Talking With Country Artist Lizzie No

Beyoncé just won the Country Album of the Year, but radical Black country music is having its moment too. Lizzie No is a working-class country and Roots artist (and former board president of Abortion Care for Tennessee) trying to bring politics back to music. Her most recent album, Commie Country, dropped in late January. —Cheryl Rivera

CHERYL RIVERA It’s refreshing to meet a musician who wants their music to be political when so many people want to separate art from the context it’s produced in – that is, capitalism.

LIZZIE NO I think that’s actually very convenient to the people who currently have most of the power and cultural real estate in music because – and I’m going to be careful how I talk about this for legal reasons, because I still have to work in Nashville –  I have faced literal retaliation and lost important partnerships because of my politics and because I have named the conditions we’re working under.

I see myself as a folk artist in the Black revolutionary tradition. Tracy Chapman and Faith Ringgold and Paul Robeson and Toni Morrison are career benchmarks, you know, heroes of mine. I’m a multi-disciplinary worker navigating a very weird moment of internet culture intersecting with a descent into fascism and the extremes that these factors create in culture. I think musicians over the past fifteen years have all been forced to either become innovative entrepreneurs or simply not make it. Maybe a generation ago, I just would have been a singer-songwriter, but because of the traditions I’m coming from and the material conditions right now, I’m also organizing.

How can we make music if we can’t have abortions? How can we make music if we can’t pay our bills?

CR How does a working class musician pay the bills?

LN In 2020, I started a subscription page on a worker-owned site called Ampled, which has since shut down. At the time it was like a more radical Bandcamp. Every artist that joined the site got a small percentage stake in the company, so we were all artist-owners and we were invited to the board meetings. Our interests were really being represented. For the first several months of the pandemic, the creators of the site didn’t take any commission off the top. I became the number one creator on that site and fully paid all of my bills through the pandemic, even through the rough transition of going back on tour, which you need startup capital to do.

I think people outside of the industry don’t have much insight about tours and how to make records. It costs a lot of money. You have to pay band members whether or not you’re broke, because those people deserve to have a fair wage too. You have to either own or rent a touring vehicle. With Ampled, I learned there is power in crowdfunding, in letting your audience know the situation that you’re in and inviting them to be part of it.

Reciprocity with my fans is a big part of what makes me a folk artist because I’m actually accountable to my audience. Like, no shame if you can’t donate, no shame if you don’t want to come to the shows. But I’m also not going to be ashamed of saying I have something great going on. You want to be part of it.

CR You recently got on OnlyFans. Did the conservatism of the music industry shape that decision?

LN I knew that I wanted to fund my next album faster than most traditional record labels would. I felt like I had emergent music and emergent financial needs and emergent ideas about how to get my work out there.

OnlyFans started to feel like a really good option over this past year because I was noticing that as I was speaking up about Palestine, people were using words like “inappropriate” and “shocking.” Why not go to the hot new crowdfunding site where I can use the 18+ restriction to my advantage by saying some things that are a little too spicy for these Roots music stages? Also, I’m fun and hot and want to do things that are “explicit” and push at what’s appropriate and what’s okay for a woman to do in public.

I have to walk the line of, like, what feels good to share, when does it feel good to be seen – and when does it not? And I’m trying to employ my feminist ethic in how I approach this work, where some days I just don’t want to be perceived by anyone and so I’m not going to force myself to make content.

A big part of what I’m dealing with on album four is that you have to tour so many days a year. Just picking up your instrument – my chiropractor is like, you need to quit your job. Not to mention the mental health issue of being away from home all the time. Being able to work from home more is an ableism issue.

CR We met when you offered to play music at a vigil I was hosting for Jordan Neely, a Black man who was choked to death on a NYC subway by a white rider. I remember we all cried when you played – music can be such a powerful accompaniment to political gatherings and can ground us in the moment. Where are you grounded, politically, right now?

LN I have been a socialist for a long time. The form that has taken is ever-evolving. My art is my activism in a lot of ways. I’ve been doing the spiritual and emotional and life work to get to a place where I am able to write the songs that can move someone I’ve never met.

I wrote this song, The Killing Season, about the cycle of Black death, the active human sacrifice that America takes from Black people when we get a little too high. That reaping cycle. I read Maya Angelou’s autobiography, where she talks about being sexually assaulted and how that literally stole her voice from her for years – that made me think of the cycles of sowing and reaping violence. The naturalization of violence against Black people is the issue. And I have a song of heartbreak and healing about that.

That’s one of the songs that I played at Jordan’s memorial. A three-minute song can feel like advocacy because in my own life, I’m facing that same racism and exclusion and a lack of access to health care and lack of safety. It’s the twin advocacy of making the music and naming the material conditions the music taking place in. To get to sing about these things, I have had to fight for my life.