Outspoken Word

With age, Melissa Czarnik has found it harder and harder to enjoy the albums she used to listen to, even some of her favorites.

"When I was younger, I could listen to just about any MC and not criticize what they had to say," the Milwaukee rapper explains. "Growing up, I didn't listen to anything but mainstream rap, and until I was 18 or 19, I would go out to the clubs, get all dressed up, and just shake my ass."

But, she says, as she grew older and exposed herself to more underground hip-hop, she could no longer gloss over the disparaging references to women in commercial rap.
"I realized that all that talk of bitches and hoes really did have an effect on the way guys treat girls, and the way girls treat themselves," Czarnik says. "It got to the point where I couldn't even listen to Tupac without cringing a little over the way he talks about women-and I grew up swearing by Tupac."

There was one album in particular, though, that always stayed with her: Lauryn Hill's MTV Unplugged No. 2.0. While Hill's overgrown double disc live album confounded some critics, it spoke to Czarnik.

"I got into it after my brother died, and that album was exactly what I needed," Czarnik says. "A lot of people didn't like that album, but when you're at a certain point in your life, you put on that album, and it can really save your life. It really spoke to me: her truthfulness, her honesty, her openness to say, 'hey, I'm not perfect.' Lauryn Hill is really my muse."

She modeled her own rapping in part after Hill's, a deeply personal blend of diary entry and diatribe. Hill even inspired Czarnik to perform under her birth name (which isn't as unpronounceable as it looks if you ignore the "c": ZAR-NIK.)

Czarnik's first forays with rap were freestyling at high school and college parties, where she'd sometimes do battle with unwitting male opponents when one of their boasts struck her as overly misogynistic, but these days Czarnik's act is more introspective than confrontational. She now writes down almost all of her raps, which she delivers with the imperturbable flow and calm, unexaggerated confidence of a spoken-word poet (she spends her days working at the Woodland Pattern Bookstore, a poet's haven, and it shows).

Czarnik's boyfriend, Eric Mire, who she credits for introducing her to a more conscious style of rap, handles her production, composing beats rich with piano and acoustic guitar. His buoyant grooves lend to the chilled-out repose of Czarnik's debut album, Strawberry Cadillac, which she released this summer to strong local press. For her increasingly frequent shows, Mire fronts a five-piece backing band.

"When I first started performing, I did feel like as a woman I had something to prove," Czarnik says. "But these days I'm far more comfortable, and I've been getting a lot of love from both men and women, so now I just go out there and let my shows speak for themselves."

Melissa Czarnik and the Eric Mire Band perform as part of a $5 post-Thanksgiving bill at the Stonefly Brewery on Friday, Nov. 28, also featuring Wody and DJ Peru, Joshua the Scribe, Haz Solo and Prophetic.