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Interview: Oompa’s new album ‘Unbothered’ plays like a promise

Photo Credit: Ally Schmaling

You could say Oompa’s new album subconsciously began back in 2019.

Nestled in the middle of her sophomore album Cleo was a song named “Joy Back,” an aching R&B dream for a more content life and sturdier peace of mind. “I swear I ain’t gon’ keep on taking all this torture,” she raps with conviction on the bridge. “I want my joy back.”

Finally, two years later, that joy is present — and preserved — on her new record Unbothered, out today (October 1). But it didn’t come without a fight.

The boundary-setting collection of bops sprouted from a period of unprecedented lows last summer, in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic and extensive police brutality news coverage. Quarantined at home, Oompa watched the trauma of the world close in on her. As her breathing room grew smaller, she made a conscious choice: She’d push back. She’s choose joy. Make room for joy. Because there weren’t many other options on the table.

The result is the sacred space constructed by Unbothered, the Boston’s emcee commitment to herself — and her listeners — to cultivate a life worth living. Oompa has long advocated for making space for people of all backgrounds and identities within cultural communities. But what good is that space if it’s devoid of any comfort?

“Despite all the messaging that we’re all taught, despite the messaging we teach ourselves, despite what we feel happens to us, what we’ve done, there is nothing that doesn’t make us worthy of a quality life,” she shares. “I believe that and I’m trying my best to stay committed to that for myself. Even if not explicitly, I hope if you listen to it — maybe you don’t like the song — but if you feel it, I want you to feel that [sentiment] when you listen to it.”

To quote an older Oompa tune: She deserves that.

Ahead of her album release show at The Paradise Rock Club next week (October 8), Vanyaland hopped on the phone with the Boston rapper to chat about unexpected pandemic peace, dismantling racism within the Boston arts community, the myth of the tortured artist, and what it means to be “unbothered” as the world unravels around you.

Victoria Wasylak: One thing I want to set the record straight about is the name of the album, which is Unbothered. Because for someone to hear that word out of context, I think people associate it with being apathetic and not caring, being passive. But it’s my understanding that that’s not what’s going on at all here.

Oompa: Yeah, I think it’s a duality. It might look like that to people. And I think that that’s okay because it still creates a protective barrier for me. If people think I’m apathetic or that I don’t care, there’s still some protection in that. But I think you’re right, I think Unbothered is a choice. It’s more of a goalpost or this idea of being content or being neutral, being unbothered, kind of unfazed. Recognizing the power that I have in all situations, in terms of how I look at things in my perspective. I want to be unwaveringly confident and sure of myself and sure of God, and unbothered.

It’s not that you don’t care and that you’re “too cool.” It’s, “I need to just give myself space to not care about these things for a little bit so that I can make sure that I can be happy.”

Yes! Yes. It’s out of safety. I care too much about everything. And sometimes that is not a safe place. Sometimes I care more about those things than I do myself. It’s like, what good is caring for things more than me gonna do me, if that is going to kill me?

Right, right.

What capacity will I have to care about anything at that point, or change anything, or do anything? It’s absolutely protective. Also, the world can — depending on how you’re looking at it and depending on your capacity to see it in a certain way — really just look grim, it can look dark and without possibility. I think sometimes you need the space and the time create a new world inside your head, a new perspective of it.

I’m really interested in the fact that you called it a choice because I was going to say the same thing, that taking on a mentality like that is not something that is natural. Can you walk me through how you got to the point in your life, personally, or in your career, where you realized that that was a choice you needed to make? And what was it like? Because it’s not like it’s just, “Okay, I’m going to be unbothered now,” and it magically happens, right?

[laughs] Right. Well, I think there’s a couple parts to it. The first thing is, I was looking back on the music. I’m an adopted kid, I don’t have much family at all. It’s a couple of my sisters left and their kids. Of all the things I grew up with, I had one photo book. So there’s not a big record of my life — except now, maybe my music. I was looking back on that and trying to feel something. I feel that I make the music I think that I want to hear in the moment. So trying to feel something, but then realizing that there was no space there for the thing I needed. Which was not this place of reflection or sadness, or making sure that somebody knew that these things that had happened in my life were true and justified or understood, but to look back on my life and be like, “Damn, you did that.” Or, “Damn, you were able to feel that way.” Or, “Damn, when I’m feeling low, here’s the thing that I think is gonna take me high.”

