In the second installment of the “Origin of Woke” series, Elijah Watson highlights Georgia Anne Muldrow, the musician who introduced Erykah Badu to the word woke.
“To be woke is to be black.”
I posit this thought to Georgia Anne Muldrow, one of the most forward-thinking musicians of our time, as we speak on the phone in early October.
There is a brief silence.
Then:
In the second installment of the “Origin of Woke” series, Elijah Watson highlights Georgia Anne Muldrow, the musician who introduced Erykah Badu to the word woke.
“To be woke is to be black.”
I posit this thought to Georgia Anne Muldrow, one of the most forward-thinking musicians of our time, as we speak on the phone in early October.
There is a brief silence.
Then:
“Woke is definitely a black experience — woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out, and put you in a new location and then you come to and understand where you are ain’t home and the people around you ain’t your neighbors. They’re not acting in a neighborly fashion, they’re the ones who conked you on your head. You got kidnapped here and then you got punked out of your own language, everything. That’s woke — understanding what your ancestors went through. Just being in touch with the struggle that our people have gone through here and understanding we’ve been fighting since the very day we touched down here. There was no year where the fight wasn’t going down.”
This is only one of many profound insights Muldrow offers on the idea of wokeness during our two-and-a-half-hour talk, and what it’s become since she first uttered the word on Erykah Badu‘s “Master Teacher” a decade ago.
Sure, she’s happy to see the word woke become a rallying cry of resilience for black people in America. But she also doesn’t mince her words on wokeness becoming a performative trend for the masses in recent years.
“Most people who are woke ain’t calling themselves woke. Most people who are woke are agonizing inside,” Muldrow says. “They’re too busy being depressed to call themselves woke.”
I could have called Muldrow to talk about a number of topics such as her storied career or multiple collaborative albums with partner Dudley Perkins. But I wanted to talk about the word woke and her role in introducing it to the mainstream.
I embarked on this journey to discover the origins of the word woke because of the uniqueness in its present ubiquity, considering its past is shrouded in mystery. But I also hoped to highlight the erasure of the people who invented it in its political and racial context — black people.
I started this journey researching the work of Harlem author William Melvin Kelley, who’s credited with coining woke in his 1962 New York Times essay “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” and traced its use to Badu’s “Master Teacher” almost five decades later. As important as the word is to our current political state, it is also important to understand the word’s ties to blackness. That the word that was passed from one black person to another, expanding its reach from the streets of Harlem to the West Coast and eventually into the airwaves for mass consumption, making Muldrow an integral part of woke’s story.
Georgia Anne Muldrow’s life story begins in Los Angeles, California, where she was born to a musical home. Ronald Muldrow and Rickie Byars-Beckwith, her father, and mother, respectively, are acclaimed musicians, with the two having worked with Eddie Harris, Pharaoh Sanders, Roland Hanna, and others.
In the early 2000s, Muldrow relocated to New York City to attend New York University, where she enrolled in the school’s jazz program. There, she met the peers who would become her frequent collaborators including Bilal, Robert Glasper, and the Harlem alto saxophonist who indirectly introduced her to woke — Lakecia Benjamin.
“The way she would use [the phrase] is like ‘I’m trying to stay woke because I’m tired’ or ‘I was trying to stay woke but I was bored,'” Muldrow recalls. “It was Kecia talking about how she was trying to stay up — like literally not pass out.”
As a homage to Benjamin, Muldrow had created her own t-shirt with the words stay woke, writing it in marker over her heart. But the phrase came to embody Muldrow’s relentless work ethic and desire to find and love herself while on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“I had a lot of sleep deprivation [at the time], I literally stayed up,” Muldrow says. “My self-esteem was really bad. I felt like if I wasn’t productive I wasn’t shyt. I just felt like the only thing I was good for was making music and if I couldn’t be doing that all the time then I really had to face myself.”
Muldrow’s hectic work ethic ultimately took a toll on her. This, along with the September 11 terrorist attacks, resulted in her returning to Los Angeles. (Muldrow was reserved in discussing the incident during our conversation, but, shortly after, I discovered through an old press release for one of her shows that she was in the area when the attack occurred. She was on a subway crossing underneath the World Trade Center when the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the building that morning.)
However, little did Muldrow know she was the bearer of a coastal cultural exchange — the West Coast was about to get introduced to her theory of wokeness.
Upon returning to Los Angeles, Muldrow paired with Dibiase, Ras G, and Sa-Ra Creative Partners, the latter of whom she’d originally written “Master Teacher” for in 2005 for the trio’s unreleased third album, Black Fuzz. The song that marks the entry of “stay woke” into the musical mainstream would ultimately find Badu, in the throes of her own creative purging.
