OTEP: Killing survivor's guilt dead, one rock show at a time

By Mikael Wood
Photos by Travis Shinn

This feature was initially slated to run in Revolver number 56, but was shelved after the release of Otep’s The Ascension was delayed by Capitol Records. The album has since been released by Koch, but for a variety of reasons, this feature was never published. —Ed

Otep Shamaya remembers the day she discovered the power of music. She and her brother were rummaging through a closet and found their mom’s stash of old vinyl albums, a collection that included the self-titled debut by the Doors. “At first, my brother’s air guitaring to ‘Break on Through,’” Shamaya recalls. “We flip the record over, and the needle lands on ‘The End,’” the Doors’ epic retelling of the ancient myth in which Oedipus commits incest and murder. “It’s spooky and scary, and it sounds very dangerous and seductive at the same time. And it gets to the point where [Doors vocalist] Jim Morrison breaks character, and suddenly he’s the killer.” Shamaya shakes her head at the memory. “I was on the floor by that time—like, ‘This is music? This is a rock band?’”

Years later, this L.A. woman leads her own band, and while it doesn’t sound remotely like the Doors, it continues to explore the theatrical possibilities Morrison saw in rock and roll. An Otep concert is more like a piece of performance art than it is a typical metal show: While the band—which currently includes guitarist Karma Cheema, drummer Brian Wolff, and, on bass, Shamaya’s longtime collaborator “Evil” J. McGuire—churns through the thunderous doom-metal on Otep’s albums, there are interludes, costume changes, and improvised exchanges with the audience. Shamaya calls it “a mutiny of the senses.”

The subject that motivates that mutiny? The abuse she experienced as a child. In Otep’s songs, Shamaya explores the darkest, most disturbed corners of the human mind in excruciating detail: “I remember him fucking me,” she sang in “Jonestown Tea,” from 2002’s Sevas Tra. “I remember the smell, and the pain, and the shame.” Yet despite the turmoil, there’s also an element of triumph in much of the band’s work. Shamaya says that the music is a way to confront and defeat the tragedies in her past, as well as a means of reaching out to young people trapped in the sorts of situations in which she once found herself. “The most dangerous part of coming from damaged goods is feeling alone,” she says. “That’s when all hope is gone. When I was young, I connected with books—with Kerouac and Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Charles Bukowski. That’s what kept me from feeling that there was something wrong with me. So that’s what I feel I need to do with my art.”

Shamaya formed Otep in 2000, after growing frustrated with the cathartic limitations of writing. “Performing music is a more visceral experience than writing,” she says. “You can live it—it’s internal and external at the same time.” She had no background in metal; her only musical experience came from dabbling in L.A.’s underground hip-hop scene, which gave her voice a hard-edged urban twang you can still hear today. Despite her beginner’s status, Shamaya swore to a friend that Otep would play Ozzfest within a year, a promise she made good on when Sharon Osbourne personally invited Otep to join the tour’s 2001 edition (before the band had even signed a record deal). “She has the best work ethic I’ve ever been involved in,” says Cheema, who admits that the group’s material requires a “higher level of concentration than I’m used to. You can’t be drinking beer onstage—the typical rock-and-roll antics just don’t work.”

Since that auspicious Ozzfest introduction, Shamaya and her various collaborators (including Slipknot’s Joey Jordison, who played drums on 2004’s House of Secrets) have released three Otep albums. The latest, The Ascension (Capitol), is the band’s most sophisticated effort yet, with a greater dynamic range and more nuanced storytelling. It also features a blistering cover of Nirvana’s “Breed.” “Otep is incredibly deep,” says Holly Knight, a Grammy-winning songwriter with whom Shamaya cowrote the new album’s centerpiece, “Perfectly Flawed.” “Her energy is captivating.” To experience that energy for ourselves, Revolver caught up with Shamaya at a ritzy French restaurant in West Hollywood.

REVOLVER The experience of seeing Otep live is entirely different from listening to one of your records.


OTEP SHAMAYA The records are advertisements to come see us play live—that’s really what they are. And every show counts, whether it’s in front of 50,000 people, five people—whatever. In some respects, the smaller audiences are more important to me than the people crammed into one building who fall into the herd mentality: “We feel safety, so we’re gonna do what everybody else is doing.” It’s a challenge to have fewer people because you can’t just do choreographed things, like “Lemme see your fists!” That doesn’t work on a smaller audience that is so aware of themselves as individuals. They’re no longer a blanket of flesh.

The show has a lot to do with your interaction with the audience, so your set must change with every crowd.


I can’t do the same thing every night without going crazy. And I consider it my job to read my audience, to understand the politics of wherever we are at the moment. Some places need provocation; they need me to challenge them, to be their antagonist and their adversary for a moment. Other places need to feel the love and the solidarity. It’s my job to address that at every show, and also to experience every emotion that spawned the songs that we’re performing—to relive them over and over and over again.

What did you learn from your days doing hip-hop that resonates with you now as the frontwoman of a metal band?


