AZADI.mp3 on Music, We Are Lady Parts and Being a Bad Bitch

Make it stand out

Juliette Motamed, also known as AZADI.mp3, is a fucking superstar. After a two year musical hiatus, the British-Iranian musician, producer, and actor has returned with her latest single, NAZAR, a futuristic pop track, with riot grrrl rage and sentiments. 

Juliette is a jack of all trades. She is not only on your radios and playlists but on your TVs. She plays Ayesha punk drummer in Channel 4's comedy We Are Lady Parts, which has been renewed for a season 2! Our Community Editor Halima Jibril spoke with the rising star all about music, religion, rage, and We Are Lady Parts. 

In your #KeepLiveAlive video for O2 music, you said, "Being AZADI Feels more like going into confession. Being AZADI always allowed me to be freer in my mode of communication" Is this why you were drawn to music as a career path? Did you always feel like there was a sense of freedom in music? 

100%. I'm very verbose, I love to speak, and I love to joke around and chat with my friends. I'm very much an extrovert, but when it comes to expressing my deeper feelings or the more complex nuances of how I feel in the moment, I really struggle to actually get that across. So music has always been something I've sought out to find that catharsis. Music gave me an avenue to express myself and had ended up being like one of my healthiest coping mechanisms. But initially, I just really felt compelled to speak. Music has made me more open and a little less cagey, so it's been this really wholesome interplay of me learning to speak more and that feeding into the music. 

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Hearing you say that becoming AZADI "feels more like going into confession" was so powerful to me. It makes me think of religion. Is music a religious experience for you? 

I would absolutely say it is. Not to sound like a massive wanker, but I do find music a really transient experience. For me, I find music like a really powerful conduit where I can really put my ego aside a little bit. In doing that, you have to confront all the ugly, nasty, horrible little emotions that you wouldn't admit to yourself in your day to day life. So music allows me to get out of my own head and let something else flow through, and I think the experience of writing my latest single I did have an intense, creative burst after a long time of not making stuff. It was just all coming out and shows just how much I'd be holding in. 

“I find gigging like such a sacred, communal space where you can be free and let out that rage with it coming back to hurt you.”

Did you know that music was something you always wanted to do when you were a kid? 

Yeah definitely, it was always like my dream, but I'm also like fucking Iranian. I've always wanted to do it, and I was in a band with my mates in school, but I definitely had times where I was like, is this even a realistic or viable route to go down? I don't know anybody in my family who had gone down the music route and had it work for them, so it was very much like me taking a leap of faith. I just had to accept that I'd regret it and feel ten times worse if I didn't try. 

When I watched the music video for NAZAR, or even just listened to the lyrics, it reminded me of Beyonce's "Hold Up", where she's in that yellow/ mustard dress with a bat, happy as Larry, but she's smashing shit up. NAZAR is so similar in that sense. Both songs have this essence of playful rage (it shows anger as more than one thing). Do you see music as a safe space for women to express outrage or anger? 

What a fucking compliment! Also absolutely. Being able to talk your fucking shit as a woman, not have someone interrupt you or tell you what they think you're trying to say. It's a pure avenue to say this is what I fucking mean; I'm a Bad BITCH. Don't fucking look at me and don't fucking talk to me. We're not friends. There's a power in feeling that, saying that and not having to justify it. 

Growing up, one of my biggest releases was going into the pit and fucking beating people up. I also felt supported in that because people would pick you up and have your back. I find gigging like such a sacred, communal space where you can be free and let out that rage with it coming back to hurt you. Of course, I'm saying this, and I can't get the Travis Scott Astroworld festival tragedy out of my head. That shit baffles me; it was heartbreaking to see. Gigs are so intense, and it's so easy for people to get hurt, and the whole point is you look after each other, pick each other up from the ground and make space for each other, especially at a festival. It just felt like the perversion of the ideals of what a good gig should be. 

How did it feel for you when we were in lockdown, and a lot of the performing we do in society came to a halt? 

The pandemic helped me realise that I'm my own audience, and the people closest to me are my audience. They will heckle me back, and there's interaction. There's something really beautiful - and I should say I don't think performance is inherently bad. I think performance is a really gorgeous thing and a big part of what it means to be human. But I think it's really important to think about who you're doing it for, and why? The times I feel most held and most understood is when I perform for the people closest to me, and they get it, they laugh back or add something to the performance, and then it's their turn in the limelight, and it becomes this space where you and the homies are just being cute and shit. At the end of the day, you want the eyes that look at you to be filled with love, not suspicion or expectation. 

Okay, so my last question to you is about We Are Lady Parts. What was it like to be in a show that knew how to balance marginalisation with the ordinaries of everyday life for WOC? 

I think the show was just in really good hands from the start. Nida Manzoor, the director-writer - she wrote it based on a lot of her own experiences and a lot of the people she knows, and you could really feel that on set. There were so many Black and Brown women, women of colour - not just in front of the camera but behind it too. She was so detailed with the choices that it was easy to get into the characters. It wasn't like these characters were two dimensional - I felt like I knew these characters, they had a whole narrative, a whole storyline, they were whole people. Nida was instrumental in creating that. We'd go and talk to her, and she'd immediately know the backgrounds of these characters and where they were in their family lives. 

I feel really blessed to have been a part of it, even off the reaction that it's had like so many people have messaged like "I can relate to this." Obviously, going into this, that's the kind of reaction you're hoping for. So it's been really, really humbling that people have connected to it. It showed a group of women, doing them, who just happen to be hijabis.

Photography: Ashley Rommelrath | Words: Halima Jibril