Tractatus Logico-Dessalophicus

3 As a woman and a writer, Dessa both stands out and apart from the rap genre.

3.1 At times, Dessa seems extremely uncomfortable with the hypermasculine attitude of her chosen milieu. “I was apprehensive about approaching a genre so often full of braggadocio,” she says. She is ill at ease with so-called gangsta rap and has no interest in using the words nigger and faggot . “I’m more interested in making beautiful rap,” she says.

3.2 Like Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Sayers—lone female members of male literary societies—Dessa is Doomtree’s token chick. And like her literary predecessors, she has learned to sublimate her anger in the pithy couplet. On “The Wren,” she suggests a vengeful role reversal that’s been a longtime coming: So hold down the magician/the beautiful assistant should get her turn with the saw.

3.3 In both her music and essays, Dessa returns to the same poetic motifs: drowning, seasickness, spiral staircases, and a small nervous bird tethered by a ribbon to her mind. “I’m a good [vocal] percussionist, not a great one,” she says. “People listen to Ludacris for his brilliant staccato patterns—they probably listen to me for my content.”

3.4 Much of Dessa’s imagery flows from an invasive surgery and its aftermath. In 2003, one of her ovaries had to be removed. After the surgery, she prematurely went into menopause and slowly deteriorated in her father’s basement. “My thighs didn’t touch because I lost so much weight,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep and had little control over my thoughts—I was moving at a speed I didn’t feel comfortable with and felt like I didn’t get the same brain coming out of surgery that I had going in.” After a car accident, brought on by a bout of rocking-in-fetal-position self-loathing, she committed herself to a hospital psych ward.

The dual impact of her traumatic surgery and brush with mental illness may be why Dessa keeps returning to writing and rapping about finding peace or safety, whether enclosed in the womb of a car wash or in the cabin of her father’s boat or connected by pill or amaretto-on-ice to an oceanic feeling of calm. In a story from Spiral Bound, “Sleeping on the Stairs,” she describes her tolerance for anesthesia and a “New Agey” self-hypnotic sleep technique she learned as the result of a disastrous dental appointment: descending a mental staircase into a pool of water. “So it goes, very deliberate and controlled,” she writes, “as I effectively drown myself to sleep.”

3.5 Dessa adopted her current rap style when a then-boyfriend encouraged her to “rap like you write.” In one of life’s tender little twists, that ex-boyfriend is P.O.S—Dessa’s still-crewmate and, moreover, Doomtree cofounder and alpha MC, both commercially and artistically. Anybody who’s worked alongside an ex can probably understand the lingering mix of pain, competitiveness, nostalgia, and flickering joy that pervades this sort of a relationship. But few have felt this on tour with seven other crew members, all stuffed in the same van.

4 Dessa is surer of her voice while writing than while rapping.

4.1 She prefers a lower, more forceful masculine register. “You always sound smarter when you hear yourself in person,” she says. She likes her singing voice, a soft alto with a warm tone that works as a perfect melodic accompaniment to her speaking voice—but, she admits, “I hate hearing my voice when I rap.”

4.2 Dessa’s long-rumored full-length album was originally slated to come out this fall, but it’s nearing spring and a release date has yet to be determined. She confesses that although she writes rhymes much more slowly than her peers, she has the songs—she’s had them for months—but spends hours recording hundreds of takes. “I’m nervous,” she says. “I like my ideas, but I have a hard time capturing performances that are as good as my ideas.”

4.3 Despite her success as a rap artist, Dessa says she is most comfortable with her voice on the page. “Writing involves all of the things that I’m good at and few of the things I’m not good at,” she says. “With rap, I have a hard time projecting and I’m a little bit clumsy [onstage]. But with writing—I enjoy the manipulation of phrasing, I like the expression of abstract ideas and the formation of metaphor, and I relish the challenge of trying to find the appropriate structural format.”

5 Ontologically speaking, Dessa is more of a writer who raps than a rapper who writes.

5.1 On “Mineshaft,” a song off her 2005 debut CD, she raps so herself: Living in the heartland/living on the small chance/luck would save the last dance/for an underrated writer/overrated rapper . . .

5.2 As Dessa is aware, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously concluded his Tractatus with the proposition, “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.” Unfortunately, the logical conclusion to Dessa’s artistic paradox isn’t as wonderfully pat.

6 Dessa Darling can keep on both rapping and writing.

6.1 Or not.