I Need To Tell You Something

An eight-month long conversation with Natalita

Words and photography by Katie Sikora.

“A Messenger of transformation and reflection. // Iamthecreator. // Independent. Singer. Songwriter. Producer. Performance Artist. Dancer. Woman. // These are the soundtracks to the creation of me. // I honor the mother through her landscapes. // Each terrain teaches me a different language. // Documented through music, I journey to the source. // Brewing rhythmic potions…

Allow me to heal, move, and free you.”

A little over a year ago I met and interviewed Los Angeles-born, New Orleans-based musician Natalita. Shortly after that I commenced reading Feminine Endings by Susan McClary and to put it millennially, I was having my mind blown. McClary uses seven essays to address the problems of gender and sexuality in music beginning in the early 17th century, bringing the reader through modern day rock and performance art. As quoted from her Bandcamp profile and reprinted above, Natalita describes her EP, entitled 6, as “the soundtracks to the creation of [herself]”. It was as if each time McClary highlighted a detrimental difference in the way males and females are depicted in music, Natalita (through her philosophies and her music) showed me her efforts to extinguish those constructs. Every time Natalita described that which is important to her process and development as an artist, McClary provided the educational background that helped me realize just how ground-breaking Natalita’s approach is even today.

Over the course of eight months, I interviewed Natalita again and again, sometimes formally in her home with my questions written out in front of me, sometimes haphazardly after a show in green rooms and storage closets with my audio recorder in her breathless face. I continue to be awed by her fascinating ability to split wide open all the things I think I know about why and how I operate in the world, much like I felt while reading McClary’s book. The following are excerpts from those interviews with insight and quotations from Feminine Endings sewed together to tell her story.

Katie Sikora: When did you begin playing and creating music?

Natalita: I think I’ve always been creating since I was born. I would always put shows on for my family. I was always choreographing dance numbers for my friends when they’d come over. Creating has always been a part of my life. I didn’t look at it as a career until I was about 24 but I was constantly creating.

Can you tell me about your move here from Los Angeles? What was the catalyst and how has your life changed?

I had a mental breakdown in LA that was really intense and happened very slowly through time but it finally reached a peak. I wasn’t eating. I was picking at my face obsessively and self-mutilating because I was really unhappy. I was making my art and I love my art because it’s a therapy but there was something that was still missing. Los Angeles culture is very much about that “new”, I always say. I’ve been to buildings that got knocked down for new buildings that got knocked down for new buildings and that’s how they treat their artists. They’re not really willing to process and work through art with an artist. You must be created and sold. And as an artist that was really weighing on me emotionally and spiritually and physically. When I decided it was best for me to finally leave the nest, everyone kept telling me New York, San Francisco, and I just kept thinking: New Orleans, New Orleans. I didn’t know anyone and drove out here with the intention of starting over. I didn’t even know if I wanted to do music anymore. I just knew I was going crazy and I needed to get out. About three months in, everything changed. My skin started to get better — I started to get better. It was beyond the physical. I started to reconnect with source and I had a really intense spiritual awakening here or a confrontation I guess. I kind of look at it as going into the blackness instead of running away from it which most people do. I really faced it and saw God — goddess, source, divine, however you want to call it — for the first time. Life hasn’t changed but I’ve changed tremendously.

You said you “reconnected with source”. Can you explain that a little bit more?

First off, being the type of artist I am and the way that I work — I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t go to school for anything. I just press buttons and I go “That sounds right.” I’ve worked with other producers who’ve asked to sit in on a session with me and I’ve always just been like, “And then I do this, I don’t know what this means but that sounds right.” I would say that I really work off the voices inside my head. I’ve been hearing voices my whole life. I lived in a culture and a home that meant well but didn’t really understand that so maybe I was ill, they thought. But I came out here and I started to delve more into prayer and meditation. Not from a religious standpoint but from an intuitive one. As women that’s all we have left. Everything we were taught by nature has been burnt by man, literally, including our bodies. I feel that all we have left is literally our will. I decided I didn’t want to be penetrated, physically at first and then emotionally as well. I just wanted to delve in.

I was hooding myself with this big, black fabric during performances because I didn’t want to be seen. If I had to define it, I would call it my ancestral self and from that vision I just kept going deeper and deeper within and I’m still going deeper within and it’s affected me and my art tremendously. It became ‘I’m an artist creating for myself’ to “I’m an artist, I’m just the channel and something is talking to me and using my body and I’m a willing sacrifice for that”. It’s hard to put into words what exactly the source or the divine or the god or the ancestor is but I think my art and my stage performances are the outcome of what I’m discovering.

