A CHAT WITH Riders Against the Storm

RECONSTRUCTING THE PARADIGM Riders Against the Storm shake the foundations to keep hip hop alive in Austin.

BY AISLING AYERS

Faced with a music scene lacking an interest in their genre, Austin hip-hop duo and married couple Riders Against the Storm (RAS) made a space for themselves. Now three-time winners of Austin Music Awards’ Band of the Year, Ghislaine “Qi Dada” Jean and Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone plan to release their new album, Flowers for the Living, at the end of 2020.

RAS spoke with Austin Woman about the heritage of hip hop, their ten-year journey in Austin and celebrating the victories of Black women.

AW: What do you aspire to achieve with your music?

GJ: To help bring spiritual application to people’s everyday lives. To be in the same vein as the people who pioneered hip-hop music, who pioneered reggae and jazz music, is to reignite and evoke something that’s already inside of them and to be able to trust it so that they can birth new things all the time. It’s to encourage people to do their own thing.

AW: How does the theme of heritage influence your work?

JM: Hip hop is a big part of the heritage that we embrace and the power of it to inform, to inspire, to just empower. The people [who] were the originators of that, people [who] set up their turntables in the parks and plugged into the electricity of the light poles and just did it for their community so their community could have an outlet to escape the realities they were faced with, they created their own vortexes. Our name comes from a group called Sweet Honey in the Rock. They have a song called “Ella’s Song”...taken from a speech from Ella Baker. They talk about passing the torch to the young who will “run against the storm.” We chose Riders Against the Storm in the vein that we are the generation that follows those [who] made a tremendous commitment to freedom. Our mentors were community organizers. Most of them were women. Also African storytellers who embraced us as hip-hop artists but also taught us the power of stories [that] bring people together and the power of that gathering.

AW: What has it been like to develop your music and brand in Austin?

JM: There was some resistance to hip hop in general when we got here in terms of the venues and the booking. In the true form of hip hop, we didn’t depend on venues to determine our outcomes. We did a lot of performances in the community wherever we could. That’s how we really built our initial fanbase. From there, the venues and these folks [who] control who gets booked had to start paying attention to us. We never changed our concept of who we are. That led to us winning Band of the Year three years in a row. Band of the Year’s never been won by a hip-hop band before, and it hasn’t been won after. That led to things like Blues on the Green. I hit up the organizers like, “How can the band of the year two years in a row now not be a part of this Austin institution?” We ended up being the first hip-hop band to play Blues on the Green. Being leaders, saying, “You’re not going to undervalue or undermine what we've achieved,” is part of cracking that foundation.

AW: Tell me about “Black Girl Payday.” What inspired this song?

GJ: I wrote the song...based on a historical figure in the Haitian Revolution, the steps she took to acquire wealth, even as an enslaved woman, and the steps she took to matriculate out of that through some particular geniuses that she had. It’s really an homage to that aspect of the spirit, to be able to reconstruct whatever paradigm you’re given at birth. It doesn’t have to be your ultimate. It does not have to be the one thing that defines you. Whatever you were born into, whatever construct, even if it’s more difficult for you than some others, you are very capable of morphing it to your desires and also to the empowerment and benefit at large of people. My grandmother is someone who always was like, “It doesn't matter if your dress costs $7. You walk up to a room like it costs you $7,000 and that is how the room will address you.” That is about that given birthright of black women, if we understand ourselves as the matriarch of the planet, and what [it] means to step into that. Obviously I’m doing it in a very fun way. I’m not necessarily doing it explicitly lyrically, but energetically. That’s what I’m seeking to exude and to have people catch wind of. Once they have that, they’re able to walk with it. It’s really wonderful. I’ve had white men be like, “That is an amazing song” because what I say when I perform it is, “You should be happy to see black women win.” Read an expanded version of this interview at atxwoman.com.