RAMPD's Lachi Music is empowering music professionals with disabilities

As a blind recording artist, Lachi Music was intimately familiar with the music industry’s minimal representation of artists with disabilities. But becoming active in the Recording Academy and joining the organization’s New York advocacy committee only further emphasized the urgent need for industry-wide change. “I kept bumping into folks who said, ‘Wow, you’re the first person with a disability that I’ve ever met, other than Stevie Wonder,’” said Music, whose stage name is Lachi. “I decided that that wasn’t right—not just for folks with disabilities, but also for folks without disabilities, to not know about the vast, amazing creativity that's out there from folks with a different story.” Those interactions prompted Music to establish RAMPD, a global network of artists and other music professionals with disabilities, in 2021. Since then, Music has worked to infuse disability culture and representation into the music and entertainment industries and forge connections between brands such as Netflix and Sony TV and RAMPD’s network of songwriters, composers, artists and other music professionals. And over the past two years, Music has spearheaded the Recording Academy’s efforts to improve the accessibility of the Grammy Awards—both by introducing accommodations such as ASL interpreters and a ramp to get onstage, but also through boosting the representation of those with disabilities throughout the event. “For a lot of history, disability has been looked at through the lens of a charitable model,” Music said. “Until we see ads or shows with disabled folks, or hear them on the radio—see them highlighted in different campaigns—we won't have that shift from charitable to cultural." View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lachi ™🌻 Recording Artist, Cultural Architect (@lachimusic) See all of Ad Age's 2023 Leading Women here What advice would you give your younger self? People will take your shoulders and point you left. People will take your shoulders and point you right. But it’s when you take your shoulders and point them in the direction you want to go that your life truly begins. What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? All my life I’ve been “sighted-passing,” meaning though I’m legally blind, I could pretend I was not in order to blend in. And while I found some success in my career, there was something holding me back–keeping me in the barrel. When COVID hit, something struck, and I chose to go public about my disability. It was a risk in the sense that folks could feel weird about it, I could lose opportunities, be seen as non-competitive—but it was the complete opposite of a risk now that I look back because accepting my whole self pretty much shattered the barrel. I now create my own opportunities and opportunities for others. The true risk is holding yourself back due to internalized isms and manufactured social stigmas. If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing and why? I'm fortunate enough to travel the world performing and speaking, using storytelling, music, community building and forward-thinking to amplify identity pride and disability culture. I don't know that I could envision an iteration of myself not eventually coming to live this purpose. What should the industry do to encourage more women and people of color into its ranks? The industry needs to be intentional in its mission to up diversity of thought, recognizing disparate voices and lived experiences at all levels of decision-making as an asset. But more so, media is often the frontline of representation for many folks in areas where seeing someone IRL outside of the bell-curve norm is rare. Many folks see and understand culture through ads, brand activations, TV and film, and the more they encounter cultural diversity, the more they see equitable inclusion, the more they will be able to personally accept it and professionally replicate an intention to include it. How do you expect emerging tech like Web3 and AI to impact your job in the future? I'm excited for the advent of AI as a tool to enhance and further evolve our lives. I only hope that access to gestalt-building tools and knowledge bases from which AI pull are universal to all. If history, media and social zeitgeist is where AI learns—but these avenues are selective, written, edited and sourced only by a few—we may end up finding very one-sided, uninformed and undiversified AI decisions masquerading as fact. I want robust and intentionally equitable access to AI tools for historically excluded groups, women, folks with disabilities, people of lower class, so that when I receive a response from an AI tool, I know it pulled from a true sample of experiences, and not just from the viewpoint of majority society. See all of Ad Age's 2023 Leading Women here

RAMPD's Lachi Music is empowering music professionals with disabilities

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