PREMIERE: 'FLick' / POOKIE [Interview]
Creating (literal) sound waves with her conversational flow, dynamic presence and beats rooted in hip-hip, POOKIE levels up with her forthcoming album FLick.
Lyricist, producer and vibe creator, one of the most important jazz/hip hop artists in Naarm, POOKIE releases her debut album FLick tomorrow (October 25th) on Heavy Machinery Records as a part of the Flash Foward program.
POOKIE delivers a poignant, warm and straight up vibey body of work. An artist capable of making listeners feel everything with just one track, POOKIE uses her spoken-word bars, sharp lyrical talent and holistic creative vision to bring us in to her world and to share her experiences with us with vulnerability and honesty.
“It’s like Sade - if she was South Sudanese and grew up in Perth, Western Australia.”
We were so lucky to sit down with POOKIE to learn about her forthcoming album and to premiere this incredible collection of work.
Listen to FLick below and preorder on Bandcamp.
Congratulations! This is such an amazing body of work that you’re putting out. So FLick encompasses the past four years of music exploration, could you tell me more about that?
So I only started making music in 2017, and that was just like on GarageBand, just playing around with it. And then the following year I started studying production, and it was like ‘ahhhhh’, because I’m an introvert I’m a pretty shy person. I actually first started off with spoken word gis and stuff. And I realised I wanted to take my stage performance thing to another level. And I guess I thought that would push me to come out of my shell because there was more riding on it, maybe? So yeah I was studying at Box Hill, they have a music program there, and these music students hit me up one time for their recital to rap over their music.
And that was my first time playing with a band so I thought, ‘that was cool, I liked that’. So that was 2018, and we connected - it was cool, there were good vibes and stuff. When I started my second year in 2019 I asked them to be a band with me and we just started playing every other weekend. So throughout 2019 was us sharpening our sound… we became tighter. It was cool because I had already produced some songs and we got to work together to figure out how we could turn it into a live situation, and that also really helped me develop music language and vice versa - helping them understand the production world. So I already had a lot of songs written, and because I didn’t write them with the band we could kind of twist and shape it to how we wanted it.
We did that for the whole year and built a really cool name for ourselves, playing at festivals and other gigs. 2020 was going to be a good year...and then KABLAM. So we kind of just shut it all down for the most part. We tried to do a mix tape, which had a lot of cool stuff in there, but I wasn’t sure. I felt like our first project together should be really tight. And I’d actually applied for a grant, like a much smaller amount than what Flash Forward gave me and I got rejected for it - and I was like ‘awww’- and then here comes Miles calling me one day telling me about Flash Forward. And I was suspicious as first, so he had to chase me up a few times and I was like ‘are you sure there’s no strings attached?’
But yeah I got the crew together and we had a little writing retreat to put the album together. That was really nice because it had actually been a really long time since we’d even heard some of the songs. So we got to play them and recoup and reimagine this work.
Photo: Michaela Dutkova
This kind of leads to my next question, what’s your process when creating such an intricate collection of music with so many people and so many instruments, especially during COVID. How does that collaboration happen, do you have a specific process?
Not really, I’m a pretty laid back person. I think because it is originally all my music they understand that, and so if I don’t like something it’s totally fine and if I do like something it’s also totally fine. Then on the other hand I give them a lot of creative freedom, it’s kind of like ‘let’s just toss these ideas around and see what feels good’. I feel like it was pretty simple.
It sounds like a really trusting process, you all trust each other to know what’s going to work. So does this album have a consistent personal narrative throughout the entire collection?
I didn’t think so when I was writing the songs, but now that I get to look at them from here, definitely. A lot of it just outlines my experiences from that time. When I write it’s usually what I’m feeling in that moment. I find it very difficult to be like ‘oh I should write a song, what I’m going to write about?”. Like that doesn’t work for me, it’s gonna be some bullshit. So those songs, it’s a bit of a timeline, and it just reminds me of myself in that time. The things I was going through, my beliefs and all that kind of stuff.
So Beesting is so dope. Just a lovely jazzy hip hop creation and the bridge is so cool - can you tell us more about it?
Beesting is cool. It’s actually one of the songs we wrote together as a band so that’s not one of my pre-produced songs. When I think of Beesting I think of a moment when we were most in alignment with each other. It was a random show rehearsal and sometimes rehearsing can become a bit mundane because you’re just playing the same songs and sometimes you can be like ‘ugh I actually feel more creative today than work’. So we probably ordered pizza or some shit (knowing us) and came back into the rehearsal room, and instead of rehearsing we all just started playing around on our instruments here and there. We were like ‘ay that basslines cool’ and they were like ‘what you got?’ and then someone would play a little riff and we would all be like ‘ooooo’. Then whenever we got a nice groove going I would start writing some lyrics in the background. So it came out of us needing to just be creative and rest and play. I think that ‘Beesting’ for me is representative when you just let yourself go and allow yourself to make music, music that you enjoy you know?
“When I think of Beesting I think of a moment when we were most in alignment with each other…I think that ‘Beesting’ for me is representative when you just let yourself go and allow yourself to make music, music that you enjoy you know?”
Okay so also ‘Mad’, is huge. It’s full power! Who or what are you mad at?
