For Canadian musician Kinnie Starr, love is more than just a romantic feeling. It is an underlying force behind all interactions, even ones as simple as helping someone onto a bus.
“It’s kind of like veering away from what it’s looked at traditionally. People say, ‘Oh I love you, I don’t know what that is but I know I love you,’ ” Starr said.
Starr’s fifth album A Different Day was released this month. This album is a move away from hip-hop and rap, Starr’s common genre.
“As an artist you always want to be growing and changing and challenging yourself, so I chose to do something different,” Starr said.
Starr said the process of creating an album is an experience that removes you from the world. In this album Starr examines love, the different types and what it means for different people.
“We don’t spend a lot of time discussing amongst each other what love is. . . . Everybody assumes that each other shares the same definition of love,” she said.
Everyone has a similar belief of what love is and what it means but this comes mainly from its portrayal in mass media, Starr said.
“We are encouraged to think that love is just one thing,” Starr said. “It is almost like a catch phrase to describe poor behavior.”
This confusion and contradiction concerning the meaning of love is why Starr said she believes society must discuss love and what it means beyond the assumptions.
“I was interested in writing an album about love so that I could discuss love with the press,” Starr said.
While love and sex are constantly linked in society, these can be understood as assumptions as well. There is a wide belief that if a couple is having sex they must be in love, Starr said.
“I don’t think it’s as simple as I’m attracted to you therefore I must love you,” Starr said.
She may believe that sex and love have more complicated meanings but that does not mean Starr has never experienced romantic love. She currently lives in Toronto with her husband whom she shares an open relationship, she said.
But she said they are not swingers actively seeking sexual partners. Instead she and her husband are determined to be close friends first and ultimately stay together.
“It is the concept of carving your own path. . . . I don’t want to feel jealous and possessive and to have those emotions sanctioned by the people around me,” Starr said.
She defined their relationship based on the principle of love where you extend yourself for the betterment of another human being. This means going beyond jealousy to a place where her husband can feel free and confident with other women, Starr said.
Sex in the media is another important issue to Starr, who has been working on a project responding to the way the pornography industry and present-day media culture have merged.
“A lot of hip-hop is just all about sex from a man’s perspective, what a man wants and a lot of it is derogatory and it’s just bullshit and it makes for bad sex,” Starr said.
Especially prominent in today’s Internet society, both hip-hop and porn encourage women to dress like prostitutes and men to treat women badly, she said. The main concern in these videos is male pleasure and female pleasure is not a concern, Starr said.
Club culture is another industry that presents these depictions of male and female relations, she said.
Playing in clubs Starr said she sees many women desperate to be looked at and by the end of the night they go home with some guy, both completely intoxicated, and have really bad sex, Starr said.
“In the morning they are going to feel worse about themselves and so if you amplify that outwards my fear is that all these people are just feeling shitty about themselves,” Starr said.
She encourages men to talk amongst themselves respectively about women instead of relying on women to educate them.
“Learn how to make your woman cum. Learn how to treat her properly. Learn how to see her beauty without [her] having to dress in skin-tight clothes and four-inch heels,” Starr said.
Starr said she hopes to address this fairly new idea of sex in her next hip-hop project but until then, A Different Day is there to help educate this generation about the core principle of love, something Starr said can be practiced all day long.