PREMIERE: Monique DeBose Marries Motivational Speech with Soulful Singing on “Human Condition”

Photo Credit: Lift Consciousness

Monique DeBose has graced the world many times over with music that has a social message. From empowering singles aimed at celebrating women to her 2018 one-woman musical Mulatto Math: Summing Up the Race Equation in America, she infuses the passion for social justice that informs her career as a leadership coach and diversity consultant into her music. In her latest single, “Human Condition,” she spreads her work’s central message of self-love with an eclectic mix of genres and vocal styles.

Collaborating with motivational speaker and coach Preston Smiles, DeBose created a song that doubles as an inspirational sermon. Using electric bass, piano, drums, and synthesizer, the track combines the warm, comforting sound of a show tune with the catchiness and dance-ability of modern pop. She also brought in a choir, which surprisingly only consists of three people whose voices were recorded multiple times.

“It feels insane/But you stay in the game/It takes all you got,” DeBose opens. “You run away/and look to blame/emotions got you caught.” The verses mix theatrical notes and keys with energetic electronic beats, escalating to the choir powerfully belting the chorus, positioning the daily self-love struggle as “part of the human condition.” During an interlude, Smiles speaks about self-confidence: “Today’s transmission is a reminder of how powerful, how beautiful, how amazing you are.”

The song is about “owning all the parts of ourselves,” says DeBose. “So often, we are presenting what we think people want to see of us, what we think will get us approval, and much to the dismay of our full humanity, we don’t get to express all of who we are. That’s been a big part of my life, trying to be for others what I thought would be acceptable… [but] the things we may feel embarrassed or ashamed or sad about are also things that make us more fully expressed.”

In accordance with the therapeutic aim of the song, DeBose is offering a complimentary accompanying three-day Human Conditions course, where she’s teaching people how to embrace themselves as they are. She also created a fun lyric video, premiering today on Audiofemme, featuring illustrations of herself, Smiles, and the choir.

A rich and varied educational and professional background gives DeBose her unique sound and perspective. She got a degree in mathematics at UC Berkeley, which inspired the premise of her show Mulatto Math. “I have math equations I made up about beauty — what does blackness mean in the US? — and the equation gets more complicated throughout the play,” she explains. “You can’t define it — you have to define blackness for yourself.”

DeBose opened Mulatto Math with her latest single “Brown Beauty,” a body-positive love letter to women of color. This song spawned a video featuring women from across the globe who shared images of themselves, as well as a social media movement where DeBose shares some of these photos and pays homage to women of color who inspire her. The song was inspired by DeBose’s own experience learning how to take up space as a mixed-race woman. “It takes such complex navigation to be a black woman or a woman of color in the world we’re in because we’re navigating double consciousness and navigating code switching,” she says. “It’s a celebration: I see you, I love you, I know you’re doing the work and I don’t want you to go unrecognized.”

“Human Condition” and “Brown Beauty” are included on DeBose’s upcoming LP You Are the Sovereign One, set for release in late August. She describes it as a celebration of women owning their full selves. Over the course of 16 songs, she sings about “owning that part of yourself that you’ve hidden in the dark, that part of yourself that you’re ashamed to bring out, owning the parts of yourself that you’ve been embarrassed or afraid wouldn’t be well received.” It’s been recorded over the course of the past three years; some songs were written over 15 years ago, some within the last few months.

DeBose also started a podcast this summer called MORE with Monique that aims to help women find true satisfaction in different areas of their lives, from their relationships to their careers. “So often, as women in our society, we are really asked (or kind of told) from a very young age to put our needs to the side, to put our desires to the side, to put what we want to really help us live the most full thriving life to the side,” she says. This was also the idea behind her 2020 single “More,” a jazzy ode to women going after what they want.

This is the magic of DeBose’s work: she takes a concept and turns it into so many things, from art to self-help to education. She ascribes this ability to reach people in many different ways and communicate about challenging topics to her cultural background. “I call mixed people bridge people,” she says. “That’s always been my lens and my focus: diversity, inclusion, equity, being wiling to have hard conversations by default, actually being willing to be in uncomfortable situations, and growing the nervous system to be able to be in that space. It naturally lends itself to that work, and it naturally lends itself to the music I write, too. All the things I do. I can’t do things not based on my own life. I cannot.”

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Monique DeBose Inspires Change with “More” and “Rally Call”

Photo Credit: Lift Consciousness

Singer, writer and activist Monique DeBose utilizes her rich vocals and poetic talent to create anthems for all of us to live and be inspired by. Not one for creating “bubblegum pop” regardless of how much she enjoys it, DeBose has committed herself to harnessing her music in order to help create a world in which people better understand each other and create real change. “A lot of times we think we’re supposed to be a certain way or we are only supposed to express certain things, but there’s other parts of us just as alive and just as important,” she says. “When we’re willing to acknowledge all the parts of ourselves, only then are we actually, truly free.”

