Jean Grae is known to most hip-hop fans as one of the best emcees out there – a rap veteran with a career of using head-spinning rhymes to create songs ranging from confessional to comically violent. In recent years, she's turned her considerable talents to realms outside of rhyming. You can find her singing, acting on sitcoms, giving etiquette advice, making a Louie-style web series, writing cooking columns, hosting a live talk show, and doing far more than can be listed in this space.
So it made sense when Grae, at the beginning of this past week, decided to unveil her Patreon page. Patreon is a crowdfunding service with an artist-friendly twist. Users, who the company calls "creators," enlist "patrons" to sponsor them on either a per-month or per-project basis. Creators then offer rewards based on the level of support.
"Different artists have different types of content schedules," explained Christine Donaldson, Creator Talent Lead at the company. "Some might spend a lot of time working on one video per month, and others might be releasing projects every day. So the option to choose between being funded per month or per thing allows them that flexibility."
Donaldson is the one who recruited Grae for Patreon. She reached out at an auspicious time – right when Grae was seriously considering setting up a page for herself anyway.
"About a week before they reached out, I talked to Satori [Grae's brand manager Satori Ananda]," Grae explained to me when we met up earlier this week. "I’m like, ‘I started working on the Patreon thing. I think now is exactly the right time. I’ve got enough things done, and I know exactly what I want to do career-wise and planning-wise for the next ten years.’ A couple of days later, she was like, ‘You did it again. You did the conjuring [trick]. They just reached out.’"
Donaldson's thinking was that Grae's multi-faceted creative nature was a perfect fit for Patreon.
"I’m really impressed with all that she creates, and her relationship with her fans is really strong," Donaldson told me. "I love getting creatives on the platform who dabble in different verticals of arts. She does so much. I think Patreon’s the perfect place for her to become successful in all those areas because it doesn’t limit her to one thing."
As part of her page, Grae put together a touching video ("it's going for the heartstrings," she said) that explains her artistic goals – and, true to a woman who has a series of songs about a time-traveling assassin, she stars as a black-clad superhero.
"Probably one entire year was spent on figuring out, what video do I do to make this effective?" Grae remembered. "I’m not going to take this lightly. I don’t want to change my video once it’s up there. In marketing and branding, I like to be very specific. I know what I want to pull out of people."
The decision to try and raise a monthly stipend from her audience was inspired primarily by her desire to keep doing things her own way.
"I don’t like people telling me what to do," she laughed. "I think that’s the thing with this experience. Life is too short, and I don’t want to do anything that I don’t want to do any more. If I made a decision to be inside of the machine and live that way, I'd understand. But I learned very early on that I don’t fit inside of the machine. The machine doesn’t know what to do with me."
I met with Grae on the day after the Patreon page had launched, and she was thrilled at the response even within the first few hours.
"It doesn’t sound like a lot, but we’ve got 27 people in four hours," she explained. "That’s just $400, but it’s also the goal that I was trying to reach for the whole month. So I think this will go well." As of press time, that total had almost doubled.
One of the first projects Grae wants to put together with support from her patrons is a "visual album" – a project with eight songs, each with an accompanying video. It's not rap, she explains, but rather dance music.
"I've always wanted to do that kind of album," revealed Grae, who calls dance her "first life." "I haven’t danced in a long time, so I decided that this is probably a really good time to do it. I don’t want to do this when I’m 45."
"It's been 25 years since I’ve been en pointe, so it’s been fun breaking in pointe shoes," she continued. "I’m working with a really amazing choreographer and having fun. I want to enjoy myself. I don’t want to just make projects that pay the rent, so I feel like I can’t even listen to my own music because my stress is so tied up in it."
Other projects the polymath has planned include an animated short, a revamped version of her long-awaited album Cake or Death, and perhaps even a non-denominational church ("I want creatives to have that kind of space and feel open," she said.)
Grae's drive to create art in her own way, one that Patreon is helping her to fulfill, runs deep. Her mother, the late jazz singer and composer Sathima Bea Benjamin, started her own record label in 1979 to distribute her music and that of her husband, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim.
"I’ve always been responsible [for all aspects of my work], whether I was recording or producing or writing or figuring out exactly how I want to market myself," Grae explained. "But it wasn’t anything new. A lot of it is my mom. I was always watching her do all of it. She was someone else who wasn’t allowed inside of the machine, and was like, 'I’m just going to do it anyway. I’m doing it because this is what I do.'"
