Millennials are often looked down upon by our elders for being “slashers.” Gone are the days when your career means working at [insert company name here] office for 40 years and getting a plaque once you retire. We graduated into a different economy than our predecessors and taking the reins of our livelihoods. Our generation is compiling each talent we can muster and monetizing them in ways never thought imaginable.

I was excited to sit down with one of my favorite slashers, SAMMUS to talk PhDs, gaming and being mighty morphing power black girls.

Hometown: Ithaca, NY

When I try to tell people about you, I often feel like I’m not telling the full story. The PhD candidate. The rapper. The producer. How do you see SAMMUS?

That’s hard! I will say it’s a combination of Kanye’s sensibilities, because it goes between having a huge ego and being intensely insecure. Stylistically, I don’t rap like the rappers I like. In terms of content, it’s a mixture of nerdy, geeky stuff, then black girl issues and the things we think about, with a political mindedness behind it. Then there’s also the first generation American aspect. It’s a lot of different things and I struggle with putting that into one package.

That’s cool though! Artists seem to be okay with being one dimensional. You exist in an academic space, but then you’re also a legit rapper, and you’re in the gaming world. It’s interesting because those three things never intersect, but you’re able to do it in a way that doesn’t feel forced or corny.

I feel like this is the culmination of a lot of things intersecting. So all of the kids that grew up on Nintendo are all adults and we’re infusing all of the things that we were listening to. Having parents from African countries, they’re like “You better get that degree and stop playing games!” so I have to take that seriously as well. The rap is the way to express all of that.

So how did you start rapping?

I started in 2009, 2010. I started after I graduated from Cornell in undergrad. I moved to Houston where I was an elementary school teacher. It was profoundly depressing for me to see the state of our education system and I needed an outlet. I was also disturbed because my students knew all of the Lil Wayne lyrics, but didn’t know how to add. So I wanted to make music saying it’s cool to be a nerd and study and maybe one day the kids would be inspired.

Then when I started performing it, the music began to resonate with people, so I thought that I could keep doing this. The last aspect was I was going to a church at the time that had two rappers that rapped about video games. I had never heard that before and I thought it was so cool! That inspired me too and combined made me want to really rap.

I was first introduced to your music via the Another M project. Now we’re here with your new EP Infusion and the single “1080P.” When I saw the video, I was immediately blown away.

“1080P” was the first song I made after Another M. I remember having a lot of anxiety about how to follow up after that project. It was Metroid-inspired and a lot of my more recent fans came to me through that. I was hoping that they weren’t expecting me to continue making songs about this video game because I have other things I want to talk about and I’m scared that I’m going to get put into a box.

Throughout that entire year, I was in a relationship and it was just awful. It was long distance and we weren’t talking. There’s a line in there about us sharing a Netflix account and we weren’t even addressing each other. I had never felt equipped to talk about relationships, but I remember I was on the couch just crying and said that I need to put this in a song. I cannot feel this way anymore. I need to figure out something to get me out of this headspace. I was also very anxious at the time about school, so I talk about that too. I made the beat, wrote it out and just rapped it.

It was just the first verse at the time and afterwards I just cried and cried because I was happy to have expressed what has been on my heart for so long.

You also produce your own music. Was it out of necessity or did you always want to produce?

It was out of necessity. When I first started making beats in high school, I was a huge introvert. I wanted to have a cartoon and a video game, but I didn’t know how to animate or program. So I figured I could just make the music for it. My older brother (guitarist for Gym Class Heroes) is a musician, so he taught me how to use beat-making software. I didn’t think it was anything special or interesting. It was just my little hobby. I made a bunch of songs in high school and sent it to my friends. They all thought it was weird, so I stopped. Then Kanye West came out and I loved everything about him. He was producing this Chimpmunk soul and I decided I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. So I started making sample-based beats.

When I first started out, it wasn’t a gender thing to me at all. It was just that I liked making beats. Then it was dudes that would say things to me that made me feel insecure and like this wasn’t something that I should be doing. They would say things like “Who helped you?” or “Who is making your beats?” I realized that this wasn’t a thing that men think women do. Since then, whenever I see a woman making beats, I show love. I’m sure they too have been questioned and ripped apart by somebody. Been faced with masculine toxicity that says if a woman makes a better beat than suddenly you that you aren’t a man anymore.

That aspect has become a very empowering thing that I feel like I can use to build up the fact that women can do tons of stuff without asking anybody for help.

The black women’s empowerment movement for our generation is largely digital. How do you keep that online momentum going IRL?

Part of it is having a network of amazing black women. They’ll send me stuff they’re working on. I’ll send them stuff I’m working on. Not just having a network, but sharing that network with other people, the awesomeness that is my friend group. That’s how I sustain my passion for it. Also, I get a lot of emails from parents of little black girls or black women that simply say “thank you for doing this.” I read them whenever I need to be affirmed. Also, simply just hanging out with my brown ass friends. That sustains me.