Houston Chronicle

Setting words to music

Rapper Michelle Umeh is choosing her own rules

- ANDREW DANSBY

Magic hinges upon misdirecti­on, the ability of a performer to control an audience’s attention such that focus falls on a distractio­n which allows an illusion to exist. Michelle Umeh — who performs as Lyric Michelle — fittingly chose the title “MissDirect­ion” for her debut album, and its effect is both magical and mundane as Umeh, a poet-turned-rapper, tries to make sense of her life and our world in song offering insight but no easy answers.

“On one hand, I amMiss Direction,” says Umeh, at a coffee shop east of downtown. “I’m asking the listener to follow me into the abyss. I’m not going to tell you where I’m going because often I don’t have any idea. But my goal is to pull back the curtain and tell you no one really knows what they’re doing. No one really knows anything.”

“MissDirect­ion” is a jarring album, provocativ­e and dense with its examinatio­n of self and culture. It also reflects Umeh’s own developmen­t as a magician of sorts. The child of Nigerian immigrants, she spent her youth feeling like an outcast, eventually summoning up the nerve to take her poetry to public stages and, ultimately, finding an assertive stage voice in music that has made her a talent on the brink of a national breakout. Having just released “MissDirect­ion,” Lyric Michelle looks poised for a big breakout next month at the South By Southwest Music Conference and beyond. Hers is one of the most striking albums released thus far in the new year.

Afiery presence on stage, Umeh took a long and bumpy path to becoming Lyric Michelle. She was born in Chicago, her father a cab driver and her mother a custodian in a nursing home. Both came to the States from Nigeria. Umeh is the third

of four children, and the family of six crammed into a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago. She recalls sleeping on couch cushions on the floor. Amurder behind their high rise, followed by a fire in the building pushed the family to relocate. They moved to Stafford when Umehwas in fourth grade.

She grew up in Houston, but always felt like she was on the periphery. “In middle school, I remember not liking myself,” she says. “And I was told by my classmates there was nothing to like. So I felt ashamed of my hair, my skin, my lips. Instead of addressing it, I became the funny kid. You box your stuff and lock it up. But then it starts to consume you.”

As far back as she can remember, Umeh kept a journal, and as she worked through school her writing transforme­d into poetry.

She never considered putting her words to music until hearing Tupac Shakur’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby.”

“It wasn’t aggressive,” she says. “It was melodic and poetic. I didn’t know music could be that way.”

She steered her words into a more musical direction. Her entry into music might appear tentative: In 2011, she covered J. Cole’s “Light Please.” While she was working with another artist’s words, Umehwas deeply thinking about narrative voice.

“I love J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar, and I appreciate what they do, but I also feel like they’re guys who sometimes narrate a woman’s story,” she says. “They approach it with insight and a strong perspectiv­e, but I felt like I had something strong to say myself.”

Her guideposts were acts such as Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill, artists who recorded more than a decade ago. “They found their lane,” Umeh says, “talking about issues that affected them. That’s what I wanted to do.”

Umeh cites a small bar in Katy for getting her started. She went to an open mic night called Kickback Sundays held at a north side sneakers and fashion store called SF2. Azucena “Susie” Trujillo, co-owner of SF2, in particular encouraged her.

Trujillo told Umeh her color was to be purple.

“Her point was that a singer is blue, this primary color,” Umeh says. “And you can’t deny a good singer. For me, it’s more about the words. They have to project what I want to say. But as a writer and performer, it has to be exact. If I mess up a word, if I forget a word, that’s it. It terrified me as a performer. But Susie said to find the power in that. She said I wasn’t working with blue. That my color was purple. There’s blue in it, but also this red, this danger. Not many people are purple, she told me. It’s a concept I’ve grown more comfortabl­e with.”

Umeh’s comfort on stage grew quickly. And she already had down a confidence with the lyrics. The narratives on “MissDirect­ion” are assertive, even when documentin­g past insecuriti­es. She juxtaposes the insecurity of youth with a razor blade and a pen — both of which she sees as offering a way out of a predicamen­t.

The album’s themes can be consumed on the most personal level, but they also project large to issues of race and success in contempora­ry American culture. After putting together a mission statement on the album’s opening “Intro” she gets into “Weekend,” a song about chemical and sexual indulgence­s as a way of ignoring more pressing personal problems. That theme returns in “Her Vice.”

“Instead of doing something about the things that bother us, we usually just try to ignore all of it,” she says.

Umeh says her parents don’t have much of a frame of reference for her music. “They worked hard so their children could be here and pursue the American Dream,” she says.

That dream remains vaporous to her. From youthful insecurity to a few “terrible relationsh­ips with dominating men,” hers has been a journey toward a strength in independen­ce.

“We’re handed a rubric and syllabus for a very specific American Dream,” she says. “Go to school, go to college, meet your wife or husband, have a child and work until you’re 60,” she says. “Hope to God your 401k doesn’t go into the dumpwhen you retire. That’s fine for some, but not everybody. If there’s nothing in your entire life that’s for you, what’s the point of it? Is your life supposed to be about supporting someone else? That’s not what I want to do. So I made a decision to choose my own rules. I had to decide emphatical­ly to be what I wanted to be.”

 ?? Blue Secatero ?? Michelle Umeh, a Houston rapper who performs as Lyric Michelle, began her career as a poet.
Blue Secatero Michelle Umeh, a Houston rapper who performs as Lyric Michelle, began her career as a poet.
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