“Intellectualism, Philanthropy, Charisma and Confidence (sans forced daily mantras) should be the new sexy in the 21^st century.- -“ Sasha Brookner

I don’t have to say much about this public relations powerhouse, but “Google her-. When you do, you’ll find that the talent, perseverance and building of a star artist is often measured in the team she/he has behind them -“ in the background making it happen. You’ll find that Sasha Brookner is a name slipping off the tongue of many of your favorite artists.

credit: Photo by Djeneba Aduayom

Sasha Brookner is the founder of Helio Public Relations. Based in Los Angeles, this boutique PR firm nurtures artists as varied as Nikki Lynette, Goapele, Ledisi, Joi, N’Dambi, KRS One, Tamar-kali and  Conya Doss. The list is long and growing. Yet, before you can understand the success of a company, you need to understand the heart and soul behind it. We chose Sasha Brookner as June’s Fly, Fierce, Feminine femme fatale because, well, she’s deep. We talk to Sasha about everything from feminism, misogyny to what projects keep her up at night.

Cocoa Cure:  The fly, fierce, feminine ideology is a mantra. It’s a woman who is not only successful in her professional world, but radiates confidence and positivity in her aura. What does a “fierce” woman mean to you and does she have to earn that title?

Sasha: Naomi Wolf said in her magnum opus “The Beauty Myth- that a woman’s biggest fear was to be invisible to men. So I admire women who can break out of that treacherous mindset. A woman who separates her sense of self from her aesthetics. It sounds like a simple dichotomy but it’s difficult for us x chromosomes. Being able and willing to see yourself outside of a physical mirror is a struggle (Janet Jackson cried for years in front of one. Can you imagine everything she could have been doing during that time instead?) Ultimately it gives you a more genuine sense of human agency and self-esteem that isn’t defined by arbitrary genetics or connected to your interaction with others on a particular day. I mean yeah if you wanna call women “fierce- who whip their hair, keep their man in check or balance in some Louboutin stilettos without making it look like they got muscular dystrophy I guess, that’s not really my thing. And now Spanx is the modern day Victorian corset. In order to impress we have become optical illusions. To liberate yourself from what feminists call the “second gaze- is a rebirth. Too many women wear looking glasses that reflect men back as twice the size of who they really are. We spend our lives catering to their desires. Oscar Wilde once said “women know life too late.-   This notion of connecting our inner most spirit and splendor with the superficial is a pathology taught to us from a young age from all the regular outlets (i.e media, parents, boys, social structures, school.) We need to explore new concepts of self on a more philosophical and perhaps metaphysical level.   I think that will create a paradigm shift and put women on an alternate path where everything starts to fall into place because we discard 75% of our insecurities and can start focusing our time/energy on places it needs to be. And this isn’t to say we can’t also be sexy and/or even salacious but at the same time also donate our time at a battered women’s shelter or give money to pro-choice organizations like NARAL. How dope is the concept of a stripper who is also a rocket scientist? Okay that might be extreme but I’m just saying. There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between being pretty and being a critical thinker who challenges the system. A healthy woman can find the proper balance. Intellectualism, Philanthropy, Charisma and Confidence (sans forced daily mantras) should be the new sexy in the 21^st century. Whether the majority of men completely ignore these qualities doesn’t matter, most likely they will but who cares. I also respect women who aren’t super judgmental and critical of other women. All that energy could be redirected towards introspection. There’s a dope quote from Madeleine Albright who said there’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women. Sisterhood gives us the elevation needed to continue to act as the agents of societal change. All of that to me is the definition of Fierce. Oh and the chicks who do the Brazilian bikini wax thing. They’re no joke!

Cocoa Cure:  You have many titles – Publicist, Historian. Would you consider yourself a Feminist?