Time and again, Natalita expressed her “inability” to know what she is doing when she creates her music. And yes, from an intellectual point of view, this seems like a negative. But when you consider that intellect was long deemed a solely male characteristic as well as the fact that “individuals learn how to be gendered beings through their interactions with cultural discourses such a music”, I think Natalita dodged a bullet. Although she has had to deal with sexism in other aspects of her life, in not coming to the table with a wealth of typical musical knowledge to inform her songs she was able to create a world that was truly her own: art not informed by age-old gender constructs. With regards to music, sex is biological while gender and sexuality are literally “constructed” by composers. In Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, the composer perpetuated the idea that unless reconciled by a male character, women are subordinate and threatening. Even when you disregard the human behind the composition, the male and female features are taken for granted as the “way music is”, reproduced without conscious intervention. For example: a phrase or movement that ends in an unstressed or weak cadence is termed a “feminine ending.” McClary asks “How do women participate as equals without perpetuating the ideologies that inform these male and female binaries?” Perhaps by not learning the antiquated ideologies in the first place.

Is that the darkness that you mentioned previously that you were first running away from but now are going into?

Yes, that beautiful, beautiful blackness. In dwelling in the darkness and seeing what I could find (which inevitably was myself) I started to recognize that the way we treat women and people of color signifies that we really do fear the darkness. We’re obsessed with light, we’re obsessed with white, we’re obsessed with white Jesus and our savior. There’s no balance. I started honoring the blackness that is in women naturally because we are the creators. We literally have a black hole inside of us. We have our womb. Previously, I had a lot of gender issues because of preconceived notions of what I thought I had to be. This album is about entering that blackness and honoring it which I really need right now, especially after this election, especially after all these shootings, especially because of where we’re at right now as a society.

Is your music a catharsis?

Yeah!

Is it cathartic for you or for the audience or both?

It’s completely for me. But I recognize that my audience, despite all our differences, also suffers. We all feel the same pain of not being present, not being connected with one another, with nature, feeling alone, unloved. They’re common feelings we all have. You could be Joe Schmoe from Buttfuck, Minnesota and you could watch my show and be like, “I’ve been there. I am there.” I don’t give a fuck what gender you are, what color you are because none of that exists to me. I believe in source and that’s what I want. I want my audience to feel their source and recognize that that is what connects us and what makes us all the same. That is where our sympathy for one another will come from.

How do you think that the music you’re creating on this EP and the things that you’re working on here in New Orleans are different if at all from what you were creating in Los Angeles?

I’m completing my third EP. It’s going to be called 6 and it is a collection of songs about the darkness that I entered that I now honor. All my EPs have been honest in the sense that they are where I was at the time. On my first two, I was definitely reliant on other producers and mixers and cared more about other people’s opinions.

This EP I didn’t give a fuck. I was like, “This is what I’m going through and I’m going to honor that and I’m going to push myself as a producer to finish each and every song and learn as a mixer to make it sound the way that I want it to sound.” It’s different in the sense that I’m different. The next one will be different because I’ll probably be different then too.

What is the thought process when choosing costuming or stage setup?

Am I going to be comfortable? Do I have to wear shoes? For me that’s a big thing. I love to be naked. The amount of honesty I’m giving on stage — I feel like if you see a picture, you’re like, “Oh, she’s naked,” but if you’re there it all makes sense. I need to be able to bear my soul and if I’m constricted, I am not fucking happy. I don’t like high heels, I don’t like waist cinchers, I don’t like bras. Freedom is a big theme of what I do and if I abide by society’s ideas of “I must have a cinched waist because I am a woman” or “my breasts must be up high because I am a woman” or “I must wear high heels because I am a woman”, that’s not freedom. And that’s fine if another artist wants to do that but that’s not my calling. I’m here to remind you of a time when you were a woman that didn’t need to wear a bra, didn’t need to wear heels. You were just a fucking woman and that was what was so fucking powerful about you.

Sexuality is the realm of human being most constrained by social order. “Madness was regarded as a female malady brought on by an excess in feminine sexuality”. And while music gives the illusion of operating outside this constraint, is that only because we have never stopped to question it? Every aspect of Western culture denies the human body (especially when it comes in the female form) and erotic impulses are seen as negative. Admittedly, it is now 2018 and we are starting to shed these antiquated thoughts on bodies and what we should or should not do with them. But the work is nowhere near finished. If we continue to address and break down gender roles and boundaries, we may be able to create new models that do not demand shame as the price for sexual freedom. It may not seem significant for someone like myself or Natalita to say we aren’t going to wear bras any longer, but experience shows that as women repeatedly hear challenges to restrictive ideologies, they become increasingly acceptable. The effect is two-fold when you see or hear an artist you admire putting it into practice in real time.