There was the lack of having that music. That was the first part. But then there was also this part of accountability to myself. If I’m going to write an album like November 3, which is all about loss and grief and hoping that something happens, and then I write Cleo, which is about finding the promise in a future for myself, then I have to make good on that promise. These are the external things. I got to make that album for myself that makes good on that promise, so when people relate to me on all the pain and the grief, and they’re experiencing that, they also feel like there’s possibility. “Okay, let’s make good on that promise to find that thing.”

And then on an innermost level, last July I never in my life felt so sad and so low and so without the desire to… it was just all the pandemics, all the dying, all the black people dying. The news was only covering COVID and black people getting killed. And it does a lot [to your mental health]. Then I watched 8:46 by Dave Chappelle, and I never in my life felt so sad but also [that] the only possibility for liberation for myself was choosing my death before somebody somehow chose it for me. And I was like, “Man, I only have a few options.”

And I was like, “You know what? This can’t be the world that I live in.” So I committed to — in my personal life — healing, trying to figure out a way to enjoy life, to chase joy, to really feel that and to make records of those moments of joy as best I could. And just heal and work through that shit. Because there were no other options for staying alive and being well.

This arc you have going that you just laid out, and choosing that healing, I think that was really responsible, not just for yourself but for everyone who’s listening. Because I think it shows how possible it is. A lot of times we fall prey to that mentality that your art is the best when you’re getting the shit kicked out of you, when you’re sad. That you have to be tortured, that you have to have a tragic backstory to make good art, whether that’s music or writing something, or painting or sculpting. And that’s not true.

Right! Right. One, it’s not true. Two, I’ve watched my peers and artists that I love constantly get pigeonholed in that way into their own depression. They almost feel in their art, in their brand, in their person, they can’t be happy because they can’t possibly be good artists. Three, the only people who are making that judgment are people who are also sad and suffering. And four, nobody’s going to tell Drake he has to be a sad artist, and Drake is out here living his best life. He changed his situation. Nobody’s going to tell Drake that, but somehow I have to be in this  DIY gallery space with my sad art only and there’s no room for anything else. Is that gonna change my life on any level if I feel like that’s the only thing I can do? Not only is it not gonna change my mentality or my emotional state, but it’s not gonna change my material state either. People love the sad music when they can suffer with you, but they’re not going to buy tickets for suffering. Where’s the joy? All of us want to go escape to something.

***

Once you decided that that was the direction you wanted to go in for the album, did you notice a change in your life, outside of the studio?

Yeah. You know, I felt for an extensive period of this year, I have never felt more happy in my life than I did in those months where nothing was happening. My shows were canceled, the money was funny, you know, all of this debt, all of this stuff. Nobody knows what tomorrow looks like. I was never more happy than I was waking up, making my bed so that my future self can have an easier life or easier day, meditating in the morning, stretching, moving my body, going to jump rope, drinking tea, praying, putting flowers on a thing hoping like my ancestors would feel it somehow. There was never a moment where I was more happy than that. And I was like, “Oh, okay,” because it’s not in the strategy of, “Oh, I need to release music on this,” or it’s not “how people perceive me needs to be like this,” or “if I keep hustling, maybe I’ll be able to find the wealth I’ve been looking for my whole life because if I could just be wealthy for five minutes, I’d be a lot happier.”

It’s not any of that stuff. And you hear people talk about that all the time, so it seems probably mundane at this point. When you’re actually in a moment of real peace and contentment and you don’t have anything spectacular happening, except your choice to be present and with yourself, yo, there’s nothing else better than that.

It’s something beautiful but hard to find. It becomes harder and harder to find the more that you need to be successful as an artist. It’s always been complicated, but you think about it now, you make the music, you put it on streaming services, you hope it gets on the right playlist. It gets on the right playlist, it gets a lot of streams. That doesn’t make you any money but it goes on Billboard. It goes on Billboard, more people hear it. People buy tickets to your shows. Then people buy merch. And that’s how you make money, when people buy merchandise. And you have to go through all those steps!

Yo! And then by the time you get there, the merch is the last thing you even think about.

Yeah. And it’s not even why you’re here. You don’t want to sell sweatpants. You want to sell albums, you want to sell music.

Right. I want to sell out stadiums. Exactly. I don’t want to sell sweatpants. That’s perfect. That was a perfect way of saying it. Exactly.