Born in Los Angeles, to an Irish-American mother and African-American father, writing poetry was her way of creating her own world, one in which she could express herself. Since those formative years, her tenacity for writing has expanded into other ventures, as well as music. In 2018, DeBose released her one-woman show, Mulatto Math: Summing Up the Race Equation in America, which unpacked her experiences as a mixed-race woman struggling to fit into black-or-white racial binaries in the U.S. “My work really supports all of us, including me, to move from seeing in black and white to actually living in full color,” she explains. “I feel like the space available for all of who we are has been so narrowed that we’re squeezing ourselves… it’s a narrative that isn’t sustainable for any breathing, living creature.” With that in mind, DeBose’s latest singles, “More” and “Rally Call” look to widen the space our identities can inhabit.

On “More,” DeBose tackles the societal constraints of womanhood, using an upbeat jazz track packed with a variety of musical elements that convey her desire for more from life. Demonstrating her captivating vocals and range that perfectly compliment the jazz track, that desire is depicted in a positive light. DeBose chooses more not because she has so little but because she wants to add to what she’s already achieved, despite what society thinks she deserves. This sentiment is highlighted in the lyrics “I’m gonna take my ovaries off the shelf and be the woman that I know I am/Why live small?/That’s not my plan.”

“I have this curiosity about all the different roles women play and I wrote it to give myself a daily dose of ‘You can do this, be courageous,’” says DeBose. She wrote the song some 14 years ago, for the women who are told they are “too much,” which she explains is “a tool that people in power – and power can mean many things on different levels – often tell women or girls. Girls are meant to be seen not heard; you’ve got to be kind and respectful. It’s definitely better than before but I think it’s still a part of the culture – you have to look kept and beautiful to be desired.”

“Rally Call” takes on a very different tale with the same emphasis on empowerment and change. A powerful blues track from beginning to end, “Rally Call” conveys DeBose’s emotions as a woman of color even as it highlights the experiences of the Black community in a wider sense. Released on the 57th anniversary of his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, DeBose echoes the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in unforgettable lyrics as the song increases in tempo and her pitch rises.

Inspired, in particular, by the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the resulting Black Lives Matter demonstrations, DeBose communicates anger and pain, stressing the fact that enough is enough. “I can only speak to my experience; to me it’s devastating, it’s heart wrenching, it puts me in a space of feeling powerless, of feeling like I don’t matter,” she says. “There was a scab for many of us in this country, that is racism, and then those three murders really peeled the whole scab off again and you have this wound that isn’t healing because we’re not dealing with it in a way that is geared towards healing. We were dealing with it in a way geared towards avoiding it and ignoring it and hoping it will go away.”

This element of avoidance and how it leads to an inhumane cycle of brutality, murder, and backlash towards protests comes across in the song’s powerful music video. DeBose sings in front of a wall depicting African-American culture and history whilst images from slavery, the 1960s Civil Rights movement and modern day images of Black Lives Matter marches are woven throughout. “For people of color and people who have been oppressed, this song is really an anthem to encourage and inspire you to no longer make yourself small so you can fit into a narrative,” says DeBose. “Regarding people who don’t identify as people of color or don’t have that experience of being oppressed, it’s an opportunity to really let it wash over you. I really want people to pay attention and imagine that the world does not exist only for your benefit or for you and consider that if we are making space for everyone at the table, the table would just be that much more nourishing, creative and exciting.”

To further emphasize the message of both tracks, DeBose has created the movements #ICHOOSEMORE and #JOINTHERALLYCALL; she partnered with Color of Change on their 15 year anniversary to promote the latter. This determination to keep the message going is indicative of the thought and care that DeBose puts into her work – not just making the music, but connecting with people and bringing about vital conversations that will lead to vital change. “Music is so powerful. When people set intention with the words or instrumentation it’s definitely going to filter in because it’s just something we know,” she says. “It’s a wonderful, powerful source of shift.” 

The power of owning all the parts of ourselves, good and bad, attractive and unattractive, is a thread that runs throughout everything that the singer, writer, activist does. “Every song I’ve written, I could make a movement behind, because it really does come from a place of owning yourself and expressing yourself authentically,” she says. For DeBose, the message-within-the-message is the importance of not letting anything or anyone define you. With that in mind, she plans to take her work to the next level in 2021 by creating her own podcast, putting her award-winning play Mulatto Math online, and recording a full length album that will include “More” and “Rally Call.”

If 2020 has demonstrated anything, it’s that our lives are not concrete and that they can change faster than we realize. Monique DeBose has utilized that fact to remind her listeners of the work still to be done for both women and communities of color – and that change is not only possible, but within our reach.

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