THE HISTORY
Asked to comment on the themes of Street Knuckles, Jessy Moss reflects: "This record is kind of about retribution and forgiveness," then laughs and says, "and sometimes more about retribution than forgiveness!"

But Jessy also figures anyone singled out for retribution should be able to handle it. Shit happens, and it’s happened to her, but that’s not the point.

"People are more resilient than they make out," she says. "I feel a lot of songwriters do this ‘poor me, and yeah, this is therapy’ thing, that whole cry for sympathy. I hope my tracks aren’t misconstrued as a big sulk about hardships – another person having a fucking whinge – because when you’re being autobiographical, you run that risk. But I believe we can handle whatever people dish out. We can. Just deal and get on with it."

The composition of her debut album extends this no-nonsense outlook. The title’s surface meaning suggests the urban edge that powers much of the album; but, she explains, a "knuckle" is "a little something, a little gem, a little story." Each song on the disc is "just something that happened, and so I write about it," Jessy says. "I’m not trying to change the world or make any profound statement about injustices, because they exist for a reason. Who would want to take away the hardships? Without ’em, it would all be so shit-boring."

The Australian-raised rapper, singer, songwriter and producer is equally direct in addressing her thematic concerns. For instance, she simply calls "Telling You Now" "a murder ballad." "Pick A Card" is about "struggling, fighting and drinking." She comments on "Build You Up": "You best expect no treatment but the treatment you give, an eye for an eye – and a tooth if it’s loose." And "Owed A Living" traces money "coming and going." Jessy suggests: "You best watch it ain’t all you value and not hold it too sacred."

The songs on Street Knuckles (set for release July 15, 2003, on DreamWorks Records) are frequently structured around hip-hop verses and sung choruses. A bluesy lilt insinuates itself into many of the tracks. Jessy attributes this to the influence of Nina Simone and Muddy Waters, but she is quick to reel off other favorites – Massive Attack, Björk – in addition to a variety of hip-hop artists.

Of her emergence on the musical landscape, she says, "I’m sure some people will think, ‘A white chick from Australia doing hip-hop? That’s pretty far-fetched.’ But I was just doing what I wanted to do. If people like it, then good on ‘em; if not? Fuck ‘em!" One suspects Jessy Moss has been an independent spirit all of her life.

She was born in England but, as an infant, moved with her parents and three older sisters to Byron Bay, Australia’s most easterly point. The Street Knuckles song "Chapters," she says, is "for my dad," pointing out: "When he moved to Australia he had four daughters, no car, no money and had to work two jobs in a country he’d never been to before." Still, in typically matter-of-fact form, Jessy notes that her father’s experience was essentially no different from that of countless other immigrants.

When she was a girl, her father taught handicapped children and her mother cooked at home for a local vegetarian restaurant. There were no musicians in the household, but there was music everywhere, from the Miles Davis albums her dad played to the records she began to accumulate on her own early on.
Under some duress, she will admit, "I was always singing back when I was little," but is quick to add: "I really hate to say that because every singer who’s ever had a bio goes, ‘I’ve been singing since I was born,’ and it’s so fuckin’ precocious and lame. It’s like a competition – ‘I’ve been singing since I was four’; ‘I’ve been singing since I was a fetus.’ You watch these ‘Behind The Music’ things and it’s, like, ‘Yes, she was singing before she could speak,’ and you want to scream, ‘Oh shut up!’" (This is nonetheless tempered by a recollection: "I remember one time my mum listening to me and going, "Hold on a second – you can really sing.")

She kept a journal, in which she wrote short stories and eventually lyrics, though she confides, "I was always a bit reserved about it, but my sisters would encourage me."

When Jessy was 13, her parents split up. "A lot of people go, ‘Oh, your parents are divorced; that’s terrible,’" she says. "So what? Not for a second did I ever feel bad that they were divorced. Because if they’re fighting when they’re together, why wouldn’t you want them separated and happy?"

After the divorce, Jessy’s mother left Australia, eventually settling in the U.S. When Jessy was 15, her dad decided to move to the other side of Canberra, where the family had been living at that point. "That would have put me three bus rides away from school," she says, "so I moved in with some friends to a house that was closer. And it wasn’t because my dad wasn’t there for me; where he was living was just too inconvenient."

