On February 18, American University’s Spirit and Traditions Board alongside the Student Union Board hosted a conversation with actor, writer, producer and musician Daveed Diggs, moderated by Professor Omékongo Dibinga. Many of us were introduced to Diggs through the 2016 hit musical “Hamilton.” Since then, he has produced music and performed with his experimental hip-hop group clipping, co-created the series Blindspotting, voiced characters in various projects including Central Park, Trolls and The Little Mermaid, written television commercials and more. In addition, he has used his platform and creative projects to address social issues such as racism, police brutality and gentrification.
Before the event began, I had the opportunity to speak with Diggs about how young people can navigate having multiple passions, the power of staying creative and motivated in times of political uncertainty and the impact of using art to address the social issues and complexities of our world.
T: Thank you so much for being here and sitting down with me.
D: Yeah, of course.
T: The way that you’ve been a part of such a wide range of projects speaks to people like myself who have a variety of passions. What advice would you give to someone who has many goals and passions that they want to pursue, but aren’t sure where to start or don’t know which is most “worth pursuing?”
D: I think right now, if we're talking about people at your age right now, you should do them all. There's no reason to specialize at this point, um, and I have found, kind of ever. Things like, genre and different artistic mediums or whatever, those are in my experience, mostly marketing gimmicks. Every artist I know or every creative person I know has to do a ton of different things and has a ton of different skills and you have to cultivate them all.
So I would say, just do all of it. Do everything that you're interested in, learn all the time, read all the time, consume whatever you're into all the time. And let the chips follow how they fall down. You'd be surprised. It's really difficult, I find in this business, to predict the trajectory. And, you spend a lot of time worrying about what's coming instead of really living where you are now. So like if I had advice to do it over again, be really present and be really conscious of just do all the things. Do all the things and stop listening to people when they tell you you can't do all the things.
T: Your song Chapter 319, was such a powerful and direct response to current social issues and the 2020 election, and many people today are feeling the same way you were feeling in those lyrics. So, I wanted to ask you, what do you believe is powerful about using art to address social issues and how they affect us? And, what were some challenges that came producing this song and releasing it right when everything was happening?
D: You know, that song was an outlier for my band, clipping. Generally speaking, [clipping] does not do true stories, we don't deal in first person narratives at all. But we were all marching. You know, we were outside protesting and doing things, and music was such a big part of that experience. And we just started to feel like we're gonna break our own rule for once and do something that artists do, and do something about what we're feeling right now—which is sort of the least academic thing we've ever done, but felt necessary and urgent. But mostly the idea was like, “let's add to the music that can be played at marches.” So it's still functional in the way a lot of our music tends to be. We have a reason for you to play this song, so put this out here.
T: Many young people are struggling to stay creative or question the power of their art during these times. Has your creativity ever been impacted by current events and how have you worked to overcome that?
D: The only way I think anything can limit your creativity is if your creativity is somehow tied to the response to it. The only thing that makes any of us special as artists is our taste. Who you are, the more you can explore yourself and your creative impulses, those are the things that make you special and unique. I think you have to just trust that the audience that needs to find that will find that if you make it. And so, as opposed to getting stuck before you make it, you should make it. That can be very personal, it doesn’t need to involve anybody else or it needs to involve just your collaborators or whatever, but you certainly don't have to take into account the marketplace or the changing opinions of the country or whatever. All of that, I don't think ever has to come into play in what you're making, actually, you can just make the thing.
clipping is a good example of that, I think. When we started that band, we had made like five songs and this was a thousand years ago, so we burnt CDs and gave them to our friends in the community of artists that we were in, and all of them were like, “this is terrible. I don't know who this is for.” We were like, “really? I think it's pretty good.” And like, you know, now it's whatever, 14 years later or something and we're playing bigger shows than we ever had before, and just it found its place.
Our first album on Subpop, we played the release party for that in Moscow. We were terrified to go to Moscow, but we ended up hanging out with all the queer kids in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where it was currently illegal to be gay. Like, you know, it was like the community who needed to find it found it. It felt like we were in LA, we just happened to be in Moscow. So, you know, I think if anything that I've learned about being an artist it’s that you have to be the barometer yourself. And so like, if you have really rigorous guidelines for what is good, do that, make the thing that you really believe is good, and then and then worry about getting it out to people, which starts off as your job, but then eventually you can get help with that. You know, you get agents and people help proliferate yourself.
[Laughter from his agents who were behind us].
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I want to thank Daveed Diggs and his team for the time, and thank you Spirit and Traditions Board for the opportunity to have this interview!