I’m mad about a lot of things! So many things to be mad at. Mad is one of the first songs I ever wrote and finished. I wrote this in like… I reckon I wrote this in 2017, because when I first wrote it I made it on GarageBand. It was like old, old, old. I wrote it around the time that the news was just giving South Sudanese people a hard-ass time. And it got to a point where I didn’t feel safe and when I was out I could feel the animosity. And I was like, ‘wait a minute, y’all are the fucked up ones’. So I was mad as hell and that was my only way to really let it out, theres not much you can do sometimes. Especially when you’re angry because you’re being oppressed and the people oppressing you are the ones in power, like anything I feel like I could have done to release my anger was probably illegal… so lemme just go write a song. That song has taken so many forms, it’s in my first EP as well but as a produced version and I feel like it’s a constant narrative in my life so that’s why it could be rebirthed and it’s staying with me until today.
Wow I’m really excited to hear the next iteration of ‘Mad ’and what trajectory it takes. In your writing, your identity is something that you can hear in it. How does this inform your creativity, is it in the rhythm, or the lyrics?
It’s hard to explain. I feel like I’ve explained this to my friends before and they were like ‘what?’. I feel like in my brain I can focus on many different things at once. So for example, we’re just chilling and having a chat, I’m talking to you, but I’m also doing quantum physics back here, and I’m thinking about a beat I want to make, and what I want to paint, and I hope my family’s okay.. you know? It can be very exhausting because sometimes I’m just like ‘shut uuupp’, but when I’m writing I am thinking about all those things. Musically I want to hear my voice as an instrument as well. I don’t want to just write my story, it needs to be musical so I’m thinking about that. But I also don’t want to write bogus lyrics so I’m thinking… how can I put that? And I’m thinking about whether it goes with the music and if the music goes with it. Sometimes when I’m producing I might go back and remove some of the instrumentation so it fits with what I’m saying. I feel like I’m always looking at all the aspects of it as I am doing it. Yeah I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like one big holistic process.
Was there a driving intention behind the album?
I don’t know, I mean I’ve always wanted to create a big project. I more of a project creator as opposed to just releasing singles. I like working towards big things. It just felt like the next step, we had done all this work and pruned and sharpened our music/performance skills and also when we move on it’s nice to encapsulate things. It can open up space for new ideas and all that stuff, because knowing me I could just work on it forever. Having an end date helps.
Photo: POOKIE
What do you envision to be the step after this for POOKIE?
I definitely want to collaborate with more artists in Naarm, or other states as well. My journey so far has been quite solitudinal. Even with a band it’s been my music and kind of working towards my project. But yeah I’ve been listening to a lot of music that gets produced in our areas and I want to start tapping into it and opening myself up to it, and being vulnerable to it as well because making art with people is not always easy. You’re not always going to agree on the best way to create, but I can’t make beats in my bedroom forever. I mean I can, but who is this for?
That’s a great question, who is it for?
It’s for me, first and foremost. And then it’s for South Sudanese people. And then my family, I think one of my big driving forces is to get to a point where I can support my family, and they can live a life that’s nice.
Thank you for sharing that, and I just wanted to ask this, you don’t have to answer if you don’t feel comfortable, but what’s it been like as a South Sudanese creator in these spaces?
It’s been pretty lonely. I feel like I really had to learn to get aggressive to get the things that I wanted. A lot of the time it’s a two sided thing. There’s the fact that I’m South Sudanese and in a lot of the spaces I’m in people undermine me and my knowledge and not expect that I know as much as I do. There’s two results from that; it’s either disrespect or saviour complex. Both of them are problematic. And then the other side, which is also saviour complex, is people using me as a box ticker, you know aligning themselves with me so that they are activists. That makes it hard for me to trust people because everyone’s intentions are different. But to be honest, for me personally it’s been okay. I realised earlier on that with the whole skin colour thing a lot of people are… stupid. As soon as I realised that I thought that if I don’t pay any mind to the actual bullshit, I can just work on myself and make myself the best that I can. I’m glad I had that outlook because it just made me focus. But I think for a lot of people if you don’t have that outlook it can be really discouraging, or you can just end up in the wrong place. For example when I release my first single ‘Tuesday’, a lot of people approached me in a way of like ‘this is how I can help you’. But it was like ‘if you loved the song, why do you think you can help me?’ You know if I was white and I made that song people would be offering me things, offering me ways to grow and all that shit instead of telling me how I can be helped.
Fuck it must be so hard to build trust within the industry.
Yeah and it scares me about all the other emerging artists of colour. It is really hard, especially if you don’t know what direction you’re going in and someone who obviously has more experience than you comes offering help then it’s so easy to think it’s a great idea. And I do see a lot of young artists getting lost and fucked over and it’s just… ugh.
Knowing that there are a lot of young people across so-called Australia who look up to you as an artist, do you have any words of advice or tips when it comes to navigating this?
Trust your intuition. Even if your intuition ends up being wrong, that’s not that bad, that’s a learning experience. Really trust your gut and give it the credibility that it deserves. Because if your gut is smart enough to make something that you like, you can just feel things!
Meditate y’all! Get in alignment with yourself.
Everybody, even people in the industry they’re just human beings. Like when you meet someone and are deciding if you want to be friends with them, it’s the same principle. It’s also a place where genuine relationships can be made. It’s really important to look at it like that, judge each person for who they are. Not for their position, not for what they can offer you… what vibes are they giving?
FLick is seriously dope release, and is really the perfect accompaniment to Naarm’s first weekend out of lockdown. It’s being released on vinyl and digital on the 25th of October. Make sure to listen and pre-order now!
Follow POOKIE on Instagram and Soundcloud.
Words by Ria Pillai (@brown.suga.princess)
Cover Art by POOKIE
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