by Dessa
I knew that I was capable of making a good living in another field—I had gotten good grades, could interview well, was willing to work hard. If music wasn’t going to be my life’s path, then the time I spent writing songs and bios and press releases might be better spent doing something else—going back to school, or applying for a full-time job, or maybe teaching English abroad, where at least it’d feel like I was contributing. I was a lousy waitress. I was a pretty good tech writer, but couldn’t envision it as a long-term gig. And I couldn’t butterfly forever.
Q: Am I delusional—like, fully out of my damn mind?
I’d venture that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of young women at this very moment who aspire to be the first female president. And one of them will be. The problem is it’s impossible to tell if you’re the one.
When small children say they want to be quarterbacks or tap dancers, they’re applauded for their audacity. Aunts and uncles toss a ball around the backyard and buy a little fedora for Christmas. When you are a grown-up who says she wants to be a rapper, the blush is off the rose. The conversation at the Christmas table is more likely to include the words compound and interest than follow and dreams.
And it is a little crazy to believe that you can navigate a career path that seems to pan out so rarely. The numbers say you’re almost certainly wrong.
Q: Could wanting it badly enough make it real?
This question isn’t about hard work—that’s a prerequisite. It’s about taping blinders to your temples; categorically writing off the critics who don’t like what you do; categorically writing off the counsel of the people who love you and worry about how you’re doing, to insist, I am going to will this into reality.
This is the Tinker Bell model. She’s only real because she is clapped into existence. The children refuse to entertain any alternative, and the force of their desire and their determination has metaphysical consequences.
The Tinker Bell model is the nuclear option. It taps every reserve. It permits no Plan Bs. It’s bold, reckless, conceited, juvenile—right up until it works. And then, in hindsight, it’s brave, windblown, and scored with strings that sustain right into the commercial break.
I’ve known artists who’ve tattooed their hands and faces to ensure they’d have no recourse, no desk-job escape chute.
* * *
—
I started painting faces when I was fourteen. My dad’s second wife, Linda, taught me how to do it. She was petite, quirky, and irreverent—a skilled botanical artist who ran a talent agency for children’s events. She taught me how to mix paint, meticulously trained me on each design, and helped style my costumes. By the time my first EP came out with Doomtree, I’d been painting faces for ten years.
At the Renaissance Festival, I wore an enormous tulle petticoat beneath a hot-pink silk dress. The bodice cinched tight in the back with crossing laces (you could be fined for visible zippers). Occasionally, a wagonful of Renfesters would drive by and point at me as part of something called the Wench Tour.
During the Christmas season, I wore striped tights and a Santa’s hat with an enormous spring inside, so that the white pom-pom bobbled above my head, even when I stood still as death beneath it. I could not pass through any doorway standing upright.
Corporate picnics were the bread and butter of the operation, however, and my normal work uniform was a short blue dress, bright red boots, pigtails affixed with holographic ribbons, and an expensive pair of butterfly wings. They were made with real feathers, hand-cut, painted, and layered to look like the scales of a monarch wing. Heading to work from the Doomtree house, I carried a Caboodles case full of paints in one hand and my wings in the other. When I arrived at a gig—sometimes at a public pavilion, sometimes at a theme park—I put my wings on in the car, before any of the kids could spot me.
In the face-painting line, children didn’t censor themselves. There were sweet kids and there were assholes. There were boss kids and support-staff kids, and their talk was frank and constant. If children could unionize, that’s where they’d have done it.
I don’t buy into the hype about children as untrammeled innocents. They’re seeded with all the human traits. Sometimes they share, even when they have less than they need. Sometimes they hoard, even when they have more than they want. They just don’t have the resources for big projects. And they get tired early. But I do believe that kids warrant special consideration. They have big heads that goof up their center of gravity. They don’t have properly formed kneecaps until they’re, like, three. They haven’t been in the rock tumbler long enough to have their curiosity and affection polished down. They’d ask me to marry their dads, just so I could come live with them. They’d rub my leg while I was painting, just to rub my leg. They’d fall asleep with their faces in my hand and I’d have to wake them up, reintroduce myself, remind them where they were, and then slowly turn a mirror to reveal the butterfly mask I’d painted while they were out. For someone who is not particularly romantic about kids, I take them more seriously than most people I know.
