Album cover for Dessa’s latest album, Chime.
Alternative hip hop artist Dessa recently released a music video for “Fire Drills”, a poignant track off of her latest album Chime.
The song deals with the challenges of being a woman in a society where more blame is put on victims than perpetrators. That is highlighted with the following verse: “so you shouldn’t
try to stay too late or talk to strangers /
look too long, go too far out of range.”
If a woman is raped or assaulted it is often erroneously assumed that the woman must have did something to put herself in that situation.
Such attitudes put the burden on women not to be sexually assaulted. For a woman to live a life of fearful vigilance is also extremely limiting, which is highlighted with the lyric “that formula works if you can live it / but it works by putting half the world off limits.”
Dessa made the following statement to NPR about the motives behind the song: “I wanted a song that could serve as a little portal into a particular way of looking at the world. In the interest of keeping themselves safe, women are discouraged from participating in vast swaths of human experience. We’re advised to travel in the daylight, in groups, and on familiar roads. But wandering lost alone has value, man. And getting home before dark every night means you miss all the fireworks. Asking women to live smaller lives is not an acceptable solution to the problem of a dangerous world.”