In Conversation: Jeru The Damaja
"I just got a vibe and followed my instincts..."
*Jeru The Damaja* has been a prominent figure in hip-hop since appearing on *Gang Starr’s *1992 album ‘Daily Operation’. His* DJ Premier *produced debut ‘The Sun Rises In The East’ was ranked as one of the 100 greatest hip-hop albums of all time. Today, Jeru is a YouTube creator too; making content that aims to educate and inform. He is outspoken, he is passionate. He is a proud New Yorker and right now, he is in Berlin.
“People always ask me, ‘why did you leave the U.S?’ Honestly, I just got a vibe and followed it. It never seems to mislead me. Where are you calling from? Manchester, Gunchester, what area, Moss Side? See, I know about that shit, right? Man, I been coming out to the UK since 1992. I love to move around, and I love revisiting certain places. My dad actually grew up in Peckham. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I live in Berlin now. I just got a vibe and followed my instincts. I talk about it on my YouTube show; Jeru the Damaja Comes Clean. Where I talk about current events and rap a few songs…”
I mention how active Jeru is on social media and ask if he would have survived if it wasn’t for the internet. “I just got on it, I’ll tell you. Look on Instagram (127k followers) and YouTube (10k Subscribers) for as many followers as I have, I haven’t made as many posts as I should. I’ve been traveling for the last 25 years. I have toured for many years before Social Media. In the beginning, I was very resistant to it all. I’m old school, you know. To me, a lot of that sharing your life shit, feels like snitchin’. I still don’t f-ck with Twitter, (44.6k followers). The only time I use Twitter is when Instagram shares my posts. I can’t get into it.”
“I like to keep myself private, but every now and again I’ll get caught up in a wave and go berserk on Instagram, you know what I’m saying?” he then admits, “YouTube is crazy, I’m having so much fun with it. I have my own set-up and have been practicing filming and editing, even more so recently.”
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I point out that he has come a long way since I first heard ‘94’s ‘The Sun Rises In The East, and that Jeru also happens to be one of the first artists that got me into hip-hop. “Wow” he exclaims, “is that what’s up?”
After thanking me for my support, he continues; “That’s what makes me survive. One, I grew up in Brooklyn, East New York. I’m always gonna survive. Two, I believe in being genuine with people. Nothing more nothing less. It’s not an act, this is just who I am. My mother instilled gratefulness in me”. I want to know which artists influenced the young Jeru. “Oh, so many” He lists Curtis Mayfield, Bob Marley, Kool G Rap, Isaac Hayes, Barry White, Ninja Man and a plethora of others. “I could name a million people from different genres.” He continues; “I was very fortunate to grow up in an era of good music.”
Agreeing with him, I ask which of today’s artists have his attention. “I’m working on a lot of different challenges, a lot of different shows, so I don’t listen to too much music today,” he says, “I’m just so wrapped up in my work, I don’t get to listen to music”. I detail my recent experience with New York music duo BriGuel, and how they stand out in the industry because they have a positive message. A quick look through other artists’ videos on YouTube, we can see sexualized content, violent undertones, and explicit content. All easily accessible to the casual viewer. Why is it so hard for artists who stand against the flow of generic music, to get noticed on a bigger platform?
“That’s always been the case, right. Society is designed so that music, especially the music of the urban youth, is destructive. It can be over-sexualized or appropriated. Anything that’s powerful, especially as much as hip-hop is, is unwanted. When music contains positive, developing messages like with Bob Marley, they stop it. That’s why he’s dead. It’s not because he was sick. He was talking about love and peace, and it was too much. It’s not just coincidence.”
“Notice, all the people who talk about love get killed. Even John Lennon, he was very popular, he was talking about love, peace and happiness, look what happened. All of a sudden, a crazy guy just kills him. It doesn’t happen all of the time, but I think that the system is designed against those messages. Confusion benefits the system more. Right now, with the coronavirus, quarantine and lockdown, people are getting rich off of this. The rich get richer and the people suffer. But this is the conspiracy theorist in me talking. It may just be totally coincidental”.
I mention Jeru’s past as an outspoken militant young man, he seems to have chilled out a lot. Is this the case? “When I was young, I was a victim of oppression, I’m still a victim but not in the same way, I just know more about life. You can’t win using the same tactics that they have used. If we were playing chess and both were using the same moves, nobody is gonna win.”
“Hate begets hate, hatred is not gonna win you anything. I was never a hateful person. I always had strong views about racism, white supremacy, and all of those things. I just didn’t know how to express it well enough. I was expressing it from the point of youth. I had a lot of energy. But now I realise; the highest form of understanding is love. Don’t get me wrong, racism is real. The history of white supremacy is the most prevalent form of racism in the world. Just look at all the places that have been colonized and dismantled”.
He continues: “But there are certain things that I have overlooked, other people have too. If you watch the thing with Lauryn Hill (a 1995 video with community leaders and hip-hop artists discussing racism and police brutality). People were getting all upset and thinking I was racist. I never said I hate all white people. I said it was safe to assume if your grandfather has a history of hitting my grandfather, and his son hit my father and then his son hit me, I would be foolish to think that when I see you, I’m not gonna get hit. you understand that? Until you show me something different, that’s how I am gonna think.”
