Becoming Hip-Hop's Biggest Sign Language Interpreter — Matt Maxey

 

Airdate: October 8, 2025

Julie Rose: Have you ever struggled to be understood?

Matt Maxey: Sign language was not considered as "cool" for the people who came from the background that I came from. I'm gonna do it anyway. They're doing, "You're doing it wrong." "I don't care. I like it. You understand me, right? Perfect. Let's keep it going."

Julie Rose: Hey, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a show about sticking with moments that challenge us even when they're uncomfortable. And I know you're probably wondering, "Why would anybody choose to be uncomfortable?" But I have learned from personal experience, and maybe you have too, that sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can stay open and curious about it. And that is what we're here to explore, so let's get Uncomfy. I'm joined today by Matt Maxey. If you watched the Super Bowl this year, you might have seen Matt Maxey performing his ASL interpretation of Kendrick Lamar's halftime show. Matt is the founder of DEAFinitely Dope. That's spelled DEAF, DEAFinitely Dope. It's a performance collective that uses American Sign Language and music, especially hip-hop, to bridge the Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing worlds, so it's a real treat to have Matt with us today. Welcome to Uncomfy!

Matt Maxey: Thank you for having me, Julie. It's a pleasure.

Julie Rose: Is it true that you didn't actually learn to speak sign language until you were in college?

Matt Maxey: Yeah, so I actually got exposed to sign language in high school, but I was resistant towards it. I spent a lot of time growing up in speech therapy, so I felt like I was part of the hearing world, and I wanted to stay a part of that, but it wasn't until I got a scholarship to go to Gallaudet University in DC that I was actually forced to learn sign language. It was an experience.

Julie Rose: Right, well, an incredibly Uncomfy experience, I imagine. So, you, you were raised just, uh, you said going to a lot of speech therapy. I mean, can you, can you hear at all? Are you able to hear my voice right now?

Matt Maxey: So, with my hearing aids, I can hear. With headphones, I can hear. If it was music playing, I would not be able to hear the music without reading the lyrics and memorizing the lyrics, so it's a spectrum of how much I can hear.

Julie Rose: I see we're gonna get to the music in a moment because that's, like, an amazing part of what you do, but, so you can hear some, but without hearing aids, not at all. So, growing up, yeah, growing up, you say you lived in the hearing world, that felt like what, what your world was and you wanted to stay there. A lot of lip reading? I mean, how, how successful did you feel in the hearing world?

Matt Maxey: I felt like if I couldn't read it, if I couldn't see and understand it, like captions or a book, it was just like being a lost duck in the water, just, like, lost dog in the parlor. "Hey, what's going on? Um, help. You know, break it down, slow it down, run it by me again," and after a while, you just kind of learn how to survive. You learn coping mechanisms, and I just started picking up on patterns and trying my best. If I missed it, I missed it. If I caught it, I caught it. But after a while, you want to be able to understand everything that's going on without guessing and, "Uh, I hope I got it right. Oh, I got it wrong? Yeah, okay," then next time I'll be quiet and then make sure I got it right before I speak up, so it was a learning process.

Julie Rose: Yeah, you really had to become an amazing listener. That's something a lot of us don't have great skills at.

Matt Maxey: The irony!

Julie Rose: You said, it really is. Matt, you said that you were actually resistant to learning sign language as a teenager. Uh, tell me a little more about that.

Matt Maxey: So, I guess because nobody in my family or circle encouraged it, I kind of took on their approach of, "You don't need sign language, you can talk," or sign language kind of implies that they were "lesser than," so it was actually a form of audism, A-U-D-I-S-M, to where I thought I was better because I could speak and didn't need sign language, but the more I learned about the Deaf culture and community, the more I realized, "Hey, this is actually more fit for me instead of me working overtime trying to fit everybody else to make them happy."

Julie Rose: So, you got a scholarship to Gallaudet, the, the Deaf university.

Matt Maxey: Yes, ma'am.

Julie Rose: And there, you were expected to speak sign language there in that community. So, what did that feel like for you showing up as someone who didn't really know it?

Matt Maxey: So, my first semester was actually a school protest. The, um, student body wanted the president to step down because they wasn't Deaf. So, because they wasn't Deaf, they didn't feel like they could relate to what they needed. So, if you were hard of hearing or if you could talk or if you didn't know sign language at the time that I went into school, you were considered an "enemy." So, that was my first semester at school. I come in, I'm talking, I'm talking on the phone with my mom because I know her voice, and then I don't know sign language, so they're like, "Oh, you are the kind of people we're trying to get out of here." Like, I don't even know what the fight is all about. Like, I just came here to come to school 'cause they told me I would love it here, and, um, you know, after a while I just tried to, "Let me put aside my own feelings and let me understand where they're coming from," and the more time that went on, the more that I got exposed to the sign language, the culture of the community, the more I just became a part of it and then became an advocate on behalf of it with the platform and privileges that I had.

