Grime MC JayaHadADream: ‘bell hooks changed my life’

“I was a kid when I realised racism wasn’t taken seriously,” Cambridge MC JayaHadADream tells Dazed. “I was at the BMX track and this girl shouted the N-word at me. My mum raised me to call this stuff out, so I literally thought that if I told her parents she would be told off. I cycled all the way to her house, knocked on the door and said, ‘This is what your daughter said to me’. Her parents were like, ‘That definitely didn’t happen’. That memory always comes back to me.”

It’s one of many painful childhood experiences that’s fuelled Jaya’s defiant debut project, Happiness From Agony, released today. Raised by her single mother and grandmother in Cambridge, Jaya’s financial struggles, tomboyish nature and mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage led her to be targeted by bullies growing up. But it is through unpacking all of these intersecting prejudices on the microphone that she has started fo find acceptance. In the past year alone, Jaya has received co-signs from grime legends Frisco, JME and Flowdan, been played on BBC Radio 1, and, lately, even those very same bullies have started to come out of the woodwork to show their support. “The catharsis is big with this one,” the now-25 year old says with a smile. 

In April of last year, Jaya won a competition to perform at Glastonbury. The moment should have been yet another strike of vindication for her earlier struggles, but prejudice marred the milestone once more. “I’d just done a video on a train near Cambridge in which I rap the lyrics, ‘Nothing sick about this nation, ancestors owned in the sugar plantations’ and it definitely got put in a racist group chat, because I’d refresh my Instagram and get about ten comments a second being racist towards me,” she recalls. “I was literally sitting next to the Eavis family and I’d look at my phone and read, ‘You n***a go back to your country’, ‘You’re not even Black’ and ‘You’re a woman and we’re going to beat you up’. It was coming from all sides.” 

She continues: “Then, when I won the competition and Glastonbury posted about me, people started saying that I was a token because I’m mixed-race, I’m a woman and I rap. I’m not going to lie, that was really hard. That was the first time in my life I actually had to get support for racism.” 

Still, she is more equipped than most to make sense of these encounters. Before quitting her job to pursue music full-time, Jaya taught GCSE criminology in a Cambridge secondary school, and credits one book in particular with her political awakening. “bell hooks’ Killing Rage changed my life,” Jaya recalls. “My sociology teacher recommended it to me when I was 16. That book shapes everything I do and talk about. When I first started to make music, I would say stuff like ‘Capitalism is really bad’, but now, I try to show, not tell, in my lyrics.”

Indeed, it is by walking the listener through these pivotal experiences that Happiness From Agony truly shines. “One of the coldest writers but man don’t say it ‘cos I’ve got vagina,” Jaya raps self-assuredly on mellow grime cut “Bug”, while closing track “Nothing’s Changed” chronicles her heartfelt tale of innocence lost and rage found with visceral detail. “Mum’s ill but bills, so my nan keeps working,” she spits over transient synths. It’s rap’s quintessential underdog narrative, but told from an entirely new perspective.

Despite this fire that engulfs the project, however, Jaya is insistent that her lasting message be one of gratitude. “I just want to say that I love everything that happened,” she says. “I really appreciate my parents, they did the most for me. I wouldn’t change a thing.” 

Below, visceral storyteller JayaHadADream breaks down the experiences that led up to today’s release, from the freestyles that inspired her, to why she thinks grime is inherently leftwing. 

Where are we right now?

Jayahadadream: We’re at the Old Ship Inn, which is crazy because my nan grew up here, my family moved from Ireland and started their life in England with this pub. It’s crazy to be here.

You’ve got quite a close relationship with your nan, right? 

Jayahadadream: My nan is literally my rock. She taught me about work ethic, she bought me my first mic, she helps with props for music videos… She even drove me to the station this morning to get here! I come from quite a broken family, but nan has been the glue. That’s her voice at the start of the project, too. 

So, was your entry to rapping through hip-hop or grime?