Sometimes while I was working on one, another would sneak behind me to reach out and lightly touch one of my wings. I’d shiver and yelp and she’d return to the line freaked out and excited, hissing, I told you they were real.
Most days, I fielded the same set of questions:
Q: Can I get two?
“Unlikely. This line is very long. But if there are no blank faces, come back and I’ll do your other side.”
Q: Are you a kid or an adult?
The costume made it tough to tell if I was a giant child or just a parent in disguise. “I’m an in-between.”
Q: If your wings are real, then can you fly?
“Kid, nobody can paint while flying.”
Q: Is this, like, what you do? Your job?
Well, honey, that one’s complicated. Some days I paint faces. Yes, for money. And sometimes I write instructional manuals as an independent contractor. And sometimes I wait tables at a sports bar downtown. And sometimes I work as a temp for an agency like Dolphin Staffing—which is not as magical as it sounds—but at night, I am a rapper at a precarious point in her—
Q: I saaaaid, is this, like, what you do? Your job?
“Well, I’m face painting and you’re waiting to get painted. So is that your job? Being second in line to get face painted? Are you a professional paintee?”
Q: Do you have a boyfriend?
I do, but only for a little while longer. He’s becoming a famous person, I think, and there is no competing for first place in his heart because that position was already occupied by music-making when I met him. And maybe the best spot in my heart is reserved for the same thing. But all sorts of people want a piece of him now, including beautiful women who I don’t think he has the self-discipline to turn away. And I am a sizzling mess: angry and jealous and vengeful and sad. That’s the truth, but I can’t share it with you because you’re too young and this is supposed to be a party and I’m being paid by the hour.
Q: Do you have a boyfriend?
“How come? Are you single? Are you asking me on a day-yate?”
At indoor gigs, people walking by often bumped my table. That was bad news; a jostled table could slosh paint water, spill glitter. And a glitter spill is one of the worst things that can happen at a face-painting gig. Not because it was impossible to get out of the carpet, or because the rest of the kids lost their minds if they couldn’t have any, but because the stuff was expensive. Even more expensive than our paint with real gold in it. We used a special glitter with rounded edges (gentler on the cornea, should it wind up in an eye) that had been subjected to laser light to refract holographically. In sunlight, the stuff was incredible. Linda, my stepmom-slash-booking-agent, sourced it from a special costume shop. She sold it to us in little jars, like a drug dealer in a ladybug costume.
One day, possibl
y jacked up on orange Crush and sheet cake, an impatient kid asked, “Well, can you fly when you’re done painting?”
“I can’t just fly from sitting still, I need a running start.”
“But you flew here?”
“I did.”
Dammit. That was a mistake, I thought. Lying to children gets convoluted quickly. Now at the end of the day, they’d all expect me to fly home.
Just as I’d feared, a gang of girls hovered as I packed up, all waiting to see how I’d leave. When I turned to go, they followed as far as they were allowed, watching. They wanted to know if I’d fly home—if I was the real thing—or if I’d get into some beat-up sedan and let ’em down like everyone else. Dammit, I thought. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
I’d told them I needed a running start, so I ran. I didn’t know how long I’d have to go; I passed my car, figuring I could double back later. I was breathing hard. Then panting like an animal. My paints were banging around in my Caboodles case; my wings were bouncing on the elastic straps that held them to my back. I figured I’d run until they got tired of waiting to see if I ever made it off the ground. Or I’d run until I was too small to see. Or, fuck it, maybe I’d just have to run until they were all grown-ups, with their own day jobs, dreams, and disappointments.
