Mojo Juju is fierce. It’s impossible to break eye contact with her
album cover, or look away from the mesmerising film clip for its
titular song, “Native Tongue”. The intensity of the imagery matches
the record itself: a blend of soul, blues and hip hop that draws heavily
on Mojo’s personal experience as a queer woman of colour with
Indigenous heritage.
“I wanted to tell my grandmother’s story about her relationship with
her parents,” Mojo explains. “Her father was Wurundjeri and her
mother was white, and they weren’t allowed to be together. These
things have a lasting effect.” Having grown up around music – her
maternal grandmother was a soprano and grandfather played the
trumpet – Mojo acknowledges the inevitability of following such
a career path. “It was my most natural creative outlet,” she says.
Coming of age in small towns in central-western New South Wales,
where she experienced homophobia and racism, Mojo also found
power in music as a self-proclaimed “retreat”.
Familial lines run strong onNative Tongue. Though her father doesn’t
play any instruments himself, he does perform a spoken-word track
on the album in Tagalog – the national language of the Philippines,
where he was born. (It’s just one of four languages he happens to
speak.) Mojo laughs when she admits she can only speak English,
but it’s fair to say she’s fluent in music. It wasn’t always the way – herhigh school guitar teacher told her she’d never be a musician –
but Mojo knew it was her path. “I kind of didn’t give myself any other
options,” she says. “I knew what I wanted to do, so I just moved to the
city and made sure I had absolutely zero fallback plan.”
Having fronted the band Mojo Juju & The Snake Oil Merchants for
years, Mojo’s third solo album is her most personal release to date.
The process of writing and recording took two years, and in that
time Mojo grappled with some really heavy topics – and an intensely
raw journey. “I started thinking about the experience of my Elders
and ancestors, and how they’ve impacted and informed the way
I experience the world,” she says. “One of the big things was seeing
how conversations around race, gender and sexuality occur through
the language and lens of academia, and how dehumanising that is.
I wanted to look at those things from a really personal perspective.”
There’s a lot to learn from Native Tongue, an album full of frustration,
rage and heartache – but, like Mojo, it’s also celebratory, defiant and
proud. “You internalise homophobia,” she says. “Then you work to
try and overcome all that stuff. It’s a process and, for me, it’s about
embracing it and being visible. Owning a kind of female masculinity
is part of the work.” In a way, Mojo wishes she had artists like her to
look up to growing up – moving around a lot as a little one, she was
often the only person of colour at school and, “coupled with all these
intersecting parts of my identity that make me different, especially
in small towns like that, being new made it even harder.” Australian
pop culture didn’t offer much more by way of connection, so she
turned to artists like Michael Jackson, Prince and Janet Jackson.
Nineties R&B and MTV-generation artists became her biggest
musical influences.
These days, Mojo still finds herself on the road, but she’s busy
touring her music across the country instead. When asked what she
does with her limited free time, the ’90s nostalgia returns. “Timezone
is my meditation,” she laughs. Mojo and her band love visiting the
game arcade to blow off some steam between gigs. “There’s so much
noise and colour, there’s no way I could possibly think about work
while I’m there.”native tongue
MOJO JUJU IS DEFIANT AND PROUD.
Words Stephanie Van Schilt
music talks