JayaHadADream: I would say hip-hop because my mum literally had like 500 hip-hop CDs. My whole childhood she would play Nas, Jay-Z, Tribe Called Quest, Lauren Hill and stuff. Then, as I got older, my friends were more into grime and they showed me SBTV and LinkUpTV, so I started to tap into that. It was cool because they were speaking and using language that I understood and weren’t just talking about the American Dream, which I didn’t relate to. I feel like grime is inherently quite left-wing. Even Nadia Whitombe, the Labor MP, has been a key supporter of mine from early on, and now Zarah Sultanah is onto me. 

The project mentions dealing with sexism in the grime scene, right? 

JayaHadADream: Yeah, I think some of the men don’t even realise it. Even little things, like men won’t big you up at sets because there’s already conversations about glazing and women getting extra credit, or because they don’t want to seem like they’re trying to move to me. Also, some of my lyrics are about men, so they might not want to big me up, but I want people to understand that when I talk about men I’m not talking about specific relationships, but rather being in a male-dominated scene. You know, when Kendrick says that someone’s a bitch or, ‘You’re being a little bitch’, I know that Kendrick isn’t always saying me as a woman, so I don’t understand why, when I say mandem or brother, it’s different. 

Every week I get a message like, ‘You’re one of my favorite female rappers’, which is really cool, but they’re probably not saying to a white guy, ‘You’re one of my favorite white rappers’. It is a bit mad. There are some female rappers who are really aimed at a woman or a female audience, that’s their thing, but I don’t think that's me. I just talk from a human perspective. I am quite a masculine woman, but I’m straight, and I think it’s really important to represent that. I think there's not enough representation of women who are quite dominant but are actually heterosexual. People assume I’m not a lot. 

Having heard how tough things were for you growing up, it must feel quite insane suddenly getting so much support from the scene.

JayaHadADream: Yeah it’s mad. Emily Sandé followed me and I haven’t even processed that yet. Her song was literally the first song I ever sang on stage on my own – I sang ‘Clown’. But, yeah, Giggs and Fred Again commenting on ‘Nothing’s Changed’, even working with Frisco – he was one of the first SBTV freestyles I ever watched and he’s my favourite BBK member. I’m quite nerdy about music, I really care about this, and it’s crazy that all these people have just found me through seeing my videos online. 

As a music nerd, then, what are some of the freestyles that inspired you? 

JayaHadADream: Ice Kid and Chip on BBC 1Xtra, because Ice Kid also speaks about being Jamaican-Irish in that one. The hunger in that – I think we’re missing it [nowadays]. Nolay is also a big one for me. She was one of my first co-signs – she bigged me up on Twitter when I was, like, 15 – and I know her LinkUpTV 'Behind Bars Freestyle' bar-for-bar. [Jaya stars playing the freestyle on her phone] I’ve cried to this. I’ve got through things to this. It’s literally been the soundtrack to my life. She also raps over the Massive Attack’s 'Unfinished Symphony'. I remember I turned to my mum and asked her, ‘What instrumental is this?’ and she knew it was Massive Attack. So, Nolay got me into Massive Attack. 

Speaking of early inspirations, can you explain what The Abbey is?

JayaHadADream: It’s so mad hearing other people say that name. The Abbey is a field near my house in Cambridge, and the Abbey Trails are a BMX track. It’s where I got into BMXing, I met all my friends there, I tried my first cigarette there, I sold my first bag of weed there, I broke my arm and my nose there, I got chased by boys there over weed. It was my escape. Back then, mental health was really not spoken about and I remember kids at school would get told off for cutting themselves, so we used to go and hide there. Recently they got rid of the tennis courts there and people are getting annoyed so I really wanted to represent it.

I wasn’t actually going to put that track on the project because it was a bit older, but I’m glad I did because my friend, Jasmine, passed away from ovarian cancer a week or two ago. We were both doing music in different worlds, and she’s the only person that I know who got out of that area in Cambridge and is doing her thing. 

Having gone from agony to happiness, where do you go now? 

JayaHadADream: I think I need to actually process happiness a little more. I  think there’s a lot of acceptance that still needs to be done. This project was me spewing all of this shit out and saying how crazy things are, but I don’t think I’ve necessarily accepted them yet. So, after happiness comes solitude and peace of mind. 

Happiness from Agony is out now.