When Sarah Jones burst onto the New York hip-hop and slam scene, she seemed to become a legend almost overnight. After winning the coveted Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Poetry Championship in 1997, she took her talents to the theater, where a lack of formal training didn’t stop her from launching three acclaimed one-woman shows that have been produced in venues as varied as the United Nations International Conference on Women’s Rights, the John F. Kennedy Center, and performance halls and universities across the country.

But Jones is perhaps most well-known for being the only performing artist who has ever successfully sued the Federal Communications Commission for censorship. Her famous song “Your Revolution,” inspired by Gil Scott-Heron’s legendary “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” is a sort of girls’ guide to surviving misogynist hip-hop culture — the refrain is a defiant “Your revolution will not happen/Between these thighs.” That and the song’s other suggestive lyrics led the FCC to slap a local radio station with a federal indecency fine for broadcasting “unmistakable patently offensive sexual references” that “appear designed to pander and shock.”

The irony of the ruling wasn’t lost on Jones, who fired back with a suit of her own, charging censorship. And she was angry. The song launches an offensive on sexist mainstream hip-hop — what Jones calls “hip-pop, the illegitimate child of hip-hop” — and plays on rap lyrics, turning them over in a feminist reclaiming of hip-hop’s political power. (Jones’ song doesn’t even include any of the seven verboten words usually flagged by the FCC as indecent.) After two years, the FCC eventually reversed its ruling.

Jones has been widely compared to Anna Deveare Smith, Tracy Ullman, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor and John Leguizamo for her skill at performing a range of disparate characters, sometimes using just one prop to signal a shift in portrayal. Her recent solo show Surface Transit includes an elderly Jewish grandmother, a white supremacist, a young black man leading a 12-step group for recovering rhymers, and Sugar Jones, a British-West Indian woman auditioning for a reality TV series that Jones says at the time seemed preposterous enough to draw laughs. She soon learned that she had a knack not only for bringing out the humanity in a host of often unsavory characters, but for being something of a cultural prophet.

Q&A With Sarah Jones

You performed Surface Transit for five years. How has the show changed over that time?

I keep the characters true to themselves, but there are certain things that I’ve updated. The characters are very personal, sort of outgrowths of my own experiences, and obviously based on people I’ve come into contact with, one way or another. But they’re very much interpreted through my lenses, even as my perspective has changed. I try to stay engaged in the process of better understanding myself and other people, particularly in the context of a world like the one we’re living in now — we’re all adrift in this Ashcroftian sea in this country, with the Patriot Act and all the rest of it. I really made an effort to stick to the script, but just to allow for little changes that I thought were necessary based on who each character was.

The funniest thing that I haven’t changed, which most people think I have, is the character of Sugar Jones, who auditions for the reality show. That parody is something I thought was outlandish enough that people would get it, that it’s an absurd joke, and of course the show practically ended up getting greenlighted somewhere! I didn’t know that Hollywood would catch up to my sense of the absurd. But it did.

Your work is often described as primarily “political.”

I never set out to run for political office, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is, I don’t think that’s where politics is really taking place. I have always been moved and inspired by art and artists and entertainment that resembles art — there’s less and less of that. I think of folks like Lily Tomlin, like Richard Pryor, two of the people I mention most often because their work best epitomizes art that is, by design, a very kind of careful craft, that is about emotion and about story and narrative and characters and all of the beauty that is theater or performance art or, in Richard Pryor’s case, is called stand-up comedy. Some of what Jane Wagner writes for Lily can also feel like stand-up, because it’s so funny, but it really is a kind of theatrical performance that is difficult to categorize because it’s a mirror that you hold up to people.

You’ve made references to “hip-pop, the illegitimate child of hip-hop.” Describe that a little bit.

Hip-hop started out as an innovative means for young kids in the South Bronx, working-class and poor black and Latino kids whose school budgets were being slashed and had no music programs, thank you Ronald Reagan, who made do with what they had. We have no instruments; we’ll take two turntables and a microphone and we’ll pick up on the tradition of some of the folks from the Black Arts movement, Gil Scott-Heron and everyone else, and do this rapping thing. Then there was break dancing, and there was this style of dress and there was the visual art of graffiti.

