Dead Rhetoric: Did it take a lot of inner strength to keep going at points, if you have that level of intensity being thrust at you at a semi-regular basis?
Crisis: I was a New York street-rat anyways. I had been living in New York and I knew very much how it was to live in New York. Seeing that kind of an attitude wasn’t so surprising to me. I was coming from a music-place that had to do a lot more with British rock, and I was surprised to see there was so few women. But the negative attitudes, I was like, “alright, well I already live in New York City; I already get sexually harassed on the street, this is no different.” It wasn’t really so scary. I always felt like I didn’t belong anywhere I went anyways, so that wasn’t so unusual. And there were plenty of people that were super supportive, both men and women. There weren’t that many women in the scene, but there were a lot of guys, whether they were fans or promoters who were welcoming and very supportive. It wasn’t like I was getting it from all angles. It’s was just something that I don’t think is there in the music scene anymore, that I had to deal with on a raw level.
Dead Rhetoric: The other thing, besides your vocals, that seems to get a unique stamp with you is your dreadlocks. Do you get a lot of comments on them?
Crisis: I think over the years, in general, I have. I think it’s really weird, it’s just hair. Get over it [laughs]. I don’t understand. I’ve lived in very international places and I’ve seen people wearing all sorts of hairstyles, clothing, cultural decoration…I don’t really get it. Mostly people love my hair. The only time people tend to bring it up is in an environment where men want to see women looking like a standard kind of woman. So their way of tearing me down is to make fun of my hair and tell me they would never fuck me. It just makes me laugh because he wouldn’t stand a chance, first of all. I’ve heard the hair thing my whole life and it doesn’t’ deter me. I see that again, as these particular men, having an issue with a woman standing in her [power]. Any human being who stands in their power on this planet is going to look different from their neighbor or is going to express themselves different and you really can’t worry about if people are going to worry about the details of my life. When I wake up in the morning, my hair isn’t really an important thing on my agenda. It’s just there, you know what I mean [laughs]? It’s like my fingernails, I don’t really put a lot of thought into it, so if you are trying to talk to me about my hair, it doesn’t really chip away at my stronghold at all.
Dead Rhetoric: With your vocal approach, and the way that Crisis shifted over the years, did you ever feel that the band was a little ahead of its time?
Crisis: That’s what some people say. I try not to think about those things too much. I think that if you get into the mindset of “oh, I’ve missed my window of time,” or “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” you tend to look at life in a more negative way. I have said that I feel out of time and place on the planet, but at the same time, I think that things happen for a reason and that they are what they are supposed to be. I feel very satisfied with everything that happened in my life at that time. If I look at it in terms of musical culture, yeah I guess we were an out of place band I guess. But if I look at it in the arc of my life and my own personal past, it made perfect sense for me to be in that band at that time and to go through everything I did and all the challenges and triumphs and to break all that musical ground. Which definitely wasn’t the goal. The goal was more to find the gut and sing from my heart and expose myself. I wasn’t thinking about those kind of things.
Certainly there were times in the band where maybe we should have been in a different place successfully or visibility-wise, or touring with bigger bands and doing much more. That’s why I also don’t feel dissatisfied with leaving the band when I did because I felt that we did what we were supposed to do. I felt like we were a band that always worked really, really hard and I don’t believe that we didn’t work hard enough to get where we wanted to get. I feel like that was an occurrence, and it was supposed to happen in the musical universe. That was the time period that it was meant to happen in. As part of a band, I try to look at things like, you can have a goal and you can work your hardest to get towards that goal and do the best you can along the way reaching your goal but sometimes life is bigger than just your human will, which is very connected to the Earth life and accomplishing things. Sometimes there’s a bigger picture at hand, and my small little self may not have control over that bigger picture. If I can look back at those days and say, “oh I didn’t reach a bunch of goals,” or I can look back and say, “Wow actually I reached all those goals.” I set those goals when I was 18 and I reached all those goals and that’s an exciting thing. Then life had something else in store for me to move onto.
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Part II will post tomorrow night, Thursday, March 5th.