[Director, memoirist, journalist, podcast host – Raquel Cepeda has done it all. She recently sat down with hip-hop personality and SOHH Correspondent Shawn Setaro on his popular “The Cipher”podcast. Listen to the full interview and check out five gems Raquel dropped during the Q&A.]
On how the violence of the colonial slave trade has left the Latin@ community with collective post-traumatic stress:
“There’s all these things that I’ve seen people in my community do – straighten their hair to the point where it’s coming out, getting blue contacts, wearing light powder on their skin. They’re doing all these things that they perceive endears them to the Man, to our former colonial masters. That kind of thing, to me, is a form of PTSD.”
On the eerie coincidence that happened when she wrote about the “subway vigilante,” Bernhard Goetz:
“Do you know, when I typed the words ‘Bernhard Goetz,’ I was in a cafe on 14th Street. He walked right by me. I’m getting chills. He walked right by me. It was so close to where he shot those kids. It shook me to my core. But at the same time, I knew that I was going in the right direction, that I was writing about what I was supposed to be writing about.”
On New York City’s early 90s spoken word scene:
“Rap and poetry were very much blurred, because you had a lot of people who were doing rap and hip-hop music performing poetry, and a lot of poets that were growing up in a hip-hop generation that were influenced by hip-hop. We influenced the culture, and the culture influenced us. It was this concentric thing going on. We were doing poetry that kind of sounded like hip-hop, because that’s what we were inspired by.”
On reading the Village Voice‘s music criticism as a kid:
“I remember reading Joan Morgan writing about Ice Cube. I was like, wow, you don’t only have to just review a song. We can actually look at our isms – feminism and all kinds of isms –and critique our culture by using this music as a prism. And that really turned me on.”
On making her documentary Bling: A Planet Rock:
“People ask me, what was it like to make Bling? It was like sleeping with the devil. I had to dance and sleep with the devil a lot. And in that, I had to make sure that I was able to get things that I thought were important into the film.”