Kinnie Starr Feed The Fire

Kinnie Starr is a genre-defying artist blazing her own influential trail. Entirely self-trained, Starr moves from hip hop to art-pop, folk to spoken word with eclectic grace. Her music is fearless, intuitive, politically charged and melodic, challenging listeners while making them bounce and nod. In 2000, after leaving DefJam, she was one of the first beatmakers to mix powwow and hip-hop/EDM on her underground classic Red%X which featured Ulali.Starr's career has taken her around the world -- across Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia, but she is first and foremost an artist and activist. Her activism began before her career in music as a visual artist, and her current visual work continues to touch on her areas of interest: race, home, family and humanity. Most recently, she collaborated with director Stephanie Clattenburg on the 2016 documentary, Play Your Gender, which explores the realities of being a woman in the music industry, a business in which less than 5% of producers are women even though many of the most bankable stars are female. Her upcoming 2018 album, Feed the Fire, comes out of much reflection done in the aftermath of a taxi cab collision that resulted in a brain injury. Her road to recovery deepened her interest in the nature of communication in an era where immediacy is king and anxiety disorders rise alongside extroversion and urgent digital chatter. Feed the Fire will be a critical look at where we are at in our relationships to the screen, to our faiths, and to each other: our devices allow us to stay up all night viewing porn, fighting for likes or hype on social media, tailoring our public personas as a means of delivering toxicity...or warmth. Feed the Fire is about hope and despair in perilous times and reconnecting with our truest selves.