Julie Rose: That's pretty amazing that you were able to set aside the, the hurt I'm sure that you felt when people were judging you and ostracizing you, pushing you away, blaming you as part of the "enemy," and, and you were able to somehow try to understand. What, what did you learn? What, was there an interaction with a fellow student that you had where you came to see their perspective maybe a little more clearly?

Matt Maxey: I think I saw the struggle that everybody went through, not having access to the language that they needed. So, for example, I would become, like, the interpreter for my friends, and then, "What if they go out again and they don't have me around to help support them? Then what?" Then they gotta go through all the frustration over and over and over again to the point to where they're just fed up, so the more I started, and then my hearing aids broke for three years, and the more I experienced that, the more I'm like, "Ooh, okay, now I really get it, and because I get it, I can put aside whatever petty hurt, anger, whatever, I can put that aside and try to turn the bad into good." And it actually was freeing and inspiring in itself because, you know, everybody likes their underdog story. You know, you make a change, you make an impact, you change the perspective, you change the game, and seeing the difference from 10, 15 years ago to how much we have available for now, it's empowering to feel like you had a role in supporting that change.

Julie Rose: What is that change that you feel like you've helped to support?

Matt Maxey: More accessibility. More accessibility, more inclusion, more opportunities, more recognition, more fairness, more consideration, just, "Oh," not so much, "Okay, well, you know, you are," what do you call it? "A nuisance. You're more work for us to deal with." No, you can deal with this. It's gonna require more effort, but it is possible. We can make a finished product that's appreciated by everybody. So, seeing that there's more opportunities, more captions, more awareness, more interpreters everywhere we go, that's the change I see, because before that was not happening.

Julie Rose: Especially not at, like, a hip-hop concert.

Matt Maxey: No, not at all.

Julie Rose: Yeah, yeah. That's really beautiful. I wanna talk a little more about that, but tell me first of all, how you, how you became a, a music interpreter. Like, how did, how did, how did that happen?

Matt Maxey: So, when I was learning sign language, I, I, I probably had bad ADHD because I was just all over the place, and everything was so backwards. Like, ASL, American sign. Language is backwards, so the grammatical structure was different, and I'm a bookworm. I love to read, so I like my English in precise order.

Julie Rose: A, B, C, D, E, the noun and the verb and,

Matt Maxey: right,

Julie Rose: in order. Okay?

Matt Maxey: and now they're telling me, "You gotta switch this, this, that," and I, I could not get it. So I, I kind of went against the grain, and I thought about it. I'm like, "Hey, you know what? Let me increase the vocabulary words, with everything that I'm learning, let me try to apply it with the music that I love." So, if I learn new words for the songs that I love, after a while my hands would kind of get used to just signing and flowing, and then I can pick up on the whole grammatical structure context.

Julie Rose: So, music, so listening to music from hip-hop artists and, and translating it for yourself with, like, that was your practice. That was your study for ASL.

Matt Maxey: Yeah, like, imagine trying to sign to people, like, Twista or Eminem or Busta Rhymes, and they're super fast. That's gonna make the conversation seem way easier when it's slower.

Julie Rose: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you started doing it just for yourself with the music that you love, and then you posted a couple of videos, right? What do you think, why did those resonate so much with people?

Matt Maxey: Because it was music that people never had access to, so it was, at that time, a lot of, "Keep it clean, keep it family friendly." Like, "Oh, that's too much." If it's not Taylor Swift, if it wasn't Miley Cyrus, if it wasn't Bruno Mars or that type of music, it was too much.

Julie Rose: People weren't gonna do the interpretation. Like, so, so if, so, if a Deaf or hard, or hard of hearing person wanted to see music interpreted in ASL, it wouldn't, it would typically not be hip-hop or artists.

Matt Maxey: No, yeah, it would be considered too explicit, so that was probably the motivation, like, "Hey, somebody gotta do it. Somebody gotta cover it," and especially, you know, if you have families, you come from the city and you have people who can hear around you and they're listening to these songs, some of them are not friendly, but they want to be able to join their families and be able to sign along and sing along, so the more I think, started seeing the happiness and joy of, "We are one and the same," instead of, "Me, I'm missing out on everything because it's too much for me and my world, but it's okay in your world," that was something that I saw needed to change.

Julie Rose: Did you know any Deaf people who were Black like you growing up?

Matt Maxey: It wasn't many. Growing up? Growing up, no, not at all, at all. Sign language was not considered as "cool" for the people who came from the background that I came from. Most of the time, the people that I came across, they were too shy to express themselves. Like, they were afraid of the criticism or the, um, comment that other people would have to say about, "Oh, don't do this. Don't do it that way. Don't do it this way. Don't do it that way. Oh, this is how you should," so me, just excited and passionate and like, "All of that doesn't matter. I'm gonna do it anyway." They're doing, "You're doing it wrong." "I don't care. I like it. You understand me, right? Perfect. Let's keep it going." And then later, it just became, "You know what? Even though I didn't understand or I didn't like it," they ended up respecting what I was trying to do and understood the vision of, "Hey, I'm just trying to make something for the people like me and then maybe branch out even more from there." Now, if you look on TikTok, you can see sign language and music everywhere. So,

Julie Rose: yeah,

Matt Maxey: it's, it's incredible to see.

