On staying connected to community

So there is this quote that I really love from you. You’re talking about being able to have your instruments be wireless on stage, and how that you gave you freedom of movement. You said that you asked yourself, “What else is prohibiting me from being wild?” So I’m curious–not just in the concrete like being wireless, but emotionally or in any other sense–what has in the past or currently prohibited you from being wild, from being your most authentic self?

Just society. I always have this vision, like one day I’m going to be on a farm. I’m a hippie at heart. I just want to chill and be growing my own food and everything. But I feel like the system’s kind of set up for us to just work and go to sleep, wake up, and not really grow your own things for yourself.

Of course, yeah.

So just like society, you know?

Yeah. I know that you’ve talked a little bit about feeling like you don’t have as many Black audience members as you would like to. You’ve talked about how that could potentially be because of how your style of music has been marketed in the past. I know it’s tricky to acknowledge race as an aspect of identity without making it all of the identity or being pigeonholed. How do you walk that line between respecting this aspect of your identity, without feeling like you have to do anything because of your identity?

Yeah. I just feel like… I’m trying to find the wording.

Yeah, I guess I’m curious how you interact with stereotypes. You don’t want it to control your life, but you can’t pretend that society doesn’t exist. In general, how do you navigate that? What feelings does it bring up for you? What challenges?

I just feel like my music has kind of been gate-kept. I’m going on tours, and I’m going to these places where they fly me out and house me. But then it’s usually these corporations. I’m on a run, and then next thing you know, it’s just all these white spaces I’m performing for.

There’s also the structure of the booking agencies and the touring routes. It’s harder to tour in parts of Africa, Brazil, or Mexico. On top of that, I feel like my music is alternative. If I were to be a specific genre like hip hop or R&B, there might be all Black people.

I look at myself when I was a little girl–when I was 16, 18, 19, 20, 21–going to these shows and what type of music I liked. I envision the audience I’m making music for, and it’s basically people that were like me. There are people that are in white spaces, the only Black girl in white spaces, kind of like alternative Black women. I see those people at my shows.

Yeah.

I see little versions of me.

At the end of the day, I still feel like I am performing for people like me. I feel like because of society in general, the way the touring routes work, and with the certain type of music that I do, it’s just going to be harder.

So I just make sure I stay connected in the community. When I talk to friends that run their own Black queer spaces, I make sure to basically just be like, “Yeah, girl, I can play the show. You don’t got to go through my management.” I just kind of do those shows and do it directly, because those are the ones that I want to do more of.

There’s another quote from you I love, where you talk about how being an artist is narcissistic because it’s about the idea of you and not the real you. I guess I’m curious what parts of the process feel the most narcissistic to you?

For example, how you have to be a content creator now to be an artist. You just have to come up with all this content. You just got this video camera in front of your face every day. Then you’re trying to make sure you look good, and got a good angle.

Yeah, and how do you manage that? Is that something that you don’t like? Or is it something that you’ve learned to manage better?

It’s something that I don’t like, but I’m also trying to make content about different things. I like to consume content, because that’s how I taught myself how to do a lot of things. So I was like, “Oh, well, let me just be that. Like, these are all my violins.” This is where it’s almost educational, kind of funny content.

You’ve talked about not wanting to keep putting out the same body of work–wanting to evolve and how you want to reinvent. So I’m curious, how do you decide what to keep constant? Are there themes that you keep returning to? Or is everything up for grabs basically?

The theme is the violin because the violin is the heart of everything that I do. So I feel like there is nothing I can’t do and I can do any kind of music, any kind of genre. I can do any kind of character, play any kind of role. But I think the violin is the heart of everything. So I feel like I’ll never go astray from that and then I’ll always be Sudan Archives.

Right. I know you have an interest in ethnomusicology. Does it inform your music?

Well, that is so important to me because basically my career has taken off into this thing that’s a job. So it can feel a little like, “Dang, where’s my hobbies now?” Because now my hobby is my job, so I need a hobby. But I realized that my hobbies still branch from music.

So my hobbies are to collect traditional string instruments from all around the world because I’m really interested in specifically the ancestors of the violin. Because the violin has been–at least as far as American culture–it’s been looked at as a very Western instrument, but it’s not, it’s so many other things.

So I collect all these violins. And I started specifically this Fun with Fiddle Series on Instagram where I basically talk about the fiddle and where it’s from and how to play the violin.

Do you feel like doing the series where you educate people and learning about all of these instruments and their histories, do you feel like that’s impacted how you make music or you as an artist?

Yeah, because basically in those videos I talk about that. I talk about this African violin, well, this Ghanaian violin. It’s basically kind of like an ancestor to the violin.

Seeing Africans play gave me representation for me to keep playing violin. Because I was like, “Oh, this violin is not just this white thing that I randomly just did and I’m an enigma.” This is something that’s been in my African DNA for a long time because I’m African-American.

So that makes sense that I’m playing the fiddle. Slaves played the fiddle and Africans played it. It’s just like to see the connection of it, it made me feel more comfortable just breaking the boundaries of the Western views of the violin. Because I’m like, it’s not just that. It’s so many more faces.

Yeah, I’m actually, both my parents were born in Nigeria and then came here.

Oh, cool.

So you just taught me something too. That’s so fun.

Nice. Yeah, when I got tested, they said it was 75 percent Nigerian, so that was really cool to know. Because we don’t know. I only know my grandparents’ history. I don’t know anything.

You know a lot about the history of music in Ghana and various other countries, so that’s very neat. You taught me something. Do you feel like being an artist has made you more self-assured about your identity? And if so, how? Any aspect of your identity, like your personality, your life?

I think so. I think it helped me connect with my roots as just an African American, because I have always been obsessed. I thought I wanted to be an African studies teacher too when I was younger before the ethnomusicology part. But I grew up in a lot of white spaces, so I had to find all these things and learn history on my own.

Because in school they’re not teaching it to you. You got to find out the truth. So I was seeking the truth. Then, seeking the truth taught me self-empowerment because I was like, “Oh, my natural hair is beautiful. I don’t need to poison myself to have straight hair.”

So I just got super like hippy. It made me basically become, I guess somewhat of a Afrofuturist back in the day. But really I’m just naturally, me. I’m just being myself, loving who I am.