Naiara: Doing digital wrongly - SOLHOT's mixtape

How did SOLHOT do digital wrongly and what were the aims and results of their first mixtape? (409-414) 

SOLHOT members point a series of reasons that led them to do digital wrongly:

• Access: they simply didn’t have access to the best technology, or didn’t know how to play instruments and manage software.
• Confidence and knowledge: they felt what they knew and what they could communicate about Black girlhood was more important than following the industry standards.
• To make a statement: doing music together was a way of expressing love for each other. By doing it in an educational/corporate environment where love is not part of the language, they were making the statement that “I love you in a space that says we shouldn’t.” (408).
• As an act of courage
• Because they are “scholars without a method” – by reviewing scholarly literature, they were confronted with the pedagogy of Trinh T. Minh-ha and other authors that incited them to let go of the security of established methodologies and art forms to create something original, that incorporated their truth. The idea is that what you have is what you need to get it done.

Their first mixtape was an exercise of confronting their truth to a more “professional” aesthetics. Whereas the industry prefers a sonically spotless and cleaner sound, they acknowledge that the sound of Black girlhood has laughter, children's cries, doors’ slams, and messiness. Their music incorporates all that “noise”, and especially the experiences and feeling they were going through in the process of making the tape – grief, longing, anger, misunderstanding, uncertainty, affection, joy, love. 
Their music found acceptance among their audience. "Miss me", the most requested music of the tape, deals with the rightful anger and its common misunderstanding that is faced by Black girls and women. It also discusses masculinity, as male anger and violence are often more accepted, and discusses how emotions are gendered. In addition to that, it is a critique of women's systemic erasure in the hip hop scene. 

Question:

The process of making the taped showed them that "we are not and can never be without the resources needed to get it done." (411). It is a powerful story in the sense that they used everything that could've stopped them (lack of technology and "negative" experiences) to be the very material from which they built something. Transposing that reflection to your scholarship and digital projects, answer: Is there any technology, skill, resource that you would like to incorporate in your research but is not accessible to you today? What are the technologies, skills, resources that you do have and that are not incorporated yet? How can you use them to build a stronger research project, more aligned to your skills and expertise?