Semiratruth Garrett remembers the exact day her creative life opened up. It wasn’t the afternoon in 2014 when she first recorded a song at Harold Washington Library’s YouMedia lab, or the day several years later when she rapped her way onto Netflix’s 2019 hip-hop competition, Rhythm + Flow—though both those moments are also burned into her brain. It was in New York City on the evening of July 24, 2021, when Semira went to SummerStage in Central Park to see her friend Teiana Davis, aka pianist-singer Anaiet, open for the Sun Ra Arkestra with her jazz trio, Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty.
“I was blown away by Teiana’s band,” Semira says. “But also seeing the Sun Ra Arkestra—I was like, ‘I feel spiritually connected to this.’ To see the importance of space—especially as a Black person, like, the space you take up, the space of your mind, the space of past ancestors. All of that was really drawing me.”
Semira had felt the pull of the cosmos for many months prior to the show. She’d been reflecting on her place in the universe while working on a loose series of dreamlike, sample-based beats, some of which she’d begun before 2021. That night at SummerStage cast this unreleased work—whether completed songs or half-finished experiments—in a new light. She’d rapped on her own beats and recorded verses on other producers’ instrumentals, and she assembled her favorites into a full-length, adapting the material to suit her new vision. She also found an interview with Sun Ra and augmented a few tracks with a sample of him declaring “It’s the truth.”
“Everything just seemed to weave itself together as I started doing it,” Semira says. The resulting album, I Got Bandz for the Moonlandin’, came out in September. It wasn’t her first full-length of 2021: in February she’d released Mira, a collection of nine brief, forceful tracks made in collaboration with producer Morgan Varnado. Her debut project, a six-song release called Wait!, had dropped in November 2018, and for a few years before that she’d uploaded singles to Soundcloud.
Moonlandin’ is a milestone for Semira, in part because it’s her first album to showcase her skills as a producer—half its instrumentals are hers. As a beat maker, Semira arranges brief, boisterous samples whose humane warmth accentuates her convivial personality on the mike. She plays off the music in a way that’s both dizzying and inviting, intensifying the intimacy in her playful, twisting verses—the album feels like messages shared between best friends when no one else is around.
Semiratruth’s breakout album, I Got Bandz for the Moonlandin’, is her first to feature her production work.
Semira had an inkling Moonlandin’ would be different. “When making the project, I was like, ‘This is something. This is going to go further than anything I’ve created before, because I know that this is good—this is a story and I feel very connected to it,’” she says. “I was able to unlock something in myself that I don’t think I was ever brave enough to do.”
After she dropped Moonlandin’, Semira got booked at Sleeping Village to open for a couple of revered underground NYC rappers: Mike in October and Wiki in December. By the end of 2021, her name was appearing alongside theirs on the year’s best-of lists. Phillip Mlynar included Moonlandin’ in his best 2021 hip-hop roundup for Bandcamp Daily, and Gary Suarez ranked Moonlandin’ at number six on the best hip-hop list for his crucial newsletter, Cabbages. Harmony Holiday put Mira at number four on her best music list for Artforum. The acclaim for Moonlandin’ exceeded even Semira’s expectations. “A lot of people that I was fans of was like, ‘This hard,’” she says. “A lot of people see a little part of themselves in it. And that’s all I could ask for, honestly.”
Semira, 21, grew up all over Chicago’s south and west sides, including a few years in the south suburbs. While attending elementary school in Park Forest, she got her first taste of performance by acting in the ensembles for school musicals; at age eight, she started piano lessons. She soon took an interest in poetry, and in fifth grade she won a poetry competition.
The art of reciting poetry transfixed her, though it’d be a few years before she’d feel confident doing it herself. “It’s something very critical that moves people, and how you put together words, and how you can paint a picture just by moving your mouth and vibrating your little vocal cords,” she says. “As a young kid, I was attracted to that.”
Semira was living in Austin during middle school, when representatives from Uptown-based hip-hop arts organization Kuumba Lynx came to talk to one of her classes. Their poetry programming piqued her interest, and Semira eventually learned the ins and outs of slam poetry through Kuumba Lynx. “That is very important in where I am today,” she says. “Because that initially taught me how to perform, and how to write and visualize pieces so I can present them.” Semira also learned about hip-hop from her father, who played her the gritty, cerebral music of Ghostface Killah and MF Doom.
In fall 2014, Semira began her freshman year at Jones College Prep, a few blocks south of Harold Washington Library. Incoming students got a tour of the library as part of the school’s orientation program, and that introduced her to the YouMedia Lab, an after-school teen creative space that’s incubated a generation of Chicago artists. Semira made a habit of visiting YouMedia, drawn by the promise of free access to a recording studio.
Eager to learn her way around a studio, Semira slid into a stranger’s recording session at YouMedia one day her freshman year. “He’s like, ‘I’m making a song.’ I was like, ‘Well, show me how to do it,’” she says. By the end of the session, they’d both recorded verses atop an instrumental ripped from YouTube. “On the train ride home, I’m listening to it,” Semira says. “I said, ‘I ate him up! This is fire!’ That’s my first song that started me off. Like, ‘OK, we can do this—this is it.’”
YouMedia’s staff also mentored Semira and fostered her musical and poetic ambitions. Veteran underground rapper and former Nacrobats member Marcellous Lovelace, aka Infinito 2017, served as a YouMedia music instructor, and Semira enrolled in his hip-hop workshops. She learned about hip-hop production and the history of the culture, and within a couple years she’d joined the pool of hosts for a YouMedia podcast he produced called Underground Feed Back Stereo. “I think that helped ease me into stuff,” Semira says. “I remember him being, like, ‘Oh, you’re good. You can rap—you’re fire.’ That expanded my, like, ‘OK, I can do this, and build upon it with this poetry shit I’m doing on the side.’”