Sasha: Yes. I embrace everything about the word; it’s history, legacy, struggle, honor. Everything I do in life I try to pause and think whether it might be disrespectful to the women who came before me, the women who bled, sweat and cried so I could have the opportunities I have today. I stand on the shoulders of my foremothers in every facet of my life and they deserve my utmost veneration. But I don’t necessarily think feminism is intrinsic in women. I’m not an essentialist, I’m from the school of existentialism. Like Simone de Beauvoir said I wasn’t born a woman, I became one. I was initiated into the stages of womanhood and feminism properly by my mothers and aunts, some girls never receive that tutorial but feminism gives us structure. The fight for social justice should be the backbone of any marginalized community, without that we are basically invertebrates.   Feminism has gotten a bad rep because men are threatened by the idea of a socially egalitarian society where they can’t micro-manage our sex lives, where we would rather practice law then cook, where we stand up against domestic violence, where we refuse to stay barefoot changing diapers or on the flipside try to act chaste to garner a man’s respect. These are ideas that don’t sit well with the opposite sex so they’ve gone on to poison the minds of women through propaganda and then those heffaz sell out in their dire need to placate men. I always encounter women who eschew this title and make jokes about bra burning but I find the irony that they are more then happy to reap the benefits of the various waves of feminism throughout history. They vote, they go to college, they use domestic violence shelters, they frequent Planned Parenthood, they get abortions, they get divorces and alimony. The fact that we don’t have to witness the type of porn that existed up until the 80′s which included much more degrading, humiliating, dominative, rape-like scenes is the sole work of feminists. The fact that we are now paid 78 cents on the dollar to men in the workplace is not something that happened haphazardly. It’s because of feminists that it’s now actually a crime for your husband to rape you (which it wasn’t up until 1976 when I was born). We have reproductive choices that feminist are still fighting for on our behalf. I could go on and on. Women will give themselves the title of “queen- and “goddesses- before “feminist.- But which one of those is really putting in the work to make your life better? A “queen- is someone who sits on a throne and enacts laws for a nation, you are not that. A “goddess- is some spirit off in the clouds or in rivers, you are not that. You are simply a woman whose life is made a little less intolerable by the work of feminists, don’t spit on that. It’s like a black girl sitting in the front of the bus on her way to school and then in history class rolls her eyes when assigned an entire book on Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. But I think Beyonce is definitely helping make the word “feminism- cooler for young girls. Whether she is or isn’t one (another subject) but just appropriating the label she’s giving it a sexy new facelift which is dope.

Cocoa Cure: What’s in heavy rotation on your iPod?

Sasha: Man I listen to sooo much music. I love all the artists who can’t get signed to major labels because they’ll never have potential to be featured on Worldstarhiphop which is how A&R execs sign artists nowadays. I love Joi, Conya Doss, Mateo, 4^th Avenue Jones and The Elevaters. And then I also listen to Kate Nash, James Blunt, Edgar Winters, Tupac, Jevetta Steele, Youssou N’Dour, Lauryn Hill, Mint Condition, Donnie Hathaway, Nneka, Ayo, Cyndi Lauper, K’Naan, Leann Womack, Carlos Santana, Melky Sedeck, The Foreigners, Syleena Johnson, Beethoven, Richard Marx, as well as a lot of South African music. My tastes extend beyond continent borders and ocean divides.

Cocoa Cure: Who is your biggest inspiration if you had to consolidate it into one person?

Sasha: You know I couldn’t even condense it all to one person. It would be a mixture of men and women contemporary and throughout antiquity like Josephine Baker, Matilda Joslyn Gage, my mother/father, Frida Kahlo, Clarissa Estes, Isabel Allende, Katherine Dunham, Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, Frederick Douglass, Amanullah Khan, Socrates, Julian Assange, Avicenna, the Samurais from 12^th century Japan, Queen Nzingha, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stoics, Hypatia, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Gloria Steinam, Kris Ex-¦.

Cocoa Cure: How has public relations empowered you and your legacy?