Julie Rose: Really a trendsetter, Matt Maxey. Um, how did you end up being one of the official interpreters for Chance The Rapper for his shows?

Matt Maxey: Yeah, so that was organic as can be. Um, I was actually at a festival called Bonnaroo, and I got invited by a group of interpreters to go, and they're like, "Hey, if you want to interpret a show, you're Deaf, you can interpret whoever you want to interpret for," and I'm like, "Great." So, I picked Travis Scott, I picked, uh, The Weeknd,Chance The Rapper, and I picked Red Hot Chili Peppers, but that was a little bit too hard. So, when I did the first show, I'm just up there, I'm looking at the crowd. This is, like, 10,000 people it feels like, it may be even more. I just see a whole ocean of people. I'm trying to remember everything. Like, this is nerve-wracking. This is a lot of people.

Julie Rose: Because you had to have the words memorized, right? Like, when you are interpreting, you don't actually, are you hearing anything, any, the beat or anything like that?

Matt Maxey: So, I can only hear what I recognize. So, because I knew the song, they have a setlist, so the two songs that I knew, they're like, "Hey, it's your turn. Go." So, I know it by heart, boom boom, and Chance The Rapper was backstage watching, so he loved it, and he was like, "Hey, can you do my show?" And I'm like, "For sure, let's go." Really, the next day they were like, "He wants to meet you," and we met, and it was just organic. "Hey, what's up? This is good. I love what you're doing. I'd never seen anything like it. Can you do it for my show?" After the show, we met again and that's when he brought up, "Hey, I would love to have you on tour,"and from there it was, "Green light, go. Like, say no more. Where we going? Meet you in Miami? No problem." We get a team together, drove down to Miami, great time, great show, he's like, "Can you join the rest of the way?" "Absolutely!" And from there, whew, it took off.

Julie Rose: Matt, what difference would it have made for you as a teenager to meet you, to, to get, to be able to go to a Chance The Rapper show as a kid?

Matt Maxey: It probably would've changed my life, uh, just to see representation, inspiration, possibility. This is an area where people have constantly said, "Deaf people can't enjoy music," and this is from both the hearing and Deaf communities. But to see, like, that stereotype being defied, there's not many Black men that are doing it, there's not much that are my age that are doing it, so to see that as a young kid, that would be somebody that, "Oh, wow, okay, now I don't feel alone in this space anymore because I see this, I admired it. I respect it. Okay, now I'm motivated, I'm excited. What can I do to help and support and even elevate the ball even more?"

Julie Rose: Matt Maxey is the founder of DEAFinitely Dope. It's a performance collective that's all about bringing the Deaf, hard of hearing and hearing communities together through music. You can see him and his team interpreting for lots and lots of music events and rock concerts, including Matt was at the Super Bowl interpreting for Kendrick Lamar. What was that like for you?

Matt Maxey: It was incredible. It was absolutely incredible. It was so nerve-racking because Kendrick Lamar is so brilliant and so fast. It's just like, okay, once it was, like, "3, 2, 1, go!"

Julie Rose: Yeah, your hands are gonna get cramps, right?

Matt Maxey: I was sweating buckets, though. When I finished, I think that whole third quarter, I was just in my chair.

Julie Rose: And just trying to catch to your breath, amazing. To have that big of an audience, where, did you hear from, did, did you hear from anyone or sort of see any kind of impact that came as a result of that?

Matt Maxey: Yeah, I mean after that ended up going to work at the, um, Oscars, ended up doing just interviews. The main goal was to provide just accessibility. It wasn't me so much, I just felt like I was picked to be the right person to provide accessibility, to let companies, like the NFL or whoever's watching, let them know like, "Hey, this can be a great thing going forward," so hopefully that door is open for more companies to just kind of follow through, like, "Okay, we see this space is working out good. Okay, let's try it," and then from there we can make that be a norm all over, which is the goal.

Julie Rose: You can find out more about Matt Maxey and his team online at deafinitelydope.com. That's spelled DEAF, DEAFinitely. Thank you so much for your time. Good luck with your work.

Matt Maxey: Thank you, and I wish you the best as well.

Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. I loved talking to Matt. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I can't stop thinking about the story he shared about being in college, getting all of that hate and being ostracized by his fellow students and deciding to try to understand where they were coming from and coming to feel empathy for the pain that they had experienced in their lives because of the barriers to, uh, not being able to communicate and interact in the hearing world. I'd love to hear a story about a time when you were able to feel empathy for someone who maybe hadn't treated you well. It's the one of the hardest things we try to do, isn't it, as we try to live in community together, and sometimes there are people who we just find really hard to love, to feel empathy toward. I'd love to hear what's worked for you. Share your story with us at uncomfy@byu.edu, or you can connect with us on social media; we're on Instagram, @uncomfy.podcast. I'd love to keep the conversation going. Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Hyobin Kim and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.