In a New York Times “Live at Home” event, the recording artists Meshell Ndegeocello, Brandi Carlile and Hayley Kiyoko explored the role of activism in their work.
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A recent discussion in The Times’s “Live at Home” event series focused on music, activism and queer identity. Meshell Ndegeocello, Brandi Carlile and Hayley Kiyoko, artists with different backgrounds, found shared experiences in a conversation moderated by Nellie Bowles, a culture and technology reporter for The Times. The panel fielded questions from readers and shared stories of their lives and work. Here are edited excerpts from the event.
When did activism start for each of you? When did you become politically awakened?
HAYLEY KIYOKO I was on my own journey. For me, it’s been out of necessity. I think that for most people who have lived their lives being activists, it is through necessity. When I released my music video for “Girls Like Girls,” that was out of necessity for myself.
MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO In my youth, I wasn’t very aware of it. I was very singularly focused on making music. Music is something where I feel genderless and raceless. But being a person of color, I think every day of my existence is pretty much making a statement, and I’ve only come to understand that as I now am 52. But I think it happened naïvely. It was only once I started to take in a lot more media, a lot more of an understanding of what it meant to be in an industry that was marketing you in a specific way. I think that’s when things started to click for me.
BRANDI CARLILE It happened when I was 11. I fell in love, like deeply in love, with Elton John over of a fifth grade book report on Ryan White, who died in the early ’90s from AIDS. He contracted it through a blood transfusion, but he was heavily politicized.
He died and Elton John sang a song at his funeral. I wanted to hear the song. And I picked up an Elton John CD and it blew my mind. Then I read biographies, then I started to get curious about Elton John’s AIDS foundation. At that point, I realized that the intersection between being an artist and an activist isn’t even an intersection at all. It’s hard to know where one begins and the other ends, and I knew that if I ever had a platform, my music would be a means to an end, which would mean that I would get to use my platform for something to make me feel like there’s a reason for being here.
What is the next battle?
KIYOKO We all are working hard to make the next generation able to thrive.
I think it’s easier, but I don’t think it’s easy. When I was touring before the pandemic, and seeing all these kids, ages 11 to 23, most of them, 80 percent of them, were not out to their family, were kicked out of their homes, were living a double life.
I think the battle is getting through to older generations.
NDEGEOCELLO I’m curious about the seed of what makes a person want to react to their bigotry, disdain, discomfort, lack of familiarity, lack of education, that makes them want to engage in violence. I’m more interested in the seed that’s in someone that wants to annihilate the other. It says much more about that person than it does about me.
CARLILE Until 2016, I really did think progress was only going in one direction.
It’s so important that we vote. It’s so important that we keep our eyes on the Supreme Court, and pay attention to the direction that we move in, because we can finish the business and have it get unfinished again.
How do you integrate queerness into your music?
KIYOKO At first I had to actively implement my queerness into my music, because if I didn’t actively implement it, I just don’t think I ever would have.
I will never forget that moment writing “Girls Like Girls.” It was the first time I wrote about girls, even to myself. I would write music in my bedroom, and I would write in fear that someone was going to find the lyrics. I was hanging out with my songwriter, and she said, “What are you most afraid of that you’ve never sung about?” And that was girls. So we wrote that song and it was very cathartic. I had to actively force myself to do so, to break that boundary that I put down for myself.
CARLILE Music is such an expression that your sexuality comes out. It just does. Whether you’re writing about it or not. The people that need to know, know. I write songs with guys and sometimes they’ll have written a song or a narrative and they’re singing about a woman, but the perspective is so male I can’t put that on me. “I don’t feel that way, I feel really female about this,” and that’s just where I am with my gender identity so I kind of need to change this — keep the pronoun where it is, but I need it to be me.
NDEGEOCELLO All good songs are gay. David Bowie, there’s an essence. There’s something in there that you can’t explain. Billy Strayhorn, with Duke Ellington. Gay. Queen. Drop the mic.
So how do you balance activism and being out with the very real threats of violence that still exist?
NDEGEOCELLO I have to say your safety is much more important, your life. I’m a very passive, nonviolent person, and I hope you can find the peace within yourself, so perhaps do your activism through other channels that don’t jeopardize your safety. That’s the most important thing.
CARLILE I agree. Just observe it and learn from it. Use what you see to realize what people in the world are capable of and fix it from outside of your being in danger.
KIYOKO Survival is key and without you, there is no change.