By then Jessy was well into hip-hop. "I still spent a lot of time up north [near Byron Bay], and me and my boys would be out in the bush, in the middle of nowhere, and it’s fuckin’ hot because it’s sort of subtropical, and there’s very little to do except drink beer. So we used to talk in rhymes – out of boredom and just because; instead of actually having proper conversations, we always tried to talk to each other in rhymes. We were listening to Wu-Tang, Beastie Boys, early Mobb Deep, mostly East Coast stuff. We would do ‘two turntables and a microphone’ and just rock beats and freestyle at parties and stuff."

Into this hothouse of sound came other models, as diverse as PJ Harvey, The Pixies and Edith Piaf. Jessy relates that she was "mostly just writing at that time because I had no equipment," but she does say, "Every now and then, I’d be in a situation where someone I knew had a cassette four-track, and we’d go and throw down."

After graduating from high school, Jessy set off on a working holiday in Europe, spending most of her time in London. She tended bar here and there and got a job cleaning up after the Reading and Glastonbury festivals. She calls that work "abysmal," remembering how she had to pick up used syringes, tampons and condoms – "the most heinous shit" – among the trash. The lowest point came at Reading, Jessy says, when "they turned off the showers, so we couldn’t even get clean."

(Among Jessy’s other "bad day jobs": shearer’s hand. She illuminates: "When they’re shearing sheep, they do it real quick because the guys get paid per fleece; they’re shearing so quickly that big chunks of flesh come off the sheep. My job was to take hand shears and cut the chunks of bloody flesh off the wool before it was baled up. What a beautiful job that was.")

On the way back to Australia from Europe, Jessy stopped in the U.S. to visit her mom, who was then living in San Pedro, Calif. She made friends there with some guys in a band and one night, bolstered by a few beers, jumped onstage to sing with them.

Her performance impressed a producer in the audience, who asked if she had any recorded material. "I played him what I had," Jessy says. "It was scratchy and sort of bullshit. He seemed interested, but I just decided, ‘Fuck this, I’m going back home.’"

She returned to Australia and began dividing her time between Sydney and Nimbin, up near Byron. She worked as a waitress to make ends meet but was promoting hip-hop clubs on the side: "You’d put on a night, one night a week at a club. You’d have hip-hop DJs come in and spin, local hip-hop acts. You’d organize all the street-level stuff, do flyering, and handle the ads in magazines."
Though she was immersed in the music she loved, the job had its shortcomings. "We never really made much money," Jessy informs, "and in Sydney, the hip-hop club promotions are real competitive. We were gettin’ threats around there, and then I got into some trouble up north," which she details in the Street Knuckles track "Confessions."

"That song is about a situation I got into when I was in a home invasion/beatdown," she says. "I was held at gunpoint in this room with a bunch of blokes, having a proper conversation about whether I was gonna be killed or not. The lyrics are sort of what the guy was saying to me while it was happening, though I wrote him more of a sense of humor then he had in real life. I flipped the script – it sounds like it’s me being the aggressor, but it’s actually happening to me."

In fact, it’s unlikely her assailant would have been clever enough to come up with this rhyme: "I’m doing you a favor, liquidatin’ shit you don’t need/ Freein’ you from consumers greed/ See you were plagued, now I’m settin’ you
free … "

Not long afterward, Jessy got a call from the producer who’d seen her onstage in San Pedro. He wanted her to return to the States to record background vocals for a project he was working on.
"That phone call was just timely," she says. "I was kind of weighing up my options. I was going, ‘Fuck, I’m in heaps of trouble over here; everything’s just kind of shithouse at the moment. And I was still workin’ as a waitress, you know, a $5-an-hour job. So I said yes. I only intended to do the vocal track because he was paying for the ticket and it was something in the studio, like I wanted to do."

As soon as she arrived on the job, she started "harassing" the engineer at the facility, Total Access Recording Studios, to show her the ropes of making a record. "I’d never been in a proper studio," she continues, "and finally, after driving the engineer crazy with all my questions, he said, ‘Look, if you’re serious about this, you should come in and do an internship here.’ And it hit me that maybe I should; maybe I could. And I just sort of never went back to Australia. I had a friend go ‘round and pick up my stuff from where I was living there, and I stayed in the U.S."