It’s complicated stuff, which is why it’s all the more impressive that we have the success in Boston right now that we’re having.

Oh, man. Oh, my God, absolutely.

You’re one of four people who are playing The Paradise in one season, which I think is phenomenal. How have you been preparing for that? 

Oh, my God, absolutely. We’re just really putting a lot of trust in the city to show up four different times, you know what I mean? Four different times to enjoy four different kinds of artists, really trying their best with everything they have to make it happen. I think that’s a reason to celebrate and hopefully people go and show up. But in terms of preparation, we’re having rehearsals, my band and I, every week. I had a knee injury and an ankle injury this year, so I’ve just been trying to move around and do the whole OutKast regimen where you work out and you rap your songs and you figure out how out of shape you are. [laughs]

And [there’s] the dancers and the special guests, and the arrangements and practicing with my background vocalist. And working with my video team. Multimedia is the lasting impression I want to make on my city before… I don’t think I’ll release probably another album or do another run this size before I move. So I really just wanted people to remember that this is the person that they made me into, and I’m equipped to go out into the world and “do the thing.” You know?

So are you definitely moving?

I got to. I don’t want to.

Do you feel comfortable talking about that?

Yeah, in terms of the when and the what, [that’s] all tentative, but I got my eyes on L.A. You know, it’d be cool to figure out a bicoastal thing so I can stay somewhat local. But, yeah, I think my city, they’re just like, “Okay, great. We got you here. Now go somewhere and do that.”

Be free.

Yeah, be free and do it again and move and grow. Not to get all spiritual, but in one way or another, my mother said she wants to see me go more than she wants to see me come. So I’m gonna take that with me.

That’s beautiful… You say you “feel like you have to.” You mean from a musical standpoint?

Yeah, from all of it. I think that we’re a small city and I think that there’s a way that you kind of hit your head on a ceiling. It’s like we’re all fighting to expand the ceiling. I think every time somebody bumps their head on it, we push it out a little bit further. Then at the same time, it doesn’t grow as fast as maybe the number of heads bumping on the ceiling do. We’re all pushing it. And then at some point, I think you got to take a break from trying to push the ceiling and go somewhere where the sky is a little wider so you can breathe.

You’ve got to give your head a break.

Literally, I need to give my head a break! So that’s really what it is. You know, I’ve been doing this professionally now for five years. I really want to go hard at it and give it everything I got because I think that something special could happen for me.

I think something special is already happening.

Yeah, I think so too. Thank you for that. I think so too. I feel it. I don’t know if I can see it, yet but I feel it.

***

I don’t know if this is playing a factor in your decision to move, but something that I saw last year was a lot of artists talking about on Twitter about what it’s like to be a musician — or any kind of artist — in Boston that’s not white, and to love your city, but your city just doesn’t love you back. Boston can be/is very racist, which is painful no matter what. But the irony is so frustrating considering that the music we are making the most of right now is hip-hop. That is Boston’s main musical export right now, hip-hop. I saw a lot of people talking about wanting to move because they feel like, “I love it here. I want to stay here but I’m not going to be treated like this anymore.”

Yeah, I think that’s exactly… that’s spot on. My mother used to say, “Don’t talk about family business in front of company,” so I’ll just name that I think that there’s this internalized racism part of it too, right? There are ways that racism impacts other people of color in terms of how we treat each other and treat each other’s art. I think that is a learned behavior from the city’s very blatant and long-running history of racism. And, yeah, I think institutions are part of it. They only want to support art that continues the suffering, or that makes me engaged with antiracism or anti-this, and I’m not the one who made that system in the first place.

I shouldn’t have to only write grants to undo racism in order to get support for my art, when so much of what I’m doing is this invisible work that is around antiracism, it’s about my survival and living, and livelihood and my art, and for the art of other people and making space for other people. So much of it is already that. I shouldn’t have to write this grant to prove to you I care about antiracism when the person who’s funding those grants are people who benefit directly from not only racism, but slavery. So there’s that. And then sometimes you go to a gig that is paying your rent for a month, but you got to leave your Blackness or your queerness or your fat-girl-ness or your woman-ness at the door, and you only got to show what anybody wants from you in that moment. 

I’ve been to Atlanta and I watched the way the Atlanta folks show up, and how there is the range of different Blackness and different music that gets accepted down there. I’ve seen it happen in New York to a smaller degree. I’ve seen crazy things come out of L.A. That’s the kind of breathing room I want. I want to be able to do soul music one day, pop the next, and rock the next, and somebody just be like, “That makes sense. She can bring all that with her. She can bring all her ratchet shit and her spiritual shit with her.”

