Words by: Andres Reyes

After immigrating to Michigan from Israel at the tender age of 7, Ilana Weaver, aka Invincible, used her natural gravitation towards hip-hop as a way to learn English. By the time she was in high school, she had begun to build her reputation as an MC, performing at open mics and throwing events in abandoned buildings around Ann Arbor and Detroit.  Her passion for the music eventually led her to make a trip to NY at 16, where she linked up with the famed underground, all-female aNoMoLies crew. During that late-90’s NY indie boom, Invincible was able to build with like-minded progressive artists and continue to perform constantly with aNoMoLies. Still, for all the work her and the crew put in, there is not too much tangible from that period. Invincible explains, “the way people would see us was live at shows, and we would do shows so often. We would be at every event at that time in New York opening for everybody that was coming out at that time, Blackstar, deadprez, even Black Eyed Peas at one point.”

After turning down numerous major label offers that stifled her creative vision, Invincible moved back to Detroit in 2001 and began focusing more on her own music as well as her activism. She has since solidified links with the Waajeed-led Bling47 Group as well as with fellow D artist Finale to build strong musical network for her music. Her involvement with the Detroit Summer non-profit community collective has helped her use her skills and hip-hop in general as a way to speak to and organize youth around community issues such as predatory development and the criminalization of local schools. Rather than having her music and her community involvement exists separately, Invincible makes a conscious choice to mix those ideologies into her music, while still making sure the beats are hard and the rhymes match.

That mixture of good music and a message is just what she plans to deliver when she drops her first album after more than a decade in the game, ShapeShifters, released on her own independent label Emergence Music. They say an MC’s debut album is always a lifetime in the making and in this case, it shows. The unrelenting MC tackles deeply personal issues like emigrating from Israel at a young age, the realities of the seemingly liberal Ann Arbor she grew up in and family depression, all with the finesse of a true MC. With beats by fellow Michigan family like Wajeed, House Shoes and the Lab Techs, Invincible fashions a hard-hitting musical landscape that fills the low-end nicely as she tells her story. When questioned as to the significance of the title of her album, ShapeShifters, Invincible explained “it has to do with the concept of self transformation and how that’s connected to transforming our communities, our struggles, being able to transform that through transforming ourselves.” Truly a revolutionary in both thought and action, Invincible continues to be a beacon of hope for hip-hop and her community as she leads by example.