I also said; every brother is not a brother and every other is not an other. Just because you’re black doesn’t qualify you to be on my team. There are some black people that I wouldn’t want to share the same space with. But now, I know how to express myself better. I come from a place of love. I realize that they want you to get angry, they want you to get upset. That’s why they do this outrageous stuff, they want muthaf-ckas to get angry. Yeah, it’s good to be angry sometimes, but if you take that anger and scream and yell, then that’s exactly what they want. They already built you up as a screaming, yelling, savage, right? So, if you do that, it enforces the idea.”
“One of the only reasons we are in this situation as far as racism is concerned, is the lack of good education. Imagine a class of say, three white kids, three Chinese kids, three Indian kids and three Black kids, including me. If the class was taught constantly that the three white kids did everything right. First of all, that’s gonna give the rest a lack of self-worth. Then it’s gonna make the white kids think that they better than the rest, that the others are worthless. That’s what school does; it doesn’t teach the truth.”
He adds: “National Geographic did an issue in April, on how they were racist, showing all their racist shit over the years. The new Editor in Chief - Susan Goldberg - I liked that she did that. Good strategy. That’s what that was. Like ‘look, we have a racist history and we wanna move away from that’”.
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I wonder if he thinks racism has increased or are people more aware of it because it is being uploaded to social media?
“Well, racism is actually more undercover,” he says, “people act like it don’t exist, they just talk about the prejudice. The actual racism is so refined that we are the ones who perpetuate the racism. Watch the videos that we show, the negative imagery of the black folk, that’s us showing it. That’s why I do what I do, I try to inspire people, get them to travel with the Hip-Hop Roadshow Travel Series. Try to educate them, you know. Show the opposite of what is being represented.”
“I want to educate, and I use my YouTube channel to reach people.I’m doing all of the researching, filming, editing, producing myself. I like to know the history of the places I go. That’s just one of my passions. Whenever I go somewhere and touch down, I’m already informed, I research it”.
Curious about his other ventures, I ask what else keeps him occupied. “I got a few film scripts I’m working on, I wanna start my own online course to teach people how to perform in all areas of public speaking. That’s what I’m great at, public speaking and performing. I’m gonna pass that knowledge on. I’ll teach people that the skills I use to rock the mic, can be used in any situation that involves public speaking.”
He adds: “I’m also working on a music video for my next single; ‘Power’”.
I question him about his song ‘One Day’, from the ‘Wrath Of The Math’ album, in which hip-hop takes on a persona and is kidnapped by P Diddy (then known as Puff Daddy,) who gets the abductee drunk and ‘fucks his mind up,’ before being forced into handing him over to Death Row Record’s Suge Knight. Was there a specific beef with Bad Boy Records?
Jeru answers: “There wasn’t really beef, nobody got hurt. Puff did some stuff I didn’t like; I made a record about it. That’s it. He didn’t like us too much, and that’s it. There was no real beef. I seen dudes and his dudes seen me. We exchanged a couple of words once or twice, but it was nothing like that. It wasn’t beef. Where I’m from, if people got beef, then people get hurt. It was childish really; it was just my ego. You asked about the brashness I had in my youth, the militant. I made a lot of bad decisions because I reacted to situations. I try to be pro-active now”.
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Going back to his social media presence, I ask how often he is on it. “I turn Instagram off, now. I only go on when I gotta post something. It’s a pain in the ass, I gotta go through the whole process of linking it back up to my other social media accounts, reconnecting to Facebook, reconnecting to Twitter. But that shit stops me from being constantly on there, just looking at dumb shit. In lockdown, I have been learning different software programs, building my YouTube channel. I have a purpose for everything I’m doing.”
I want to hear more about Jeru’s YouTube show and prompt him. “The latest show of Jeru the Damaja Comes Clean is called Crooklyn Dodgers ’95. I’m talking about why I moved to Germany, addressing the dumb shit people keep asking me: that I came here for beer and white women. That shit don’t matter, you know what I’m saying? My show is structured like a talk-show king of thing, it’s comedic, I like to write jokes. I use a laugh track because that makes me smile. I make a different one every week”.
I ask how Germany is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Cases are dropping daily, there’s 10,000 cases. If the trend keeps going the same way, there’s gonna be less than a thousand active cases. These German muthaf-ckas, they’re smart. Their leader is a scientist, she’s approaching the situation in a scientific manner. I think a lot of the world leaders are approaching shit emotionally. Think about it: Germany has not been locked down like a lot of other places. There has been no curfew. That PPE facemask thing, that shit just started. Now, we have to wear masks when we go in the store. There was always social distancing but no masks, no curfew.”
“I heard about the facemask thing through a lady at the store because I don’t watch the news, I don’t even have a TV. But it’s only mandatory on public transport and in some shops, depending on the owner. I still see muthaf-ckas on the tram with no facemask, just risking it”.
Before we go, I ask Jeru to tell me about his new album: “It’s called ‘Home Cooking’, ‘cause there’s nothing like home cooking, is that right? When you don’t have it, you miss it. It’s made with love. There’s no bullshit ingredients. Home cooking is so comforting, you know. It’s familiar, that’s why I named it that.”
“The first single: 'Power', is out in the next couple of weeks. It’s about how the power is in all of us: the people. I’m on some Fred Hampton shit, The Rainbow Coalition.”
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Support Jeru the Damaja by subscribing to his *YouTube channel*, liking his videos, and double tapping that bell notification. You can also support him on Patreon, PayPal and by buying your official Jeru the Damaja merchandise through *his online shop*.
Words: *Mike Milenko*
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