Poetry proved to be a major part of Semira’s YouMedia experience too. Teaching artist and poet Jennifer Steele became an invaluable inspiration. “She really expanded my writing, and grew how I performed pieces,” Semira says.
Steele was among the coaches of YouMedia’s Louder Than a Bomb slam-poetry team, for which Semira successfully auditioned her freshman year. She remained on the team for three years, which allowed Steele to see her growth up close.
“I remember thinking that this young woman that I have been coaching for years found the space where she could be this fully animated person onstage—not just having the lyrics and the words and the images, but being able to embody those words on the stage,” Steele says.
Semira also proved that she understood how to be part of a team. “She was someone who was kind and caring towards her teammates, and really a champion of everyone else’s voice and style,” Steele says. “She wasn’t quiet, but she had this gentle spirit that was expressive and fun, all the time.”
Semiratruth’s Wait! includes a beat from her YouMedia friend Morgan Varnado.
Some of the friendships Semira formed with her teammates have lasted beyond her time at YouMedia—that was when she met future Mira producer Morgan Varnado, for instance. “One of his beats is on Wait!, one of the first projects I ever did,” Semira says. “People just kind of fall into the trajectory of my life.” Semira also met Teiana Davis at YouMedia by walking into a friend’s recording session. “We grew up a lot together in that space,” Semira says of Davis. “And I will hold her dear to my heart because of that.”
Semira graduated from Jones in spring 2018, and in the fall she left for what turned out to be a short stay at Illinois State University. “I was finding a lot of joy in the start of my adultness in Chicago,” she says. “When I left, it felt like it was stripped away. I knew nobody. The person I was supposed to go to ISU with, she couldn’t do it no more—so I was there all alone. Tried to make friends but could not do it. I was like, ‘No, I need to be back home.’” She dropped out after 11 days and moved in with her aunt in South Shore.
Netflix debuted Rhythm + Flow in October 2019. Early in the fourth episode, Chance the Rapper heads to Harold Washington Library’s Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, where he’s also hosted his own teen performance series, OpenMike (Semira had been a regular while at Jones). The episode shows a handful of rappers onstage in the auditorium—just a fraction of the number who’d turned up—and Semira’s tempo-shifting verse charms Chance and fellow judge Lupe Fiasco. She says she was invited to advance to the next round but declined. The editing of the program doesn’t let us see either way, but she already had plans to fly to New York City the next day—she was going to have her first in-person meeting with a collective of like-minded musicians she’d gotten to know over Soundcloud a few years before.
Dropping out of college turned out to be a boon for Semira. Once she returned to Chicago, she became a regular at open mikes around the city—her favorite was a monthly run by Shawnee Dez (also the Reader‘s special projects associate), which for a time made its home at FDC Studios in Logan Square. “That’s how I started building momentum, building a name for myself in the scene,” Semira says. “My mother, in high school, she didn’t let me go out a lot after hours or go out to random places without knowing a lot of details. Once I was 18, 19, I hit the ground running.” She took a lot of unpaid shows, but in December 2019 she performed her first big paid gig, opening for Roy Kinsey at Schubas.
Semira made some of her most rewarding connections outside the city. On the New York trip she took instead of advancing on Rhythm + Flow, she met several folks from musical collective and label FreeThe (she’d already become its only Chicago member) and bonded especially tightly with a rapper named Mimz. They were the youngest people in the collective, and they got closer as they discovered how much they had in common.
“The more we got to know each other, and the more we understood our upbringings and stuff, we understood that our friendship was a responsibility to each other,” Mimz says. “The support that we had for each other was important, and not something to be thrown away, or something that was disposable.”
Semira put out one project through FreeThe, the 2019 EP I Don’t Wanna Have to Yell for You to Listen, which features a verse from Mimz; neither is involved in the collective anymore, but their bond has deepened—and influenced both their music.
“There was a time where I genuinely wasn’t feeling good about my music, and when I would listen to Semira, I would hit her up and be like, ‘Honestly, this made me want to make a song right now,’” Mimz says. “And she would tell me, ‘I was just listening to one of your songs and it made me want to make songs.’ It fills your heart, because you feel like people weren’t listening to what you’re saying, and you’re hearing somebody who you genuinely love and care about and also feel inspired by telling you that they’re feeling inspired by the words you’re speaking at the same time. It’s a very self-sustainable relationship.”
Semiratruth and Mimz made Oh, the Places We’ll Go! to honor their friendship and their hopes for its future.
The two rappers have tried to close the distance between them by traveling to each other whenever possible. Mimz spent a week in Chicago last year, and Semira crashed with Mimz for all of November 2021. Last February, they rendezvoused in Los Angeles and recorded the track “Soup” with a producer named Alexander Spit. Earlier this month, Semira released it as part of a two-track collaboration with Mimz called Oh, the Places We’ll Go! The title refers to their travels together as well as to their mutual aspirations.
“It’s a beautiful thing to be in friendship with somebody where you feel like the possibilities are infinite,” Mimz says. “Like, you’ve come from a place where you felt like you were going nowhere, where you used to not be able to imagine your future because of how uncertain it is. Now we still can’t imagine our future only because of how abundant it could be.”
Semira’s work over the past year or so has also helped her see the shape of her own future. “To find my own power in the words that I’m curating has helped me build my confidence, and pull from people that are no longer here with us, so I can pull from their power too,” she says. “I’m saying things that are going to live forever.”
The post Semiratruth’s <i>Moonlandin’</i> elevates her music to a new plane appeared first on Chicago Reader.