Hello again, and welcome back to The Roc Journal.
Release week kept blessing me with conversations, and this one went somewhere deep. On Wednesday night I sat down with Ay Que Linda on her show Words of Divine — reggae, dub, and dancehall on KSQD Community Radio, 90.7 out of Santa Cruz, California.
From the first moment, Linda was so nice and welcoming. And because she is an educator herself, she really embraced my scholarly side. She asked me about my research and my dissertation, Empress Epistemologies, and she gave it real space — the kind of space you do not always get on a music show.
We got into frequency. How God is a frequency, and how singing is a frequency too. We talked about vocal registers and how the voice carries something beyond the notes. Linda let the conversation breathe and go where it needed to go, and it meant a lot to be met that fully as both a scholar and a singer.
And then she played the music. She spun Liberation Night, Sweet Like Mango, Safe & Sound, Empress Love, and Write Your Name. Hearing the catalog move through the airwaves in Santa Cruz, on a community station that loves this music, was its own kind of joy. (She did not get to Last Time or the Write Your Name house remix — next time.)
That is what liberation sounds like. A real conversation, honest research, and the music carrying it all the way through.
You can tune in to KSQD at https://www.ksqd.org
More stories still to come. Stay in the tide with me.
Signing off with much love, Jahmi Roc 🌿