Bands to Watch
Matthew Winters
Space Opera
Jaeda
Ze Krau
FAUS
Peer Review
Local music experts critique local musicians' CDs
"Not knowing what you’re going to say and what’s going to come out of your brain… it’s such a rush. You never feel more alive.”
Jaeda Glasgow, the woman who has turned heads in Spokane hip-hop over the past few years, is recalling the moment when she knew she could do it — the precise second she knew she could write lyrics, capture the attention of a crowd and rap them into submission.
There was an audience of thousands of people in a Dutch drum and bass club. It was 2004 and Jaeda, who was touring as backup dancer with psych-rapper Th’ Mole, had meandered away from her friends and found herself here in the crowd. There was a DJ. The beat. The energy. A break in the crowd. She grabbed the mic.
“It’s funny because I’ve always been a writer.
I started with keeping journals, and that was my therapy through all those teenage years that were so difficult. I always wrote these cheesy hallmark poems.”
But at the club, she says, is where she changed from a poet to a performer. A lyricist to a full-blown emcee.
“There’s no way out of it for me. It’s a way of life.
If I didn’t play music…,” she pauses, “No, I couldn’t not play it. It’s one of those things I’m so passionate about. I hate it sometimes. But if I didn’t do it, I just wouldn’t be happy.”
These days when she’s onstage — whether she’s performing at a punk club or in a boxing ring— she’s a fearless performer. Among the deep baritones of the Bad Penmanship crew (a local hip-hop collective of which she says she’s the “First Lady”), Jaeda is a point-blank shot. She cannot be ignored. On the mic, she raps about love and spirituality like she’s talking on the phone with a girlfriend: chatty, blunt, unafraid to tell you when you’re acting like a skank-ho. She dances to the beats and smiles to the crowd — crowds that tend to be estrogen-heavy, especially at her solo shows. Girls dance and sing back at her. Jaeda smiles thank-you’s at them, handing the mic off to her fans to finish the lyrics she’s started.
“I’m kind of soft-spoken, but I have this femininity, and then I get onstage and I have a lot of conviction and force in what I’m saying,” she says. “I take people by surprise, and they have no idea. They are like, ‘Oh, white girl? Rapper? I get it.’ And I’m like ‘OK, yeah. Now — wait.”
Jaeda says she thrives on judgments like this — not because she has something to prove to people, just that she likes the challenge for herself.
“I invite that. I am always proving new things to myself and pushing my boundaries,” she says. “I think it’s a cool vehicle being female. We’re not one-sided,” she says. “I’m a mom and a wife … I’m a country girl and then I come into the city and I’m this urban hip-hop artist. And my music is my time.”