Sasha: I’m not sure how much of a legacy I’m leaving. It’s not like I’m going down in a history book or anything but it has given me a platform to reach a broader audience. I had originally wanted to be a history teacher and could have maybe possibly potentially affected 15% of a classroom of 25 students, teaching them about the feminist suffrage movement and/or classical Greece. But kids live and breathe entertainment and realized it would have more efficacy to try to use that medium. So I work with a lot of activist and indie talent as a vehicle to perhaps inspire a more diverse range of role models. We’ve done a lot to promote African dance in the media when it really hadn’t been depicted accurately in the past. In the early 2000′s we garnered N’Dambi features in publications like French Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle, which was groundbreaking at the time. It’s great if you can use the media to help promote authors putting out books on women growing up in third world countries, or an artist speaking out about police brutality and the prison industrial complex. I think that’s game changing. We exist in a world where celebrities have become our royalty and seem to be some of the few the kids actually pay attention to, so we would be remiss not to try to help some of the underdogs rise up to get on that podium too.

Helio Public Relations

Cocoa Cure:How did Helio PR become the success that it was? Did you land your first “big” client and blow up or did you nurture an unknown future star?

Sasha: I actually landed in PR haphazardly, by mistake while trying to get extra credit at UCLA in order to graduate on time. Later I was hired for my first PR gig at Red Ant Records and then subsequently employed at a couple corporate PR firms. I branched out in 1999 and began working with N’Dambi (our first client) who at the time was a background singer for Erykah Badu. None of our early clients were multi-platinum, but based on the press we secured it became a snowball effect and gradually it became a mixture of grassroots talent and Billboard charting talent. Truthfully I didn’t know that my company would take off and become viable and a mainstay. They say most company’s fail within the first year so after 365 days I figured I might be cool. It’s been 12 years now.

Cocoa Cure:There is an obvious emphasis on  soul artists with your client list. Is it the grassroots vibe, personal music interest, or the avant-garde that attracts you?

Sasha: I think any music/art that doesn’t cater to people who enjoy violence, materialism or commodifying sex is definitely lacking PR/marketing. With soul music it had beautiful exposure thru the 80′s before music videos engendered a new culture where the visuals and theatrics were trumping the actual musicality. Raunchy music videos began taking over in pop, R&B and hip hop, but it seemed soul music was not really topping the charts or creating pandemonium with the youth. You had exceptions like Lauryn, Badu, India, Maxwell-¦but they were all attached to major labels. There’s always been a void with indie soul and alternative. So yeah I’m a fan of the music and I like challenging projects which are often more homegrown and less plastered on a billboard. Similarly I wanted to work with artists who were also enlightening as people, the ones with innovative cerebral type of perspectives on music, life, love, relationships, politics, etc. But now you have Adele, Lupe Fiasco, K’Naan, Corinne Bailey Rae, Ledisi, Marsha Ambrosius and Esperanza Spaulding winning Grammy’s and making a place for themselves. That’s inspiring.

Cocoa Cure: Your artists, like Goapele, are passionate about your dedication to their career. How do you give the “personal touch” to artists?

Sasha: I usually have to connect with a client on some personal level. With Goapele it was maybe initially us both being from the Bay Area, having mothers that did support groups for new moms and our bohemian fashion spirit. With someone like Katt Williams we had a similar humor, we actually read a lot of the same books. I had just finished reading the autobiography of Giacamo Casanova right before I met him and it was so interesting to see how parallel their lives were. I felt like I already knew almost everything about him right away. With KRS One we vibed over Nietzsche, Aristotle, gun control and not understanding how our country voted for Bush twice. With Drumma Boy I respected his musicality, he was as up on Mozart as he was Three-6-Mafia.   With someone like Malik Yusef (songwriter/spoken word artist) I had been a fan since I saw him on Def Poetry Jam. He was such a paradox to me being Muslim, being a feminist, being a gang banger, a poet. Once I get an understanding for who my clients are as people I think I’m able to create a better presentation to media that’s aligned to their persona, and I guess that’s the personal touch you mention.

Cocoa Cure: Is there an internal struggle when considering an artist that is “hot”, but may be misogynistic with their lyrical content?

