Dawn Richard evokes a sense of freedom with her music — it’s always been that way with the Danity Kane lodestar. Ahead of her time in both music and personal philosophy, Dawn (f.k.a. D∆WN) has never been afraid to embrace where she’s from (the 9th Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana), or who she is: A Black woman working in the music industry. On her latest album New Breed, her first full-length solo project since 2016, Richard celebrates the young girl raised in the 9th Ward’s homecoming. According to the album’s track “Spaces,” she lost that little Black girl from JonLee Drive somewhere on Hollywood and Vine.
“I had so many men in power telling me I was too brave, too confident, too Black, too ugly, too thin,” she told me last week over the phone, discussing the song. “That girl believed them. But deep inside, the girl from the nine said f*ck them.”
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And on this album, Dawn was able to find that girl from JonLee Drive on the daring and independent ten track EP that radiates a sense of total liberation.
“It took me a while,” Dawn said. “Because in the beginning of my career, I was this confident girl from the 9th Ward. I thought it was normal, the things I saw. The Mardi Gras headdress, Black people with native braids with feathers to the transwomen poppin’ in the middle of the hood with a bounce record. I thought that was normal because that’s what I was used to. The way women talk. This cockiness we have. This air we have. When I came to LA and New York, I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of fear.”
The fear Dawn speaks of is not her own; it’s the music industry’s fear of a Black woman who doesn’t fit its formulaic idea of what society perceives an “acceptable” Black woman to be. Nothing shakes society more than a confident Black woman who openly speaks her mind without tap dancing.
Dawn experienced the industry’s push back as soon as she began her career as part of the beloved pop-R&B girl group Danity Kane, created by Diddy on MTV’s reality show Making The Band 3 in the early 2000s. The multi-platinum group comprised of Dawn herself, Aubrey O’Day, Shannon Bex, and now former members Wanita “D. Woods” Woodgett and Aundrea Fimbres, all representing a diverse group of women with their own stories to tell. Dawn and D. Woods were the only two Black girls in the group and their struggles, because of this, were often highlighted on MTB3.
“The more different you are as a Black person… I didn’t know that was fearful for people,” Dawn said. “So they make you conform and they confine you. They say well, ‘No this ain’t it, do this.’ Before I knew it and the more I was getting into the industry, the girl I knew was being shaped into someone completely different than what I wanted to be. I had played [the game] for so long, that one day I woke up and was like, nah, I’m good on that. I’m tired of it.”
The talented recording artist born Dawn Angeliqué Richard always knew who was before even appearing on the reality show. Coming from a musically inclined family, Dawn was equipped with knowledge of how to utilize the uniqueness of her voice and write really good songs.
It’s why Dawn is a special treat to have in the music industry. Puff knew this — when he disbanded DK, he kept Dawn and put her in a group alongside himself and the lesser-known, yet talented singer-songwriter Kalenna Harper, to become the trio known as Diddy-Dirty Money. Their first (and only) album, Last Train To Paris is an out-of-the-box, eclectic masterpiece that was way too far ahead of time when it made its debut in 2010.
By industry standards, the cult-classic-level of love DDM received for Last Train To Paris is a moot point considering how a powerful guy like Diddy is. The hip-hop mogul knowingly entered into a music group with two Black women, who essentially shaped the album’s sound. As long as Puff’s been in the business, he’s keenly aware of the colorist politics woven into the music industry’s fabric, however, even he wasn’t even prepared for the amount of fear his vision would receive from label heads.
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In an interview with Cosmopolitan last year, Richard recalled when Interscope co-founder Jimmy Iovine called her unattractive, as a member of Diddy-Dirty Money, in a boardroom of fifty people then questioned why Puff didn’t have two lighter-skinned girls by his side instead.
“That’s normal for him, for him it’s dollars and I understand,” she explained. “He knew a formula and that’s most music labels. They have a formula and if you get the correct team, for the most part, it works. You force-feed an idea of an artist. People come out and they see this idea of an artist and it’s given. ‘Like ‘these records and ‘like’ these songs. Big budgets are given and it works.”
Unfortunately, Black women aren’t afforded the luxury of speaking up without the “angry” label. On MTB3, Aubrey was often used as Danity Kane’s voice to address issues concerning the group. As someone who has followed Dawn since the beginning, I always found her grace inspiring.
“It wasn’t meant to be disrespectful to Jimmy,” Dawn elaborated. “I think anything that was different was uncomfortable. Puff was trying to pitch something that was uncomfortable for a lot of people. Puff wanted it to work. He had a vision but he was frustrated because a lot of people didn’t see the vision. If you look at that album it was ahead of its time, it was so great. But even visually, people weren’t ready for that amount of chocolate on a stage and doing that kind of music. It wasn’t just the look of us, it was the entire package.”
The music industry has a troubling problem of embracing Black people, especially women, as anything but the negative tropes projected by mainstream media. It protects these deeply rooted limitations by relegating everything musically created by Black people into two categories — R&B and hip-hop — no matter how authentically folk, country or electronic it sounds. It wasn’t too long ago that Billboard used to categorize all music made by Black artists on a chart titled the Black Singles chart before it became the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
“I remember when the wave of electronic music with brown skin was happening, they didn’t want to give us the name of electronic they wanted to give us alternative R&B,” Dawn said. “They saw us, but they were still trying to peg it because it was soulful. Just because we sing with soul doesn’t take us away from the genre. We don’t do that when we speak of James Blake. I love him, but we never question putting him in alt-R&B, we call him an electronic artist.”