Tell me about the release show for 6.

I had been really frustrated with a lot of the shows I was having. You were there for some of them. I was always having a shit fit after and I couldn’t put to words what it was. And then after my Mardi Gras show, I didn’t want to be a part of perpetuating music as a way to numb people. I’ve always felt like the music I create has an intention and I wanted to force my audience to involve themselves in that intention. Coincidentally, I met Riley [Teahan] who is this amazing artist and has the style, aesthetic, and background of a director and her and I connected on a theatrical level because she had a direction background and I am so theatrical. It just kind of hit me: 6 is a story, let’s tell that story. Riley collaborated on making it an immersive experience. I wanted to turn the venue into a portal so people had no choice but to experience what I had experienced. It was a presentation, it was a theatre experience, it was everything I’ve been wanting to do, but it was also only the beginning.

Performance art gained popularity in the 1960s as a reaction against the erasure of people from art. Recording allows for the pleasure of the sound of the music without the (read: horrible) reminder of the bodies producing it. Performance artists using their bodies completely undermined the notion that “serious” music must separate mind and body. That was bad enough, according to the general public. But once women and minorities became artistically autonomous their decisions regarding their bodies would manifest in the art. Madonna was terrifying because she was not under masculine control and disco caused an uproar because it was the music of blacks, gays, and the working class. Both were examples of expression free from the constraints of musical masculinity.

Do you consider yourself a performance artist or your work performance art?

I am a performance artist whether I like it or not.

Do you have qualms with that?

It just gets tiring because you’re using your body a lot. Especially with the injuries I’ve had in the last year and a half, it’s been trying but it is what it is. The easiest form of expression for me is to use my body so whether I am a singer or a writer, I make my art performance art by the way I present it.

Am I correct in assuming that that was just how your art manifested itself?

It wasn’t a conscious choice. None of this was. I have no idea what I’m doing. And that’s just how I work. I literally didn’t know what 6 was about until a week before we performed it.

Was that scary, not knowing?

Yeah, frightening. It is scary because we live in a world that wants answers. The actions take me a millisecond but the answers take longer.

Do you think you could write these same songs with their same sentiments without going through the things you’ve gone through and are going through?

No. This was very specific to where I was. I’ve never moved away from my family. I’ve never felt heartbreak like that and I never will again. I will feel emotions that are extensions of those but this was sort of the first and that’s why I look at 6 as a beginning. I’ll feel these things again because I’m dramatic, I’m sad, I’m emotional but you either learn how to shun that or you learn how to embrace that and I want to learn how to embrace that because that’s what’s made me the artist that I am. 6 was made at a time when I didn’t want to embrace it. I wanted to be “normal” and now I don’t want to be normal I just want to be me.

What is the something you need to tell in “Deep”?

That’s a great question. I need to tell humans beings that they have a power that they can manifest. We are creating our lives whether we like it or not. Everything we hate and we love, we’ve created. That’s a power and we’ve used it against ourselves mostly because it’s frightening to know that you have a power and you can use that power for good for yourselves and others. For some reason, that frightens us as humans. It frightens me. But when I found that power, when I realized I descended from people of the earth, when I realized there was a power in myself that I had found in nature, I needed to tell people. It gave me the power to heal myself. Instead of looking at drugs or doctors, I suddenly had this power to heal myself. It took a different type of work that was very deep and soul crushing but I knew I could do it because I had the power. So that whisper of “I need to tell you something” is so much more than one thing. I need to tell people that we have the power to heal ourselves and 6 is about how I healed myself.

You’ve passed your one-year mark in New Orleans. When you look at where you were mentally and emotionally when you arrived here and yourself mentally and emotionally now, what does that difference look like?

I’m proud of myself. I’m astonished. I want to say to myself, slow down. I move so fast. I’ve done a lot in a year and I still feel like it’s not enough. I’m learning to slow down. I’m so proud of what I’ve done. I’ve found this magic and I’m riding it but it’s only the beginning and I look forward to deepening my connection to my spirituality and my music and my ancestors. I’m excited for what is to come and honor what is now.

McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. University of Minnesota Press, 1991.