Sasha: You know I do work w/ artists who aren’t necessarily “activist talent- but nothing that I deem is promoting material that is harmful/violent to women or an obstacle within our progression. The most controversial client who could be seen in a misogynistic realm would be Katt Williams and actually I did contemplate for awhile about working with him. It’s interesting because if you listen closely to his stand-up routines he actually had a lot of feminist content in his material. It might not have been salient but it was definitely in-between the lines. In real life he’s actually very political minded (although I think the fact that he’s been a felon since he was 16 years old and can’t actually vote is frustrating). Take for instance his routine discussing “insurgents- in Iraq, pointing out that our government uses that term with promiscuity to masquerade the fact that we’re really killing innocent women and children. I think he’s brilliant, very well read, had a genius I.Q at age 2. We’ve talked about religion, etc. and his inquiries reminded me more of discoursing with an intellectual as opposed to a typical Christian.   In real life he eschews the entire concept of a pimp. He was literally aggravated by it and would tell me to tell writers to stop asking him about it. He would say it was an “antiquated word- and that his usage of it was more metaphorical in terms of “pimpin situations and scenarios.- But on the flipside I also realize he definitely capitalized on the pimp iconography to build his brand coming out w/ the mink coat and scantily clad models, while dumbing it down for his target audience. I did enjoy working with Katt although some women might question me for it. Then working w/ Drumma Boy of course many of the beats he provides rappers are eventually turned into songs rife with dehumanization so it was hard to reconcile. On the flipside, Drumma makes rhythms for Goapele and Estelle so the beat making in itself isn’t inherently misogynistic. It’s like whether a printer company that provides blank paper to magazines like Playboy and King on which to publish their content is responsible for the effect those publications have. What if they also provide paper to Ms. Magazine? I don’t know, but those are the only two clients that have made me stop and think about whether they go against my personal belief system. But yes, to answer your question, we have and do turn down numerous hip hop artists who approach us, even when they had welcoming budgets. But for the most part the men we’ve worked with like Cee-Lo, KRS One, Martin Luther, Evidence, Malik Yusef and Keba Konte (painter) have music and artwork that I perceive as neutral or positive to women. For instance if you listen to Malik Yusef’s albums he spits about matriarchy and goddess worship in between narratives of the drug game. I like that contrast.

Cocoa Cure: What is going on with Helio PR right now, and what current projects keep you up at night?

Sasha: We’ve been working with a couple independent female soul vocalists including Goapele’s upcoming album Milk & Honey and Conya Doss’ latest effort Blu Transition. We also worked recently with two afro-punk artists, Tamar-kali out of Brooklyn and Nikki Lynette out of Chicago. We did PR for KRS One’s “Stop the Violence Campaign- as well as his latest book “The Gospel of Hip-Hop.- We’ve been working with hip-hop producer Drumma Boy for the past few years and some work w/ the cast of the Broadway hit music FELA!. Working with a couple boutiques including Loft 1513 in San Francisco which is run by Goapele’s stylist as well as Estella Boutique in Atlanta which is Tameka Foster’s new shop. We do PR for celeb fitness trainer Mark Jenkins who works out Mary J. Blige on a regular and has worked with everyone from D’Angelo to Beyonce. I wanted to branch into the reggae/Jamaican dancehall music scene for awhile so we started working with Barbados artist Rayvon, who sang a lot of the hooks for Shaggy’s hit songs in the 90′s. Working with Thurzday of the Los Angeles rap duo U-N-I who has a dope album and documentary coming up called L.A. Riot, a concept project inspired by the 1992 Rodney King riots as well as recent North African uprisings. One of the most inspiring projects we’ve had the opportunity to work recently was I.S.I.S (Instituting Science in the Schools), a non-profit in conjunction with NASA and Mos Def, working to make science, nature, math and astronomy cool in the urban school system. We also will be doing PR/marketing later this year for a domestic violence shelter in Los Angeles called Octavia’s House.

Visit us at www.heliopr.com