It’s not like we’re going to come up with the answers now during this conversation, but I just feel sick to think about it because I want you all to stay…

Same, I wanna be here…

…but how on earth could I possibly object to someone leaving? How on earth are you going to ask people to stay if they’re not being treated well? And it’s not as simple as, “Oh, well, we just need to go to this one venue and have a talk with them about making people more comfortable.” It’s so multifaceted. 

Maybe this is my organizer background, but I feel like we are largely more powerful than we give ourselves credit for. I just wish that there were enough of us who would say, for example…I’m bringing up about my mother a lot. I guess I feel her presence today. But my mother used to talk about how when she was a kid, if a kid in the neighborhood did something wrong, they would get  three ass whoopings on the way home, right? Because everybody was that invested in making sure that the kids in the village were doing right. But also when a kid did something good, everybody also knew that and rallied around them.

I feel like a lot of the institutions know that if you’re saying you’re giving money for livelihood but you got to do all these really messed up things [to get the money], or if you’re saying, “Oh, you know, this venue doesn’t play hip-hop because we need security,” if we just decided that we weren’t going to care about them and make them invisible, they will be vying for our attention. I don’t know that the folks who maintain these very racist systems are interested in changing their perspective, but they’re interested in protecting their wealth. So what if Boston said, “You know what? We’re not letting that happen anymore. We as a whole are not going to support that.” …I just wish we would just take our power into our own hands. I think that could be a solution. It’s not the solution but it’s one.

When I listened to the album, I thought it was more spiritual than your past work. And you’ve brought up spirituality and praying a couple times on our call. Would you agree that this album is more spiritual?

I think absolutely. Not in a real active, “I want this album to be spiritual” [way]. But I feel very much connected to spirit and very much connected to my spirituality. This album is a byproduct for the place I’m in. I think so much of what I’ve been experiencing in my life in a personal place is very much personal. It’s me, God, and the necessary stakeholders. But if the art is real and it’s true to me, then it’s still going to be a reflection of that. I think it’s a reflection of that, even if it doesn’t necessarily directly address it. I think it does in some places, but I think it’s almost lost on me when that happens. But I think it’s definitely there.

It’s very organic. It’s not as if you went in there and did it on purpose. It just aligned. It’s a very aligned body of work because you have this theme of making space to be happy and protecting it. I think of Cleo and you had “Joy Back” on it. It kind of started there, you could say. It’s almost like you planted that seed and present you looked back at past you and said, “Okay, let’s do something about that.”

Yep, let’s make good on your promises to yourself, shorty. You deserve to have a quality life, despite all the messaging that we’re all taught, despite the messaging we teach ourselves, despite what we feel happens to us, what we’ve done, there is nothing that doesn’t make us worthy of a quality life. I believe that and I’m trying my best to stay committed to that for myself. Even if not explicitly, I hope if you listen to it — maybe you don’t like the song — but if you feel it, I want you to feel that [sentiment] when you listen to it.

Without realizing, I think you’ve made a beautiful little story arc for yourself. Obviously, if I asked you about your next album, your head would explode because, “Let me put this one out first.” But looking at it from the perspective of “this is Oompa’s story,” what do you think would be the next phase of this arc that you’re putting together with your work? Where do you think it will go next?

You know, I imagine that the story as it continues will include moments of backfire, and lessons learned, and things that didn’t go right. But I think that my commitment to the other side, that joy, that quality of life, is going to stay present for me. It doesn’t matter if I’m down on my luck and I’m down bad. I feel like that commitment still is gonna be present because that’s the thing that’s keeping me tied to this earth and creating that world that I want to live in, is me keeping a record of that commitment. I think it has to be a part of that.  

But in terms of a more on-the-ground answer, I hope it finds me in my beach house in L.A., chilling with SZA and Ari Lennox. I just saw Beyonce for the first time and this is two years from now, and I got nominated for a BET Award after I got snubbed for my Grammy. That’s where I hope it gets me.

OOMPA + BENJI + $EAN WIRE + NOTEBOOK P:: Friday, October 8 at the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston, MA:: Doors 7 p.m., show 8 p.m., all ages, $20:: Advance tickets :: Facebook event page