Sammus, aka Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, is a Black feminist rapper, producer, and activist. She is the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown, and the co-founder of Brown’s Black Music Lab. Her research interests include hip hop praxis, Black feminist sound studies, and the influence of musical forms such as hip hop and R&B that remain underrepresented within academia. As Sammus—her stage name—she’s released three full-length albums and collaborated with other notable artists including Moor Mother and Open Mike Eagle.
Kate Javerbaum: You’ve talked before about inhabiting many identities: first-gen Black academic, rapper, producer, feminist, gamer, self-proclaimed nerd. Both within and beyond the hip hop sphere, how do you reconcile those identities via your music and academia?
Professor Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo: I’ve learned, through navigating academia, that reconciliation may not be achievable or even desirable. When I was younger, I had this sense that the people around me—who weren’t at these intersections that felt so incompatible—were living unified lives, that everyone had a sense of where they belonged in the world. As I’ve grown up, I’ve recognized how everyone kind of makes these negotiations between the way that they might see themselves, maneuver through the world, and are understood by other people. For me, being in academia is an exercise of wrestling with that complexity. I hold this position of power, as an assistant professor at an elite college. At the same time, I occupy these marginal positions, being a Black woman, first-gen, and younger within academia. That tension needs to be recognized, especially in a media/social media landscape that is really about flattening. Sitting with it has been really generative. I never feel totally comfortable, and that’s a good thing.
KJ: This reminds me a lot of your research on what you’ve called “community studios,” music studios that are accessible to typically underserved community members. Could you explain the goals of these spaces?
ELK: Community recording studios, specifically the ones that have emerged in the past few years, have been studio spaces that try to engage gender inequities in the music industry or just in STEM more generally. They try to bring in more women and non-binary folks through that venue, viewing the production of music as having applications in the world of STEM and coding. That’s one angle.
Community studios will often try to engage socioeconomic disparities. They’ll set up shop in a community center or a library space so that underserved folks—often Black and brown folks—can have access to high-quality recording gear, sound engineers, and help with distributing their music on a wider scale.
KJ:. That’s going to be a pretty loud library. I understand that these community studios are supported by both private and public funding. Does that ever create problems?
ELK: Absolutely. Some of the community studios I’ve observed were funded through philanthropy, which sustains the studio and keeps studio-goers from paying huge sums of money to record in the space. Dealing with a philanthropic effort, the challenge is that you have to keep funders in mind as you are thinking about the importance or value of this space. There are particular narratives that are very legible to funders, and there are narratives that aren’t. A narrative that is legible is, for example, “Hey, look at this recording studio. It helps to keep these kids off the streets and doing bad things after school.” This type of wording shows up on these studios’ websites, pamphlets, and other marketing materials. Implicitly, they’re saying: “We’re turning these kids—these hoodlums—into productive members of society, and your money helps to make that happen.” It echoes these discourses around public safety and policing of how Black and brown folks move through space: “You have to be productive, you can’t loiter, and you have to be surveilled.” No importance is placed on the music-making itself.
As an artist, though, I disagree. Just the making is transformative and powerful. By framing this as teaching people STEM skills, keeping them off the streets, or releasing their music or any other “useful” way, it downplays the importance of learning how to make music and record simply as a space for speaking oneself into existence.
KJ: How has your music become interwoven with political ideas? How have you learned to lean into your own voice to catalyze political change?
ELK: It’s been a journey and I’m very much still on it. I grew up watching lots of cartoons and playing video games, so that was the frame of reference for me for how I wanted to express things around race and gender, religion, sexuality, etc. Initially, my recognition that I have this position as a Black feminist rapper came in part through recognizing and talking with my audience. Hearing what they were reflecting back at me, saying that they appreciate how I take up this space as a Black woman gamer, helped me to recognize that, in part, what I’m doing is carving out new possibilities for what it can look like to be a Black woman in this space.
The music and the space of artists in the political sphere are always embroiled with each other. When you empower folks by having them see themselves, you empower them to want to take up space politically and culturally. I’ve built my touring and performing career largely through the DIY punk space, which is tied to a kind of radical politics. One that’s very much about pushing back against the hierarchy of the music industry. So there is a political sensibility around that space in general. I released my last full-length album in 2016, so there were a number of shows, a number of protests, and a number of explicit moments of resistance to the Trump administration that I was asked to perform at or to call attention to.
KJ: How have these moments of resistance concretely impacted the relationship between artists and the state?
ELK: Most notably, the world of organizing has really solidified in the last few years, specifically in regard to unions and working folks. There’s a group called United Musicians and Allied Workers that I started organizing with early on in the pandemic. Part of our work has been calling legislators, demanding that we look into Spotify and its practices around compensation—or lack thereof. This space has focused on touring in venues that were exploitative, and dealing with a music industry that is not at all invested in having artists live with dignity and security. Most recently, there’s been litigation around Ticketmaster and other ticketing monopolies that don’t really allow for ticketing at large-scale events to move through other channels. It keeps artists from setting up professional shows in a way where they themselves benefit from the price of tickets.
The pandemic created a new space for us to recognize musicians and artists as political subjects. Recognizing that, oh, we’re workers. We have a right to hold the state accountable for the work that we produce, which the state benefits from. We hadn’t necessarily questioned how precarious our jobs were, because we didn’t know that we could. It all comes back to the political imagination: What would it look like to have a country where artists who are not at the very, very top could afford to live their lives with dignity? We’ve seen something like this in France, where you can actually live, be employed as an artist, and have some relationship with the state.
It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely different than it is here. Here, it’s every artist for themself. Good luck.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.