Photo by Callie Lipkin
Psalm One
Issue #24
From chemist to lyricist, Psalm One changes up the Rhymesayers formula with some feminine elements
By Amber Drea
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 2:23pm
You know the world is getting turned upside down when you learn to make baked macaroni and cheese better than your mother. That’s only one of the many rules Chicago MC Psalm One has broken. “Now I’m the macaroni lady, and I can’t ever come to a family function without a huge trough of it. I use Velveeta and eight different kinds of cheeses, so it’s heart-stoppingly good,” she says. But when Psalm busts a rhyme about her bad-ass mac ’n’ cheese, she means something else all together. “Figuratively, it’s on some pimp shit,” she explains. “I just talk a lot about being cool, even though I’m a dork.”
As the first female rapper signed to indie hip-hop giant Rhymesayers Entertainment, Psalm One (born Cristalle Bowen) has the skills to keep up with the best. And it’s no coincidence that the Minnesota-based label noticed her. A longtime fan, Bowen would hand Rhymesayers co-founder Slug her CDs whenever his group Atmosphere performed at the University of Illinois-Champaign, where she graduated with a chemistry degree. But it was when Psalm asked Brother Ali to appear on one of her tracks that they really began to pay attention. He suggested she submit the entire album when it was finished, which she did, resulting in Rhymesayers footing the tail-end of the recording bill. “They’re in my corner and they really believe in what I’m doing. So I’m blessed to be in this position,” she says.
Being a black, female MC on a roster with more than its share of white boys might seem intimidating, but not for Bowen. “I’m very aware that some people are gonna look at me extra hard because I am a female on that label or they have a lot of white rappers and I’m not one of them, so that might be an issue as well,” Bowen says. “I try to just be as good of an MC as the MCs that I grew up listening to. I look up to Slug, I look up to Ali, I look up to I Self Divine.”
Apparently, Slug feels a mutual respect. “She’s amazing,” he repeats emphatically. “It had nothing to do with being a girl. She could have been a boy or a grizzly bear … We’re not trying to tout the fact that she’s a woman.”
Bowen is good at adapting to new situations. She grew up in a rough section of Chicago’s South Side with her single mom, who was a journalist and worked in public relations. Mrs. Bowen made sure her daughter had everything she needed and a good education to boot. Bowen attended private schools when she was younger and went to a magnet high school. Having spent her formative years in the predominantly non-black neighborhood of Edgewater (she was the only black student in her school), then moving to Englewood where she learned street smarts, Bowen gained a full perspective. “I have two sides of the story, as far as rich and poor, black and white, things like that,” she says.
Sadly, Bowen didn’t get out of Englewood scar-free. When she was about 14, her mother was mugged at gunpoint on the front steps of their house. And if Bowen hadn’t been such a heavy sleeper, she might have heard the struggle from her room. But it wasn’t until morning that she found out what had happened, and it sent Bowen into a year-long introspective phase. “I would ride the bus to school and kind of sit by the driver and just [be] very melancholy and just look around the bus every day and listen to music and think about how everyone’s lives could be different by a trigger or a lot of things,” she says. Her mother hadn’t been hurt and even got her belongings back minus the cash, but Bowen still felt bad that she had slept through her mother’s attack. “But I ended up writing a lot of really good songs on that bus line,” she recalls.
Shortly after she came out of her shell, Bowen began expressing herself through rhymes, but she didn’t show anyone for another year. “When I was 16, I started saying to my friends [who were into] rap and breakdancing and graffiti and stuff, ‘Hey listen to this, tell me if it’s even acceptable,’” she says. “And everyone really encouraged me to keep doing it.” Because there weren’t a lot of female MCs, the entire student body knew about Bowen by the time she graduated high school.
At U of I, in between studying for her science classes, she joined a few crews and eventually recorded her first EP, Whipper Snapper. Four years of flowing and freestyling later, Bowen returned to Chicago and was hired as a food chemist. “I tested everything you could imagine, probably everything in your cupboard or your refrigerator, for sodium, for sugar, for fat, water, everything. I just did a lot of food quality control,” she explains. Her lab would then give the information to the manufacturer so they could include the nutritional facts on the back of the package. “We were like a middleman between a food-product company and the FDA,” she says.
Meanwhile, Bowen had released the original version of her debut album, 2002’s Bio: Chemistry, and finally began to take her career as an MC seriously. “A friend of mine [from] high school told me one day, ‘Is this a hobby? If this is not a hobby anymore, you’re too damn old to be hanging out just rapping. You gotta figure out what you want to do,’” she says.
Soon she began working on her second full-length, Frequent Flyer, which she eventually changed to Death of Frequent Flyer because the airport/airplane concept was too similar to Atmosphere’s Seven’s Travels. “I worked at the lab, [and] when you work a full-time job and you’re really trying to make moves, you have no time. I got no sleep,” Bowen explains. “So it just talks a lot about me being somewhere that I thought I wanted to be but not and making a different path for myself. So it’s a very transitional album.”
By the time Rhymesayers officially took her on, Psalm had run out of copies of the first record, so her management company, Birthwrite, re-released it as Bio: Chemistry II with added production and extra tracks — she needs something to sell at shows until Death of Frequent Flyer drops at the end of the summer. With beats by producer and Birthwrite CEO Overflo, Atmosphere’s ANT, and fellow Chicagoan Madd Crates, Death features Psalm’s complex lyrical play and detailed storytelling over 3/4 time signatures, Cuban horns and rhythms, jazzy guitars, and Middle Eastern vocals. She relates the tale of the incident with her mom on “The 9” and raps about her mean bowl of “Macaroni and Cheese” on the song with the same title.
Psalm One is a poet with attitude, like Da Brat meets Black Thought from the Roots, but her style is uniquely her own — an educated girl chillin’ in the Midwest, trying to understand what life’s about and having fun along the way. She doesn’t flaunt her sexuality like most popular female MCs, but she’s not against it either. “If you can’t spit, if you suck, but you’re up there naked, it’s like ‘boo,’” Psalm says. “But if you got some great abs, shit, I don’t care, go up there and do your thing. If you look good while you’re doing it, it’s all the better.”
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