* * *
—
We broke up. But we still performed together. During Doomtree meetings or before a show, I often felt queasy—being so near my X sent a rancid adrenaline through me. When I wasn’t with him, I’d script elaborate conversations designed to punish him, and simultaneously to make him want me back. The amplitude of my bitterness freaked me out. Love can bring out the worst in people.
On tour, I smiled onstage and cried backstage. Hiding in the women’s room of a club somewhere in America, my feet pulled up on the toilet seat, I could cry undiscovered for a long time. There was rarely another woman in the venue until just before doors.
On the road, a phrase like “I just need some space” meant moving to the back bench seat. It hurt to be near him, but leaving Doomtree felt unthinkable. The wider rap scene looked neither attractive nor hospitable. The world we had all built together was the only one I wanted to live in. The prospect of joining another crew felt downright outlandish; it would’ve been like losing your kid at the food court and being handed a different toddler by a mall cop—they’re not interchangeable, man. It was Doomtree or bust. Or maybe Doomtree and bust.
Our tour routings had long stretches of back-to-back shows and grueling drives. Sometimes we’d push straight through the night to make it to the next club, or we’d pull over in a Walmart parking lot to catch a few hours of sleep before hitting the highway again. All seven of us passed out sitting up, wrapped in our coats in the winter, or sweating through our clothes in the summertime. One show at a time, audiences started growing.
A couple of weeks into a run, the public and the private melt into each other: you brush your teeth sitting on a curb in downtown Denver, nodding to passersby; you do a few yoga poses on the asphalt at the Amoco while waiting for the tank to fill; you wade into a roadside stream for some relief from the heat of the van before being chased off by a man yelling about municipal water contamination. The antics of musicians—their sunglasses at midnight, their handstands on barroom tables, their wasted hotel rooms—aren’t just evidence of egos run rampant, they’re also just the natural by-product of close quarters and protracted exhaustion: the grade-school loopiness of a sleepover that’s been running for two months on vodka Red Bulls. At the end of a tour, the world has only three kinds of people in it. There are the people in your band, immediately identifiable at every gas station pit stop because they are also dancing half-dressed in the snack aisle. There are the people who come to shows, who are generally happy to be invited in on the joke. And there is everyone else—the civilians who are contemptuous of the way you and your cohorts are behaving at Perkins.
When X drove the van, I’d sometimes catch him looking at me in the rearview mirror, eyes soft with affection and apology. He was young, talented, sorry he’d hurt me, uncertain of whom to trust, and scared of being unveiled as a fraud. When he told me he still loved me I knew it was true. But I didn’t trust him and I didn’t know how to fix him. His childhood had left him over-hungry for affirmation and intimacy—and that hunger almost certainly helped make him such a force onstage. It also probably drove his promiscuity. I couldn’t afford to be tender, with him or with myself, if this show was going to stay on the road. While he tried to figure out what his life was becoming, I tried to figure out which spot on the bench seat couldn’t be seen in the rearview mirror.
Slowly, I wrote and recorded my own full-length album. Many of the songs were about him. I tried to keep my nose down, cocoon myself in my work, and trust that I’d emerge with a record that would establish me as the artist I hoped to be. Part of me, though, was afraid I’d come out of the cocoon as just an older caterpillar with high-frequency hearing loss and a nicotine patch.
I called my first full-length solo record A Badly Broken Code, a line lifted from a Billy Collins poem. When the album came out, X invited me on tour. On a highway drive one afternoon, my phone chimed with a notification, then chimed again—friends were texting about something they’d heard on the radio. Within a few minutes, it was like I had a casino in my pocket: my phone was dinging constantly and X’s was lighting up too. Robert Christgau, a venerated critic, had reviewed my record on NPR. He’d compared me to famous songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Rosanne Cash, and, uncomfortably, also to X. It was an incredible endorsement—most of my reviews to date hadn’t even spelled my name right.