In the end, the electronic-infused album Last Train To Paris triumphantly birthed six Billboard-topping hits including, “Loving You No More” featuring Drake and the multi-platinum selling record “Coming Home” featuring Skylar Grey.
With over ten years in the game, Dawn wants Black women in music to unify, and break the debilitating habit of staying silent when wronged by speaking up.
“Start f*cking talking,” Dawn said. “Let’s start being unafraid to say what it really is. The more women step up to the plate and do that, you’ll see change. Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay — they are speaking with no sugar coats. They are saying what it really is and you’re seeing so much change in film. It’s beautiful and I love it. I want us to speak just as powerfully. We don’t have to anger anyone and if we do that’s fine; we don’t have to sh*t on anyone, but I do think we need to start having a dialogue. We need to start saying this is who the f*ck we are, take it or leave it. Once we do that together as a group you can’t stop us.”
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Issues Black women deal with as artists in the music industry are extremely rinse-and-repeat. As Dawn went through her own complications while in Danity Kane, similarly, former Fifth Harmony member Normani Kordei opened up about the racism she endured as part of the multi-platinum pop group in a January interview with Billboard. Naturi Naughton, of the now-disbanded early 2000s R&B group 3LW, revealed her experience after bandmate Kiely Williams, threw a plate of fried chicken at her. Besides Dawn, the racism Normani and Naturi experienced while part of their groups didn’t get addressed until later.
“F*ck the mold,” Dawn continued. “I say go hard or go home. I say come fully as you and you take no prisoners. You demand the respect that you want.”
The invisibility can be frustrating, but fierce desire can turn a dream into a reality and can be the catalyst that transforms that kind of pressure into strong, beautiful, effervescent diamonds. That’s what her favorite New Breed track “We, Diamonds” is about.
“‘We, Diamonds’ is special because I came into this business with my weave all f*cked up,” she recalled of times on MTB3. “I had no idea what reality tv was, so I wasn’t prepared for people to see me daily and not have my sh*t together. People saw us at our worst on Making The Band. It’s hard being indie, to compete at a certain level and have people love your music. But I always thought that didn’t stop us from being diamonds.”
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The idea of having to be twice as good is merely a mean of survival for women of color. It comes with an immense amount of pressure but at the same time it is everything “Black Girl Magic” is made of.
“Through Danity Kane, I knew what it was like being in an interracial girl group, experience blackballing and being a Black girl in that,” she explained. “Normani speaks of this when she speaks of how hard that journey was. She talks about that now, so imagine ten years before that. We didn’t have Twitter so we were dealing with it on a different level.”
Dawn does the whole “f*ck the mold” thing very well, as that young girl from the 9th Ward makes her return in Dawn’s latest music. Now, she’s creating all the mold-breaking music she wants, but on her own terms. “I made this album and I wanted to make it with that girl and as that girl,” she said. “I promised myself that if I did, I’d do it as who I already was — so this album speaks to that. This isn’t no big, industry, strict sh*t. There’s no one behind me telling me what to do. If it’s good or bad, it’s all me.”
Remnants of her native culture preserved by her uncle are intertwined with the spirit of a futuristic New Orleans sound on the album on the title track, nicely tapping into NOLA’s rich bounce culture with an updated approach. In a way, New Breed is a rebellious expression of Dawn’s rage against the political music industry machine. Still, she has hope things will get better. First, there needs to be an open conversation about the weakening effects systematic racism has on the industry.
In the rest of the industry, Dawn is currently the most excited about Lizzo — a full-figured Black woman, brilliantly bringing something new to pop. She’s also proud of Janelle Monae‘s Album Of The Year nod for her critically-acclaimed Dirty Computer at the 2019 Grammys. Still, more work needs to be done, and Dawn thinks more representation at the top is necessary in order to awaken the music industry new guards.
“It’s no different from the Grammys right… they were saying women need to step it up and we’ll have more women. I think it’s no different from campaigns, when you see them do something extremely racist, and everyone is asking how did anyone not know that was racist? Well, they didn’t know because no one in the room is Black,” Dawn expressed. “I think it’s the same. Whoever is at the top level of these places, awarding artist, for some reason, we’re not seeing as much representation as we should.”
Dawn is relentless in her mission to smash stereotypes by consistently doing her thing, her way. Though a Diddy-Dirty Money reunion is unlikely, Danity Kane as Dawn, Aubrey, and Shannon still exists. “I’ve been writing with them. We’re going to come out with some stuff in March,” she said. “It’s a new chapter and it’s very female.
Furthermore, Dawn has the right idea. Black women in the music industry should start speaking up. As a music fan, I’ve seen far too many talented Black singers get overlooked by their fairer-skinned counterparts, despite possessing undeniable talent.
“I want people to see us beyond just the stereotypical idea,” Dawn suggested. “We are so much more and we can be more in that space. I think everyone can live in the same space together and I don’t want to get rid of what we have right now in the industry with labels and indie. I just want us to be more inclusive.”
