and making art that lasts.
Chris Berube: How have things been recently?
Speech Debelle: Very recently I’ve been recording for my second album, The Art of Speech.
CB: What I really like about the first record is that it sounds introspective, but not self-pitying.
SD: It’s something that just came out of the reason I was writing in the first place. It was just expression. It came from a time of pain and confusion, but also the need to get some sort of clarity out of it. Without intending it to be like that, the songs all kind of end triumphantly, because that was the process for me.
CB: They end on a very hopeful note. Looking at the time when you were writing these songs, you were living in hostels and friends’ homes. How did you find enough hope to write them?
SD: I don’t know, how does anybody find hope in a lot of things? All you have to do is switch on the news and all you can do is ask that question. You hear what happens to people and how they find hope is just beyond me.
CB: You seem like a very self-confident rapper, but not in a bravado kind of way.
SD: I think I have a quiet confidence. I don’t really want competition. I don’t fare well in competition. Winning the Mercury is probably one of the only competitions I’ve ever won. I don’t like competition, but that doesn’t mean I’m not confident in my own abilities.
CB: Your first record is so much about where you were in your life at that time. What do you want to talk about on your next record?
SD: The second one is called The Art of Speech. It’s basically about me trying to make what I think is a reflection of me as an artist, or what I think an artist should be trying to achieve. For me, that’s a mixture of the way I write songs, the words from the last album, and this time mixing that with music that affects you a lot more strongly. I’m trying to make it seem more complete, and in unison.
CB: After winning the Mercury Prize on your first record, I imagine the pressure other people put on you was probably tremendous. How do you deal with getting all of this advice, especially a lot you probably didn’t ask for?
SD: Yeah, at first you have to take everything on board, and your opinion keeps changing all of the time. Maybe someone has a really eloquent way of saying something, and you start to believe that, and you go back and forth. Generally, what happens at that point is that I’m not in the studio, I’m not recording music. When I listen to myself, I get stuff done. When I listen to everybody else, I just can’t function.
CB: What do you feel the reaction was from people in the traditional music industry to you when you won? I got the sense it was very surprised.
SD: Oh, certainly. There were important people in that room from the music industry who would have never given me a second look, especially going into the music industry without ever having recorded a song.
CB: The reaction seems to have been more of “Who is this?” then “This is something new!”
SD: I did hear one story of a chair of a record label there who said to his president or something, “Why didn’t you think of this?” [laughs] And I think it’s because record labels tend to learn by example. We’ve seen right now that the big artists in England are Amy Winehouse, who goes back to ‘60s music, and La Roux, who goes back to ‘80s music in such a big way, and Florence and the Machine’s new song is a big ‘80s song. Record labels are going back and making retro music, and that’s what’s popular at the moment. My album kind of made that impression because it represents change.
CB: What I heard is that you wanted to make music combining Ray Charles and Pink Floyd. What has your process been like, thinking about how this new record is going to sound?
SD: That’s just like studying for an exam. I went to the library and got some reference books; this is exactly the same thing. I study artists, particularly ones good at what they do. The Pink Floyd album, the thing that stood out is how much it sounded like a contemporary piece of music. It wasn’t just laden with singles. There are themes that run through it and parts where the songs join on with each other. Ray Charles, later Ray Charles, creates a really interesting soundscape. So I just study that.
CB: It sounds like your process is very deliberate and it feels like music culture today is so much about instant gratification—getting hooked on something and then moving on. Do you feel like your philosophy is at odds with that ethos?
SD: Sade’s new album came out in America at number one in it’s first week, and she’s like, 40-something. I’ve seen a lot of stuff on Twitter and you think, hooray! As human beings we need music and we need things that help us escape, and the songs that we like last a long time. People get the Sade album and they think, “Great, I’m going to escape to that for another 10 years.”
CB: I mean, her career would seem like a good model for yours.
SD: For sure. For the next one, I want to do even more of that. I just want to take two years off and just travel and stuff. I’d be hard pressed to do that, but that would be my dream, just to take some time off before recording the album.
CB: How has your life changed since the prize?
SD: I think the biggest one is that people hold my opinion a lot higher than ever before in my life. The thing I’ve realized, from early on is that people really do hear what I want to say, even though sometimes I have no idea what I’m talking about. When you’re confident, when you speak, people will listen and assume that you know what you’re talking about. It’s an honour.
“When I listen to myself, I get stuff done. When I listen to everybody else, I just can’t function.”