If there was a single moment that felt like a pivot, it was that one: my phone buzzing in my lap and the prairie blurring in the windows. I didn’t quit my day job in a defiant blaze of glory, but I felt confident that when I got back to Minneapolis, I’d eventually be able to hang up my wings. I could have never guessed, however, the lengths I’d go to find peace with X—professionally, romantically, and even neurologically.
Now, years after that first NPR review and my last face-painting gig, I’ll sometimes stand at the edge of the stage during a Doomtree show. I’ll put my finger to my mouth to quiet the room. I’ll hold my mic off to the side, a gesture that will usually send a round of shhhs through the crowd. Unamplified, I’ll yell something like:
“Hey, we’re Doomtree. I’m Dessa. That’s Sims, that’s P.O.S, that dapper gentleman is Cecil Otter, and my guy Mike Mictlan is the hero who thought to grab the case of waters from backstage. Here behind the tables, where the magic happens, is Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger. If it’s your first time seeing us: welcome. If you’ve been coming for ten years: thank you. The reason that seven musicians can play a two-hour show to a sold-out room—even though we don’t have a big song on the radio, even though we aren’t in Sprite ads, even though we write pop songs that are eight goddamn minutes long—is you. Our growth has been slow, and if you’ve been here from the beginning, you know that’s true. But because we make our money in ten-dollar increments at that merch table right there—wave, Ander! That’s Ander—we’ve been able to maintain total artistic control. We don’t have to ask a record executive if it’s a good idea to pick the song with a clarinet sample in 6/8 as the first single—of course that’s not a good idea—but it’s good art, dammit, so we’re doing it. Doomtree runs on word of mouth and pixie dust. We are real because you’ve said we are. We’re the Tinker Bell of this rap shit. So thank you.
“Alright, Paper, let’s drop the next track. Here we go.”
Glossary
—
Dessa: American recording artist. Type A personality, type O blood donor. Types sixty words a minute. Me.
Doomtree: A hip-hop collective based in Minneapolis. Founded in 2001, maybe. (Didn’t keep great records then.) Known for genre-bending releases—blending rap, punk, pop, rock, and classical sounds—and an impassioned, physic
al live show that’s part tent revival, part intramural hockey game.
Current roster: Cecil Otter, Dessa, Lazerbeak, Mike Mictlan, Paper Tiger, P.O.S, Sims.
Draw: The number of fans a performer can attract to a show.
“What’s your draw?”
“A thousand at home, 250 on the road.”
Day sheet: A detailed schedule of the day’s events on tour, including drive time, phoners, time zone changes, opening acts, club Wi-Fi passwords, catering information, and set times.
“What time do we hit tonight?”
“Check your own damn day sheet, my guy.”
Door deal: A show that pays performers a cut of the money collected at the door. Generally less desirable than a guaranteed fee.
Drop: Merchandise shipped from a warehouse or manufacturer to be intercepted by a touring party, to replenish their inventory on the road. Often addressed to a club or a hotel. Lost in transit approximately 30 percent of the time.
Ears: In-ear monitors that allow performers to listen to their live sound in earbuds, as opposed to hearing themselves amplified through speakers on the stage.
Femcee/Feminem: You do not need these terms. For anything. Ever.
Head: A rap fan well versed in hip-hop music and culture who identifies enthusiastically with both.
Hit the split: To draw enough fans to warrant a bonus at the end of the night. If and after show expenses have been recouped, an artist typically earns 60 to 80 percent of the profit.
Hype: Rap backup vocals. To hype another rapper’s lyric usually means delivering that line in unison with the lead vocalist, often to allow him or her time to inhale.
Laminate: The laminated pass a performer wears to prove to security staff that he or she is part of the touring party and should be granted backstage access. Usually affixed to a lanyard, often threaded through a belt loop. Worn around the neck only by tour managers and nerds.