Jessy’s internship eventually led to a paying gig at Total Access (where Sublime, No Doubt and Guns N’ Roses, among many others, have recorded). She describes her daily routine back then: "I would work on my own songs for about two hours," she says, primarily using an MPC2000 (sampler/drum machine). "Then I would drive to the studio where I was an engineer and work for about 16 hours. And then I would go home, have a few beers and crash. It was exhausting, but I learned a lot about making tracks."

At Total Access, Jessy found herself working with former members of Sublime, who’d formed the Long Beach Dub Allstars, and SX10, a side project of Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog, through whom she met Cypress’ DJ Muggs. She played Muggs her demos, and he liked what he heard so much that he arranged for her to appear with Cypress on the track "Don’t Trip," from Muggs Presents Soul Assassins II (2000), as well as on Cypress Hill’s Stoned Raiders (2001).

By the time Stoned Raiders came out, Jessy’s own music was generating a word-of-mouth following. Fans who’d heard her demos but had not yet seen her perform were surprised to discover that the rapper/singer was not only white and Australian, but also six feet tall. She was signed to DreamWorks Records by A&R exec Beth Halper, who, like many of the talent scouts pursuing Jessy, was impressed by her ability to sing with real emotion and rock the mic like a seasoned emcee.

"I have an affinity for both," Jessy says of her tendency to mix rhyme and melody. "Sometimes the lyrics I’ve written will work with a song, or sometimes they’ll work when it’s straight-ahead hip-hop. I used to just put up a beat in the studio and rhyme over it, and then I would do a vocal melody. Then we’d build the track around that vocal melody that was in my head. The songs just dictate what they are."

"I used to write a lot more on paper," she adds. "Now I’ll call my own cell phone and sing the melody and lyrics I’ve come up with while I’m driving or something – and then hope I remember to transfer them somewhere else before my cell messages get blanked, which happens all the fuckin’ time."

When it came time to commit her songs to Street Knuckles, Jessy fleshed out her sound with live instrumentation. To do this, she enlisted producer/writer Rick Hahn (who’d hired her to sing backgrounds way back when), Camara Kambon (Eminem, Dr. Dre) and Butch Vig (Garbage, Nirvana). Jessy is co-producer of the album.

The songs continue to grow as she and her band put them through their live paces. And though Street Knuckles is her first album, Jessy is no stranger to the road: "The Long Beach Dub Allstars asked me to go on tour with them and do sound. I hadn’t done live sound before. It’s kind of, like, you put the faders up and just fuckin’ hope for the best and deal with problems as they arise – and they always arise. The mic cables fall off the stage and into the crowd and shit gets disconnected. You’re fixing gear that broke, soldering cables, running down the side trying to hear what it sounds like in the room and then back up to the console to make adjustments. It’s constantly a scramble, but you just roll with it."

And how did she roll with two months of being the lone female among two busloads of guys? "It was scandalous," she says slyly. She declines to discuss specifics of her mates’ behavior but volunteers: "The boys knew me from the studio, and they’re all good people. I was kind of one of the boys. They would go to the strip clubs and I’d go with them and it was just, like, whatever."

She concedes the close quarters could be tricky: "You’ve got a lot of different characters in a really small space and they’re all larger than life, so it’s a precarious balance; it can be pretty volatile, I reckon. But you give people respect and let ‘em blow up when they need to and just take everything with a grain of salt."

Perseverance in the face of blow-ups big and small appears to be a guiding principle in Jessy’s life and in the "chapters" of Street Knuckles. "This album is partly about working-class people, about contending with being poor and struggling," she reveals. "But sometimes in music, people quantify themselves by the shit that goes down in their lives: ‘I’m the champion – I win because I had the hardest existence.’ And that just can’t be used as the bar to establish who’s worthy. My upbringing and my life haven’t been without tests and trials and tribulations, just like everyone’s, but I wouldn’t change that. Your experiences shape you for better or worse, and sometimes both simultaneously."