"I'm different / I'm not the same / If you're in the mood for a change, I'm different / Not like any other girl you know."

An expectant capacity crowd has gathered at Toronto's Kool Haus venue eager to see hip hop's pre-eminent band The Roots deliver yet another one of their patented incredible live shows. But the Philadelphia crew is nowhere in sight right now. Instead a diminutive woman has taken the stage rocking a baby blue Wu-Tang T-shirt. As her band delves into moodily layered pop-rock melodies and occasional dabbles into ska and reggae, Graph Nobel becomes a charismatic stage presence with her emotive voice, whirling stage moves and intermittent head banging duels with her back-up singer.

Graph Nobel thrives on bucking expectations. In a reality where black Canadian artists often have to take their act to the United States to gain any recognition, Graph Nobel has managed to build support in her homebase. She has often drawn record company executives to her shows and has already turned down major label deals while she has been generating rave press reviews. All this has occurred and Graph Nobel hasn't even released a single yet. This would seem to defy conventional logic, and this suits her just fine.

A little over a month before the Roots show, we sat down at a bustling King St. cafe in downtown Toronto to discuss the rise in her profile and her plans for the future. Forthright and confident, Graph Nobel's commitment to expressing herself freely underlines the fact that her resistance to fit into any neat category isn't a calculated approach, it's the only way she knows. Whether it's her approach to audience and industry expectations or creativity or musical influences, it's apparent Graph Nobel values an eclectic approach, a theme that has been there from her musical beginnings.

While she was exposed to the parang and calypso and soca of her Trinidadian roots and is especially influenced by reggae, it was hip-hop that first gave the woman born Christa Gonzales the creative impetus to become Graph Nobel. "Thinking seriously about being an artist. I really wanted to be Nas", she says. " I really, really, wanted to be Nas, and I took rapping seriously. I wanted to be one of the first female rappers that was so dope." She says she was inspired by what she calls the 'mid-age of hip-hop' in the early 90s typified by artists ranging from A Tribe Called Quest to the Group Home. Her nascent artistic tendencies had been explored in live theater experience, but soon she was captivated by the creative possibilities of beats and rhymes. "Hip-hop is very much a box," she says, explaining her attraction to the artform. "But the box hip-hop is in is beautiful by its boundaries and that's what makes it such a powerful force on its own. When I'm rhyming I try to stick within those boundaries, so I don't try and be sophisticated when I'm writing rhymes 'cos you end up sounding like PM Dawn and that's not the direction you want to go in if you're being an emcee. I love to swear and hip-hop lets me do that. I curse like a sailor and it sounds great when you do it, so you get to the extremes." Her dream to make it as an emcee led her to move to New York, the birthplace of hip-hop. With hip-hop culture permeating every aspect of everyday life, she became immersed in the city's scene. She performed at Black Lily, met one of her favourite MCs in Mos Def and even discussed releasing a single on the then mighty independent record label Rawkus.

However, despite these developments, Graph found her love for the music was gradually beginning to subside. "Between '94 and '99 with the exception of the Roots records that dropped here and there it was really hard for me to be in love with hip-hop," she says. "Every MC that came out was so disappointing. And once that happened my motivation to do it slid down and each year it slid down further and further and I stopped doing it."

Armed with her new found appreciation of groups such as Garbage and No Doubt among many others, Graph Nobel managed to find someone who understood her creative vision in the form of Doc, acclaimed producer of Esthero and Res. "Doc was my favourite producer," she offers. "He did really cool hip-hop stuff. Like at the time he was doing the Esthero record he also produced a group from Minneapolis and he had the bomb-ass hip-hop tracks. It was more like go-go with weird sounding latin and salsa and I wanted a bit more of that." Initially though Doc was skeptical of Graph's commitment to music, but when she returned from New York with demo tracks recorded with hip-hop producer Geology to play for him, he realized she was serious and began to work with her.

Despite the polished, enchanting feel of these tracks, Graph insists these tracks are old demos, and describes their ever-evolving nature. "Our songs are a long process, we don't leave them alone, we keep on adding things and we do a lot of versions" she says. "Almost every song we've done, we've done a latin version, a rock version, we've done like a pop version, so all our songs go through these metamorphoses and can change every ten minutes. You know you've got a good song when no matter how it's played it sounds good. You know you've got a good song when it's just guitar and it sounds fuckin' hot and that's how you know and that's what works for us. You know you've got a good song when you can't stop singing it." Despite the eclecticism that Graph Nobel implies here, there is an underlying philosophy that informs these songs. "I want things to be sophisticated, catchy, have a great melody, and have that underlying blackness."

To have heard these characteristics in her songs however, you would probably have to have seen Graph Nobel play live, something that has had an indelible effect the music she's making. "Playing live changed everything for us," she says definitively. "We had a couple of demos that we had sent out to almost every label. No interest. We went out and did three shows one week in New York everybody flipped. So the live thing is like the most powerful aspect of what we're doing and it totally changed the record, the whole idea, the whole direction, the whole concept, the whole sound."

The intention of the live shows was to gauge reactions to songs and make adjustments to them but in addition to this, the shows have generated a word-of-mouth industry buzz about her, whether she's played at Black Lily in New York, the Honey Jam, or Toronto Urban Music Festival. Her appearance at the latter in between two hip-hop acts clearly made some members of the crowd restless. At one point an audience member expressed their desire to hear headlining act Slum Village instead. Graph dealt with the situation directly and smartly, but this small incident points to a larger issue regarding the perceived image of what black female artists should represent.

"I don't want to put myself in a box here," she says. "Urban is a box, a very small box And I have a lot of urban music influences. Hip-hop is the love of my life and I think in the band we all have that, we're all black. We want to be able to move in and out of that urban identity. It's cool to play urban sounds, it's cool to have a Mobb Deep bassline, but we don't want to get caught in it." With a completed album due for release sometime this year, Graph Nobel will be continuing to balance this artistic fluidity with the often rigid nature of the music industry at a higher level, something she's learning to grasp constantly. "Business and creativity don't really work together," she says. "If you're an artist just planning to put your shit out independently that's one thing, you can do what you want all the time. Planning to be successful and climb all the way to the top of that ladder you have to find a way to make creativity work with it. And that's a tough thing, it's a stressful thing. But I'm lucky, I love everyone in my band. I've got such strong support from producers, friends, industry people that's it's a very comfortable thing for me to try and achieve."

This comfort level allows Graph to focus on improving her art. "I have to work hard to be a better singer. I have a lot of difficulty with that 'cos I'm jumping around a lot and I can't stand still. The rhyming has gone down, I mean when you stop rhyming your skills go into the garbage can," she says laughing, " It took me a while to get my confidence back up and get back into it." It's evident though she still has a lot of confidence about what she would like to achieve and wants to do everything from working on small, collaborative projects to appearing on the David Letterman show and to do all this by remaining true to herself. In the long run she knows the benefits of sticking to this game plan in the long run will help her carve out her own artistic niche.

"I'm not ashamed of the different things that I like and I talk about it. A lot of black people I know are into the same things that I'm into and they're saying 'yeah I like Radiohead too'. I mean certain shit is undeniable. I don't care who you are, I think every black person when Nirvana came out with 'Smells like Teen Spirit' we all liked it, we just didn't tell everybody. When a song is written that way it's undeniable to any genre. It crosses all lines." Committed to becoming a songwriter who can do this, Graph Nobel isn't about to conform to the rules or any neatly shaped categories any time soon. "Sometimes I can feel like that new kid on the first day of school that no one wants to become familiar with," she says. "But I'm trying to ease a part of the music world in a more peculiar direction."
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