Personal Space

“Oh, I’ve got such a sexy girlfriend,” coos Thee Satisfaction’s
beaming, kinky-haired chanteuse Catherine “Cat Satisfaction”
Harris-White, sweeping her arm toward the flygrrl with the high-tops
and shades across the stage, MC/producer “Thee” Stasia Irons. “Wish you
had one, too, but you don’t and I do.” The black, female,
queer-identified hiphop duo are rocking the Vera Project stage at this
past Memorial Day weekend’s Folklife Festival, with a locked-in crowd
of hiphop luminaries, emo kids, young children, and middle-agers all
unabashedly singing along.

“I first saw Cat at an open mic at the UW Ethnic Cultural Theatre,”
says Irons of her partner in love, life, and music. “I would always hit
these open mics because I thought she was hella filthy—her voice
was dope. And there was one time I went and she was singing a freestyle
song about a girl she liked and a guy she liked, and how she was torn
between the two. Turns out she was singing about me.”

Not long after that, the two started dating. In the spring of 2008,
after Irons returned from a trip to South Africa, the pair recorded
their first song, “Sexy Girlfriend,” creating the beat themselves in
GarageBand. “We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing,” Irons admits.
“And we didn’t want to pay anybody to make the beat,” adds
Harris-White, laughing.

Born of necessity, the rough-hewn tracks of their first mixtape,
That’s Weird, established them as one of the most promisingly
outta-left acts to pop up on the radar ’round here—their jazzy
freak-rap science somewhere between Solid Gold, Octavia Butler,
and Space Is the Place, but with a bold sound and swagger all
its own. Cat Satisfaction’s lush singing/scatting blends seamlessly
with Thee Stasia’s wickedly pointed rhymes and bugged keyboard
compositions. With brazen appropriation of tasty jams from fellow
weirdos Bernard Wright (gleefully fucking up the same sample that made
Skee-Lo an overnight sensation), Michael Jackson (“Killa Thrilla”), and
Earth, Wind & Fire, Weird showcased the duo’s punk-rock
spirit and flagrantly hiphop heart.

Still, the ladies of the Thee have been surprised at how the hiphop
community has taken to them as one of their own. “It has a lot to do
with us being women,” admits Irons. “I mean, two gay men rapping
wouldn’t get the same reception, at least not right now.” “Even still,
we were not prepared for the reception,” adds Harris-White.

“It’s been interesting, because we get a lot of love from the hiphop
community,” says Harris-White. “But it’s kind of slower on the queer
side—because we’re hiphop, we’re black. Maybe they’re afraid
their shows are going to get shot up, just like hiphop heads are scared
their shows are going to get queered up. The thing is, fear is the same
all over, no matter who you’re fearing. But things are changing. We’re
performing at the Wildrose, and we’re doing Pridefest, which is a big,
big, big deal. Sure, it maybe took a little shoving, a little ‘hey,
we’re doing stuff, and we’d like to, y’know, be a part of our
community!'”

But as much as Thee Satisfaction occupy these two often-conflicting
worlds—this week, they perform at both monthly hiphop mainstay
the Corner and a variety of Pride events—they’re also above the
bullshit, in a whole ‘nother orbit, because they’re aliens and
that’s how they roll.

“I’m a sci-fi freak, space geek,” raps Harris-White on the
solar-sailing posse cut “Cosmic Voyage.” “Starfleet sky sheik/Slaying
earthlings with my fly technique.” Yeah, but space this, space
that—these days it seems that there’s a whole generation of young
hiphop artists who took very much to heart Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter
III declaration, “I am not like you, I am a Martian”—is
anybody even from Earth anymore?

In most of these astro rap fantasies, however, “space” is just
another alpha-dog signifier; it implies superiority, a heightened state
of fly—and a new frontier to stay fly in. To your average
Auto-Tune-loving, scarf-sporting swag trainee, the concept of outer
space is like just another mall to hang out at—which,
shit, one day might not be far from the truth. But the uncut
Andromeda strain, that true black space shit, that real
Afro-­futurism—that’s not the work of the merely
material-minded; it’s the domain of the downright deranged, cooked up
by cats like Saturn’s own Sun Ra and slung to the masses’ asses
straight out the starchild George Clinton’s funky diaper. Thee
Satisfaction get it instinctively. “My parents saw Sun Ra when they
lived in San Francisco way back,” says Harris-White. “It sounded [like
it was] incredible.”

“Of course we connect with that imagery,” says Irons. Growing up,
Irons and Harris-White both endured their share of static from their
peers, an alienation that ultimately gave them a self-assuredness that
resonates across all zones. Harris-White, Hawaiian-born and a
self-described weirdo all her life, concurs: “We feel a part of that
same tradition, like aliens, a part of everything and nothing at
all.”

“At first I didn’t even really want to be a part of hiphop,” adds
Irons. “Because I don’t even listen to a lot of hiphop now. I listen to
rock or ’80s shit. But now that we’re in it, I’m happy to feel accepted
by the hiphop community here in Seattle. It’s a lot more positive than
I thought it would be. Once they hear the music, they tend to just get
into it. Thank goodness, ’cause we don’t want to walk around with this
label like ‘Thee Satisfaction: Black, Gay Women.'”

Thee Satisfaction will only see their profile rise with the release
of Snow Motion, an EP inspired by the Great Seattle Blizzard of
2008. Recorded while the duo were living in a broke-down palace dubbed
“the Madhouse” on 23rd Avenue and Madison Street (where the rats in the
walls and ceiling kept them awake), the EP reflects a time when they
lost friends to gun violence, suffered death in the family, struggled
with money issues, and drove each other crazy with cabin fever. In a
significant step up from the rough sketches of Weird,
Motion carves crop circles—the duo’s natural chemistry is
through the roof and beyond. Irons packs more than her share of
thoughtfully ill rhymes, and her bouncing, loping, space-boogie
productions redshift the duo’s black-upliftment sci-fi
visions
into heretofore unknown territories.

With a debut full-length, Au Naturale, in the works as well
as a laundry list of collaborations lined up for friends’
albums—including GMK, the Physics, Champagne’s Pearl Dragon, Blue
Scholars’ Sabzi, and the very up-and-coming stunners (and Thee
Satisfaction housemates) Cloud Nice—Thee Satisfaction are aiming
to craft a positively celestial body of work in the coming months. In
the words of another great Seattle group: You better cop a telescope.