Hip-hop was about oppression and struggle and overcoming obstacles and coming from the working class and being poor and different. I found a connection there through poetry. The ideas that were in at that time were to be original and to have a message and not to be like anybody else. And it was about being a skilled writer. Composition was so important, and messages were important. I got so much out of that, but I lost faith in it because it seemed like it changed. Maybe it just got more popular—groups got popular for being surface animals, instead of the abyss swimmers that I saw.

You’d never played in a band before you formed Otep. What convinced you that you had the ability to get up onstage and command a crowd the way you do?


Honestly, I don’t know. But the first time we took the stage, I didn’t feel any fear. Maybe in some respects I was being really selfish, because I needed it. But I felt that if I walked out there afraid or showed them that I was afraid, no one was gonna respect me or believe that I believed in what I was doing. So I had to shut that off and fall back into that mystical place where I believe true art and inspiration and music lives.

That requires a tremendous amount of confidence.


I used to read a lot of Antonin Artaud, who wrote this book The Theater and Its Double that was all about giving the audience the experience itself because they had become such placid, pale observers. He’s got this great quote where he says he wants to wake up the dead because they don’t know they’re dead. And I think that’s made such an impression on people, because we’re not faking it. People don’t have to like our music, but I hope they’ll admire our integrity.

The concern over not faking it is actually something metal shares with hip-hop, where a rapper’s real-life past as a drug dealer often confers a degree of credibility on his music. In your case, it’s about your authenticity as an abuse victim.


I think people want something real, whether they want to stick their toe in it or dive underneath the surface. They’re really isn’t much out there that I find I can latch onto. The country is swamped and drowning in deceit and twisted lies. What’s good is bad, and what’s bad is good. Even if they’re not aware of it, there’s a part of people that’s seeking something real. That’s why bands like Nirvana were so successful: Regardless of whether or not you knew anything about them personally, you could feel in their music that they were real.

But with you, it is all about knowing you personally—about knowing that what you went through really happened.


Art saves. And as the person heralding that philosophy, it’s my job to actually allow that to happen. It’s scary, because it’s not familiar. What’s familiar is violence and rage and bullshit and destroying everything good and not having stability. That’s normal and that feels good; that feels safe to me because I’m used to that. But I would be a hypocrite and I’d betray everyone that ever put any faith into our music if I didn’t let it do what I think its job is—and that’s to purify.

Most people who experience terrible things don’t go on to make compelling, reassuring art about it. They don’t make that transition from victim to—Victor. Why did you?


Rebellion. I didn’t want to be the person that they said I was gonna be. There was just the sheer rogue mentality of not believing that I was destined to be shit. I can’t even fathom that now. My relatives have tiny kids, and I can’t even imagine doing that to somebody. I can’t believe it.

The Ascension is somewhat more optimistic than previous Otep records: There’s an acknowledgment of the possibility of relief. The song “Perfectly Flawed” sounds particularly hopeful.


What I was hoping to do was provide an essence of, Here’s the abyss—embrace it, and let’s fill it with something. I wanted to light a candle, rather than curse the darkness. I don’t want to look back on this grand opportunity that my life has somehow presented and only be able to say, “Wow, there’s all this rage and anger and a fight that needed to be picked.” I wanted also to assert that we deserve beauty, too.

What triggered that desire?


Something had happened in my personal life, and I realized I kept surrounding myself with bad people; it was familiar. And then one day I caught it. Something switched, and I felt like I had climbed out of the muck. I don’t know how to describe it. It was this moment of clarity where I realized what I was doing before it could damage me, and I stopped it. And I remember going for a run, and “Uninvited” by Alanis Morissette came on my iPod. I was singing it, and I felt powerful and beautiful, and I stopped mid-stride. This fear grabbed me, and I went cold. I thought, “Have I done this? Have I given my supporters—the people that believe in me and believe in our music—have I given them this? Or have I just coasted? Have I not taken that risk and been that vulnerable?” Everything was cascading down upon me. I turned around and went right home and started working again.

You’ve played Ozzfest: You know there are unreconstructed metalheads out there who couldn’t care less about feeling vulnerable, who just want something heavy. Will The Ascension disappoint them?


If people want heavy, they’re gonna get heavy with songs like “Confrontation” and “Milk of Regret.” We have heaviness in abundance. But there’s also songs that do possess a little bit of joy and beauty in the fact that we’ve survived. Why shouldn’t we feel beautiful about who we are, instead of always pointing fingers at society for not accepting us? Fuck them. Accept yourself.

Do fans come to you for help?


I get a lot of emails, and it’s one of those things that is so touching and so validating but also heartbreaking beyond measure. I got an email from someone recently who sent me a newspaper article about this girl who couldn’t think of a way to tell her mother that her father was raping her and her sister. So she played her “Jonestown Tea,” and now the man’s in prison.

What do you do with that kind of information?


It’s hard to deal with, because what can I do? I feel so helpless. That’s the reason I built the U Are Not Alone section of our website; it gives resources for almost everything that I could think of.

That level of engagement’s pretty unusual. And it establishes an expectation, right? That you’ll continue to blur the line between the personal and the professional.


I wish I’d heard a song that was personal and let me know that I wasn’t alone with the monsters in the dark. My responsibility is to motivate, to provoke and to inspire. If I can give that to somebody who I don’t know, then I’ve done my job as an artist.