A close-up of Joe Rainey.
Joe Rainey sees his job as preserving Pow Wow music.
The appalling so-called “tomahawk chant” heard from fans of the Atlanta Braves and the Kansas City Chiefs is what many non-Indigenous Americans associate with Native American musical traditions.
Joe Rainey, a Minneapolis-born member of the Red Lake Nation of Ojibwe who now lives in Green Bay, would like to get people to quit referring to Indigenous music as chanting altogether. Rainey, who makes contemporary Pow Wow music, is one of several artists and groups who are combining Indigenous drum and vocal traditions with modern electronic and other beats.
Rainey has been interested in Pow Wow since he was a kid, when he began recording traditional singing and drumming on a tape recorder. He sang with several Native groups in the Twin Cities and sees the art form as collaborative. “I didn’t expect to be a solo artist,” Rainey tells Isthmus in a phone interview in advance of a workshop and concert he will be giving at the Arts + Literature Lab in Madison on Nov. 5. “Pow Wow music is not owned by anyone, and I’m humble about that.”
Rainey’s full-length album, Niineta, was produced by Minneapolis’ Andrew Broder and released by Justin Vernon and Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s 37d03d record label this year.
Rainey had been experimenting with combining electronic beats with his singing — “abstractly” re-considering traditional songs he had heard many times. “I distorted the song to make it sound like an electronic loop,” he says, and then thought he could sing over it. He began collaborating with Broder, who supplied the beats, Rainey the vocals. “It was just a few songs at first. There was back and forth. It was a good project to take on during the quarantine.”
The song “no chants” from Niineta begins with a heavy, looming drum that sounds both traditional and clubbish; Rainey’s vocals come in late. There are no lyrics per se; the singing is “straight vocables,” says Rainey, just vocalized sound, which is traditional for Pow Wow. The voice almost acts as another instrument.
On some tracks, English speech is buried in the mix, as in the track “b.e. son” and its “Are you ready to rock?”
“can key” begins more gently, with melodic vocals over multiple drum beats; eventually, spoken English takes over: “Joey here. He asked me to come and be here for him, so I tried to do what I just do, what I can do, what is make miracles….I tried my best.” Synth and strings eventually mesh with several different lines of singing and many layers of communicating.
Rainey sees his job as preserving Pow Wow music. Despite the less conventional nature of his own work, he doesn’t see his songs as being out of place at a traditional Pow Wow. “Pow Wows are very social,” he says, and he’d like to “talk down the romanticism of ‘It’s very very sacred ground we are on.’ We do pray upon that ground, but — even the pedestalization of Indians in the museum, I really want to knock that down. If you like Pow Wow drum music, then enjoy it. I want to change the narrative about something that has been around me my whole life.”
Opening for Rainey at Arts + Lit lab show will be Madison’s taiqaa//ambe omaa, a duo featuring nibiiwakamigkwe and Anastasia. More information about the show and Rainey’s free 2 p.m. workshop is at artlitlab.org/calendar; the performances usher in a slate of Indigenous-related programs at A+LL throughout the fall and winter.