More here : The Origin Of Woke: How Erykah Badu And Georgia Anne Muldrow Sparked The “Stay Woke” Era - Okayplayer
“To be woke is to be black.”
I posit this thought to Georgia Anne Muldrow, one of the most forward-thinking musicians of our time, as we speak on the phone in early October.
There is a brief silence.
Then:
In the second installment of the “Origin of Woke” series, Elijah Watson highlights Georgia Anne Muldrow, the musician who introduced Erykah Badu to the word woke.
“To be woke is to be black.”
I posit this thought to Georgia Anne Muldrow, one of the most forward-thinking musicians of our time, as we speak on the phone in early October.
There is a brief silence.
Then:
“Woke is definitely a black experience — woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out, and put you in a new location and then you come to and understand where you are ain’t home and the people around you ain’t your neighbors. They’re not acting in a neighborly fashion, they’re the ones who conked you on your head. You got kidnapped here and then you got punked out of your own language, everything. That’s woke — understanding what your ancestors went through. Just being in touch with the struggle that our people have gone through here and understanding we’ve been fighting since the very day we touched down here. There was no year where the fight wasn’t going down.”
This is only one of many profound insights Muldrow offers on the idea of wokeness during our two-and-a-half-hour talk, and what it’s become since she first uttered the word on Erykah Badu‘s “Master Teacher” a decade ago.
Sure, she’s happy to see the word woke become a rallying cry of resilience for black people in America. But she also doesn’t mince her words on wokeness becoming a performative trend for the masses in recent years.
“Most people who are woke ain’t calling themselves woke. Most people who are woke are agonizing inside,” Muldrow says. “They’re too busy being depressed to call themselves woke.”
I could have called Muldrow to talk about a number of topics such as her storied career or multiple collaborative albums with partner Dudley Perkins. But I wanted to talk about the word woke and her role in introducing it to the mainstream.
I embarked on this journey to discover the origins of the word woke because of the uniqueness in its present ubiquity, considering its past is shrouded in mystery. But I also hoped to highlight the erasure of the people who invented it in its political and racial context — black people.
I started this journey researching the work of Harlem author William Melvin Kelley, who’s credited with coining woke in his 1962 New York Times essay “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” and traced its use to Badu’s “Master Teacher” almost five decades later. As important as the word is to our current political state, it is also important to understand the word’s ties to blackness. That the word that was passed from one black person to another, expanding its reach from the streets of Harlem to the West Coast and eventually into the airwaves for mass consumption, making Muldrow an integral part of woke’s story.
Georgia Anne Muldrow’s life story begins in Los Angeles, California, where she was born to a musical home. Ronald Muldrow and Rickie Byars-Beckwith, her father, and mother, respectively, are acclaimed musicians, with the two having worked with Eddie Harris, Pharaoh Sanders, Roland Hanna, and others.
In the early 2000s, Muldrow relocated to New York City to attend New York University, where she enrolled in the school’s jazz program. There, she met the peers who would become her frequent collaborators including Bilal, Robert Glasper, and the Harlem alto saxophonist who indirectly introduced her to woke — Lakecia Benjamin.
“The way she would use [the phrase] is like ‘I’m trying to stay woke because I’m tired’ or ‘I was trying to stay woke but I was bored,'” Muldrow recalls. “It was Kecia talking about how she was trying to stay up — like literally not pass out.”
As a homage to Benjamin, Muldrow had created her own t-shirt with the words stay woke, writing it in marker over her heart. But the phrase came to embody Muldrow’s relentless work ethic and desire to find and love herself while on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“I had a lot of sleep deprivation [at the time], I literally stayed up,” Muldrow says. “My self-esteem was really bad. I felt like if I wasn’t productive I wasn’t shyt. I just felt like the only thing I was good for was making music and if I couldn’t be doing that all the time then I really had to face myself.”
Muldrow’s hectic work ethic ultimately took a toll on her. This, along with the September 11 terrorist attacks, resulted in her returning to Los Angeles. (Muldrow was reserved in discussing the incident during our conversation, but, shortly after, I discovered through an old press release for one of her shows that she was in the area when the attack occurred. She was on a subway crossing underneath the World Trade Center when the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the building that morning.)
However, little did Muldrow know she was the bearer of a coastal cultural exchange — the West Coast was about to get introduced to her theory of wokeness.
Upon returning to Los Angeles, Muldrow paired with Dibiase, Ras G, and Sa-Ra Creative Partners, the latter of whom she’d originally written “Master Teacher” for in 2005 for the trio’s unreleased third album, Black Fuzz. The song that marks the entry of “stay woke” into the musical mainstream would ultimately find Badu, in the throes of her own creative purging.
More here : The Origin Of Woke: How Erykah Badu And Georgia Anne Muldrow Sparked The “Stay Woke” Era - Okayplayer
