“You know—and everyone in the world knows—that's what you want to
see,” Killer Mike told me over the phone. “You know when you're watching
church on Sunday morning [on television] and that little lady is in the
left corner of the screen signing? And you really wish you could just
say something to get her to be like, ‘Woah, there is a sign for “motherfucker” ’?”
Maniatty is a self-described Vermont farm girl who holds degrees in
both American Sign Language linguistics and brain science. But she said
she’d also logged more than 50 hours of studying Killer Mike’s body of
work before the show. She more than kept up.
“I think [it was] a little tête-à-tête
between the artist and interpreter,” Maniatty told me. “After, he told
the crowd, ‘Yeahhh girl. I ain't never seen nothing like that. I've been
all over the world, and all over this city, and all through these
streets, I ain't never seen nothing like that.’ ”
Earlier this week,
a clip
of Maniatty signing at the Wu-Tang Clan's show at Bonnaroo surfaced and
quickly went viral. Jimmy Kimmel showed the clip during his monologue.
Like Killer Mike, many people had never seen a sign language interpreter
translate hip-hop in real time. But Maniatty has been at this for 13
years, using her skills as an interpreter—and careful research of her
subjects—to bring music to the deaf.
Growing up in Newport, Vt., just south of the Canadian border,
Maniatty's only exposure to hip-hop was through MTV. She’d heard of
Snoop Dogg, Puffy, and Biggie, but that was about the limit of her
knowledge. She always had a knack for language, and on a whim, applied
to the Rochester Institute of Technology's ASL program. Only one of two
students who had no prior sign language experience, Maniatty graduated
from the program after two years and later got her undergraduate degree
from the University of Rochester. In college she was exposed to a wider
range of hip-hop, hearing the Beastie Boys and Wu-Tang for the first
time. She loved both.
Her break in the music business came when while working at an
interpreting company based in Rochester, when all of her colleagues
passed on a Marilyn Manson concert. “Nobody was willing to do it,”
Maniatty told me over the phone Thursday afternoon, as her Wu-Tang video
was going viral. “And it was quite a big sashay into concert
interpreting because he's a show. He's a big show.”
The Manson job gave Maniatty a taste for concert work. A few years
later, now working for an interpreting service in Portland, Maine, a
colleague connected her to Everyone’s Invited,
a production company
that hires interpreters for festivals and events. According to company
director Laura Grunfeld, the practice of including interpreters at
concerts is becoming more common, though it is still something you
primarily see at the larger festivals like Bonnaroo.
Maniatty soon was working the New Orleans Jazz Fest and Bonnaroo, sharing a stage with acts like Bruce Springsteen (
who sang and signed “Dancing in the Dark”
with her), U2, and even Bob Saget. She works an average of 60 events
annually, paying her own way and usually getting a flat-rate fee.
It wasn't until 2009 when Maniatty worked her first big hip-hop show,
interpreting for the Beastie Boys at the 2009 Bonnaroo, in what would
prove to be their final show. She remembers telling a deaf fan from the
Bronx, “Hi, I'm Holly, I'm from Maine and I'll be your interpreter.”
“He looked at me and said, 'What? You're going to be interpreting the show?' ” she says.
To prepare for the show, Maniatty says she logged more than 100 hours
of research on the Beastie Boys, memorizing their lyrics and watching
past shows. Her prep work also includes researching dialectal signs to
ensure accuracy and authenticity. An Atlanta rapper will use different
slang than a Queens one, and ASL speakers from different regions also
use different signs, so knowing how a word like guns and brother are signed in a given region is crucial for authenticity.
Signing a rap show requires more than just literal translation.
Maniatty has to describe events, interpret context, and tell a story.
Often, she is speaking two languages simultaneously, one with her hands
and one with her mouth, as she’ll sometimes rap along with the artists
as well. When a rapper recently described a run-in with Tupac, Maniatty
rapped along while making the sign for hologram, so deaf fans
would know the reference was to Tupac’s holographic cameo at Coachella,
not some figment of the rapper's imagination.
Maniatty, a first-degree black belt in tae kwon do, also conveys
meaning with her body, attempting to give her signs the same impact as
the rapper’s spoken words. Before interpreting Eminem, she watched
videos of how he holds himself while performing, and tried to capture
his motions in her work.
“He has a very specific body cadence,” she said, “and if you're able
to mimic that, it almost looks like you are him. Jay-Z's got a big
boisterous chest-out way to rap sometimes. So you have to watch the
different performers and watch how they move the body because the more
genuine you are to their way of presenting themselves as an artist, the
more equal of an experience the deaf person is going to have.”
Of course, hip-hop is a highly improvisational art, and no amount of
careful research can prepare an ASL interpreter for what might happen at
a live show. “There are lots of times people freestyle; you have to go
with the moment,” she said. “For some reason my brain is dialed into the
hip-hop cadence and is able to process language really quickly.”
The rappers she works for seem to agree. At one point during Wu-Tang's performance of “
Bring Da Ruckus,”
Method Man came over to Maniatty, mid-signing, and gave her a hug and a
fist bump. He had been looking at her every time he said “
motherfuckin”
during the song and wanted to see if she signed it and how. Maniatty
told me she thought to herself, “Of course I'm gonna say it, you're
saying it. Your words, not mine.”
This is also Maniatty’s approach to an even more delicate term: the
N-word. It's a dilemma for interpreters, especially white ones. But
Maniatty says she believes it's her job to best represent the musicians,
and she always uses the sign for the term, and, though she tries to
avoid it, will occasionally say it with her lips as well. “It's very
clear it's the artists' words, not mine,” she reiterated.
Kat Murphy is a 30-year-old Memphis native who is hearing-impaired;
she can hear beats but not words. Along with her boyfriend, Melvin, who
is “profoundly deaf,” Murphy was at Bonnaroo and attended both the
Wu-Tang and Killer Mike shows. She witnessed Maniatty's interactions
with both rappers. “It was amazing,” she said. “She didn't skip a beat
or allow it to sidetrack her” when Method Man came calling. Unfamiliar
with Killer Mike before the show, she left thinking he “was the most
deaf-friendly artist and he really incorporated the interpreters into
his performance. We are his new fans.”
Until Bonnaroo, it never occurred to Killer Mike that he had deaf
fans; he left the show “honored” to have someone like Maniatty
interpreting him. “You wonder how they can even keep up,” he says.
“That's an art form; that's more than just a technical skill.”