It was really about social justice and about protest as often as it was party music, and this was hip-hop at its inception. … The message was all about holding a certain class of people accountable for the treatment of others. It was protest art. It was also party music, don’t get me wrong — people partied. But it certainly was not the misogynist, materialistic, violent kind of what has become this sort of trash heap.

It happens that some folks figured out that it was really lucrative to market this culture to everyone and make as much money as possible — but not only that, there’s unfortunately an even more cynical agenda. I think they’re reminiscent of [racist propaganda film] Birth of a Nation, some of these images that we see … of the depraved, criminal black man, the pimp, dehumanizing women, calling them “hos” and “bitches.”

There’s even intraracial racism. I mean, there are so many layers of right-wing-oriented politics throughout the mainstream hip-hop establishment. Hip-hop is a culture and a way of identifying for a lot of young people and a way of expressing themselves that got terribly twisted around and co-opted, turned into this very lucrative and very politically convenient tool for the creation and perpetuation of obedient consumers who buy into a certain idea of who women and men are, who working-class people are, what criminality looks like. All of those things are contributed to by this weird, this really kind of sad incarnation.

A lot of those issues converged with your FCC suit.

Right. … It’s no surprise that the FCC made the bizarre, misinformed judgment that they did around my song. It’s interesting that they elect only to single out hip-hop artists — I mean, in my case it was one thing and then with Eminem it was something else, but [we’re] both hip-hop — when some of the lyrics I’ve heard in rock songs, even in country-western music — believe me, there’s plenty of misogyny to go around. The selective decision-making about who’s guilty and who should be held up as an example … there was definitely some kind of race-related bias at work.

What kind of research are you doing now?

I was awarded by the Kellogg Foundation to basically write about this moment, the moment we’ve been talking about.

The Ashcroftian moment.

Right, the Ashcroftian sea [laughs], where are we, how did we get here, how is it impacting all of our lives, even those who believe that they’re benefiting from things like pre-emptive war and the exploitation of the world’s resources for the benefit of a tiny fraction of the population, all of that. Right now my research is taking the form of looking into the gross human-rights abuses in our prison system, particularly women’s prisons. I was out in California for a while doing research there. … If you look at why women are in prison, most likely you can trace their convictions to violence in their lives, to poverty, to gender discrimination, to discrimination based on their sexual orientation, to drug abuse and other kinds of substance abuse that are directly connected to their health issues, and again, back to class issues — it’s just this kind of network of disastrous problems that our current administration pretends don’t exist, or, worse, they profit from.

Will this be another series of monologues?

I don’t know. I think I might be experimenting with more dialogue among my selves this time, more in the tradition of — well, John Leguizamo is one performer who does a lot of interaction between his characters, while I don’t think of my style as similar to his in many respects — we’re pretty different on lots of levels, and I’ll leave it at that. [Laughs.] I am very interested in his high-energy performance style and kind of creating a community of characters onstage in more threads than just the one monologue. I’ll have lots of time to try to hone those skills of switching back and forth, because I’m actually working on a pilot for Bravo television that will also be character-driven, character-based … I’m writing that with my partner, Steve Coleman.

Bravo’s been doing some really interesting stuff lately.

They have, haven’t they? We’re hoping that they’re going to continue breaking down some of the barriers I certainly associate with television, barriers to new and interesting art. Hopefully we’re pushing the envelope a little bit, changing the conversation a little bit.

My girlfriend is dying to know how you managed to do a Jewish grandmother so perfectly.

[Laughs.] Well, I have some relatives of my own in the family tree, and I also just have people that I’ve come into contact with in my life, loveable, complex individuals with a whole range of opinions and their own insecurities about who we are and where we fit and what does it mean to be marginalized or older or a woman. It’s kind of easy for me to get into Lorraine’s head.

So you were drawing on different people in your life.

Yeah, and when you love them, it’s easier to render them as accurately and lovingly as you would want to, knowing that they might see it.

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