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Photo: Mechant Vaporwave
It’s no longer a secret that Backxwash is one of the most eagerly awaited up-and-coming artists at this 19th edition of the Pop Montreal festival. With her album God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It, released earlier this year, the Zambian-Canadian artist affirms her rage for life and her search for identity as a black trans woman, through rap that clashes with her unexpected metal references and occult and cryptic lyrics evocative of black magic. Behind this mythical character of the witch, there lurks a desire to proclaim her difference, her independence, and her ancestral spiritual practice. PAN M 360 spoke with the artist to decipher the Backxwash spell.
PAN M 360: I don’t think I came across the meaning behind the name Backxwash. What can you tell us?
Backxwash: I find it funny, some punk bands choose two names out of the blue (laughs). Just like random stuff. I thought Backxwash would fit because I’m also like a queer person doing this art, so straight people look at it and wonder – what is that?
PAN M 360: My first thought was that it maybe had something to do with going backwards and washing the past.
Backxwash: That’s a good one, I might steal that from you. I like it.
PAN M 360: Your album God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It was released on the label Grimalkin, which is more focused on LGBTQ artists and witchcraft art. What can you tell us about this label?
Backxwash: It’s more a collective, I guess. It’s about people coming in together and helping each other with whatever services a person might need for their next project. It’s very socialist in a sense, because services are being distributed among everybody in the collective equally and there is no hierarchy to it, no contract, nothing like that. I sadly had to leave Grimalkin, but they do incredible work. These days you have official labels who go to somebody young who is just starting, and put them in a very bad contract early on in their career. I was thinking that Grimalkin was perfect because they don’t really do that. You need to be careful because some labels are predatory.
PAN M 360: You mention that your album is about your struggle with religion. How was religion important to you in the past?
Backxwash: I grew up extremely religiously, I like to say that I was a bad Christian. The place where I grew up is pretty conservative. Most of the laws are kind of determined by what the Bible says, essentially. Growing up, I started asking all of these questions around me. At the same time, I was figuring out my identity. It took a bit to start asking all these questions, I couldn’t ask them before. Any questions that I ask, the answer would be referred to the book. Now that you’re growing up away from the shackles of what they imposed on you, you are now free to ask those questions and heal the trauma that was caused to you, essentially in the way that you wanted.
PAN M 360: What helped you through this trauma?
Backxwash: Discovering precolonial spirituality, not being afraid to be yourself and getting a system of individualism through that. It was a long process as well, because you’re taught most of these things when you’re growing up and you have no question as to why you’re taught those things. You’re just told you’re a Christian and you don’t know why you should be a Christian. You’re just told you’re a boy and don’t know why you should be a boy. You take a step back and think this thing is much more complex than it actually was.
PAN M 360: I read you discovered the precolonial Tumbuka tribe’s spirituality. Can you tell us more about that?
Backxwash: I’m half Tumbuka, half Chewa, and I try to embrace both sides. The main point between the two tribes is embracing ancestors, spirits, and traditions that come from these cultures. Before I embraced the Tumbuka tribe, I was told that it was a spiritual evil. You shouldn’t be conversing with spirits because spirits are demons. Spirits are going to visit you, spirits are going to give you signs if your ancestors are looking over you, they’re going to try to get to you. Just embracing that conversation and that imagery, saying that this is a safe space for you. It opened my perspective to practice and whatnot.
PAN M 360: How did you embrace the persona of the witch?
Backxwash: Back in the 19th century, when the missionaries came to the country that I grew up in, we used to do the spiritual practices that I’m doing right now. The missionaries taught their English, through their English, they taught us that it was witchcraft. Witchcraft is a sin. I think about it in a way that witchcraft is actually the African spirituality in a sense. That’s how I embrace it. I’m also a fan of the occult and I like to read up on different things on magic, different practices. I guess that just how it comes together, through one concept, which is witchcraft.
PAN M 360: We can hear a sample from the writer Alan Watts at the end of the song “Into the Void”. How did you come across his work?
Backxwash: I’m always interested in people that share perspectives. The perspective might not be different but the approach to the perspective is very different. Alan Watts is somebody who gets into grandiose topics and kind of breaks it down into digestible terms. It is not digestible in a sense that you’re going to lose key information out of it, but digestible in the sense you’re going to get so much key information out of it.
PAN M 360: The void is something Alan Watts talks about in his work. How would you define the void?
Backxwash: The void is terrifying, it is nothingness. My mind is going to a place of nothingness and darkness because of the paranoia that I’m feeling, it is inescapable. It is something that I can’t really get away from and it’s not gonna let you go. The song is based on real-life occurrences of being attacked or harassed when you’re going down the street as a trans person. Your mind goes into that really dark place of nothingness because you don’t know what the next person is gonna do to you.
PAN M 360: Your album was nominated on the short list of the Polaris Prize. You winning it as a trans person, don’t you think it would potentially be a strong political symbol?
Backxwash: Absolutely. I’ll be happy for anybody who is not rich to win it. For some people, that much money is game-changing. I would have preferred that they could share it equally. Because of COVID, everyone is having a hard time, no one can tour.
PAN M 360: The Venezuelan artist Arca, who’s also a trans person, is one of the most important artists of the last decade. Her last album combines glitch with reggaeton, which is completely out there, if you think about it. Yours combines rap with metal, noise, and occult references. Through these creative collages, I think I can somehow have a better picture of the feeling of emotional dysphoria that some trans people can have. What’s your take on it?
Backxwash: That’s a good way to put it. One thing that I realize as well being in this trans artist world, is that a lot of acts modulate their voices in interesting ways. Being a trans person and feeling a certain way about your voice is kind of interesting to me. It’s like empowering yourself through that. Most trans people that I meet make some weird experimental music of some sort, you know (laughs). I think I’ll have to agree with you there. Just having the feeling of that influences how the sounds are gonna come together.
WATCH THE 2020 POLARIS MUSIC PRIZE CELEBRATION HERE
