“How then are you supposed to come in and be your most creative?” That’s the question Alicia Keys asks pointedly in “Uncharted,” the documentary she also co-produced, which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. The rhetorical question follows Keys’s recounting of the fear she often felt going into the music studio to create when the producers were almost always men.
Keys reveals she was often hit on, and endured the sense of entitlement to her body, by some of those men felt because of their relative power. One of the documentary’s subjects, singer DaVionne, discusses the difficulty of dealing with male egos and making herself “smaller” or “more digestible” to make men more comfortable.
Keys, along with a number of female music industry insiders, discusses the dire prospects of success for women in the music business. A few years ago, they decided to be the change they wanted to see, and founded the nonprofit She Is the Music to address these issues. According to the organization’s website, it was created to increase “the number of women working in music—songwriters, engineers, producers, artists, and industry professionals.”
A songwriting camp for women, where participants are expected to write a song per day to pitch to artists, TV shows, and filmmakers is a crucial component of She Is the Music, and a focal point of “Uncharted.” The camp also provides opportunities for networking with established industry players such as Keys and powerhouse songwriter and producer Linda Perry, who also appears in “Uncharted.”
Sobering statistics compiled for the Annenberg Foundation, which studies diversity and inclusion in entertainment, back up their claims: Of 651 producers credited, only 2.6% were women; of 2,767 songwriters credited, just over 12.5% were women; 2.6% of engineers/mixers were women; and 21.7% of artists in the music industry are women.
“Uncharted” takes a close look at the process of writing and promoting popular music, and the variables that bode well for success in an industry that is often cold, brutish, and short.
Filmmaker Beth Aala trains her lens on three young Black women in particular, who all brim with potential to be the next breakout star: Ayoni, DaVionne, and Jean Deaux. Aala showcases the young women’s hopefulness, passion, and ambition. The film captures their awe and feeling of being overwhelmed at their first in-person meeting with Keys. Interestingly, it also encapsulates the fact that as young as the women are (all are in their 20s), they are seasoned professionals, able to relate as equals to Keys as an artist.
All of the women in “Uncharted” have been writing, training, and/or performing in music since they were children, and recording since their teens. Deaux was chosen as one of NPR’s Artists to Watch in 2019. Pop vocalist Ayoni is a graduate of USC and has already released an album to critical acclaim. R&B singer DaVionne was featured on J. Coles #1 album “Revenge of the Dreamers III.”
They are also all renaissance women who sing, rap, play multiple instruments, produce, engineer, promote, etc. In a film about setting women up for success, this begs a question that, unfortunately, the experts in the film don’t answer: whether this type of broad focus makes success more or less likely. Technology allows artists today to do it all, but it doesn’t necessarily change the formula for success.
Journeying through Manhattan, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Brooklyn, “Uncharted” provides an intimate look at the women’s lives, exploring themes about continuing the creative process in the midst of grief, creating with scarce resources, the impact of the streaming service business model, and the dogged question of marketing certain esthetics in popular music.
Ayoni, a statuesque, dark-skinned Barbados native, has a sound that, although punctuated by jazz, folk, and R&B flavors, is very pop-oriented. Entry into the pop music scene remains difficult for Black women partly due to the music industry belief that they are hard to market. Ayoni calls out one of the music industry norms that developed in response: the disturbing hypersexualization of Black women.
Inadvertently, Deaux also hints at this when she describes herself as “shy” in contrast to the rather raunchy lyrics she often writes and performs. “I’m saying stuff in songs I would never say out loud and feel comfortable,” she says. However, the market encourages her to write and sing them anyway.
The belief even seems to play out in “Uncharted” as Keys and the other industry insiders judge what the young women have written and recorded over the course of the four-day camp. Deaux’s catchy rap “Stank Ass Walk” seems to resonate immediately. Ayoni’s anthem “Purpose” is well-received, but they don’t have as clear a vision for it as they do for the other song. Their expert judgment seems borne out when they later get word that Issa Rae’s comedy “Rap Sh!t” has bought the song for one of the episodes of the show.What “Uncharted” gets both right and wrong is the role of the fans and journalists who connect with and support artists as they are up and coming: the people responsible for the up and coming-ness of these artists. Aala shows how they turn out enthusiastically in small clubs, provide media platforms for the artists, follow the artists on social media, and give them enough plays on streaming to make the industry at least take notice. However, they remain in the background without nuance, which is unfortunate given their importance to the eventual rise of many artists.