"The New, The Old & The Dusty" is a new series breaking down one song from a different generation that carries a common theme. For this month the theme is: complicated homes.
Navy Blue in 2017 for GQ. Photo by Alex Reside.
The New: Navy Blue Feat. Ka - In Good Hands (2020)
Calling the scene Navy Blue resides in “lo-fi” seems too broad, but for now, there are few factors as defining as the purposefully low-quality vocal engineering and overall fuzz surrounding the sound waves created by him and the crew of artists he surrounds himself with. The pro-skater, turned model, turned producer and rapper, Sage Elsesser has lived fully in just 23 years, and across his debut album "Àdá Irin", he carries himself as such. Taking the mic first on the hazy and ever looping production, Navy gives us an insight into his personal life-giving shouts to his fallen friends and father, taking the last bar of his verse to recognize how much his own hands remind him of his fathers and the peace that brings to him in these troubled days. After the hook comes Ka, who if you don’t know, is probably the absolute last person you want to have on a record with you. Though he’s only popped from the shadows a handful of times to do interviews, the fire chief by day, rapper by night is one of the sharpest writers hip-hop has ever seen. Once his turn comes on record there’s no telling how long he’ll rap for, and to be honest there is no reason to want it to end. In his typical deeply coded style, Ka sculpts the world he grew up in. Bars like "For a good span my ran like a sovereign nation / but then D-Days planes dropped off 'caine to Freeways" and “Lost some folks of course that growth redefined percentage / Doomed in the womb surprised I ain't see a hanger” give us a vivid sliver of how tarnished his hometown of Brownsville was during the height of the crack epidemic that loomed over his early years. As disturbing and tear-jerking the past is to him, the slew of bars ends with a warming string of words lacing together the song's title and pushing that there can be light at the end of the tunnel. In a softer tone, Ka sends off the record with “but now I'm in good hands / surrounded by good women, good babies, good mans / hey I'm in good hands / surrounded by good women, good babies, good mans.”
Listen to "In Good Hands" here
Kanye West & Common performing "The Food" live on The Chappelle Show in 2004
The Old: Common Feat. Kanye West - The Food (Live) (2005)
Cape Coral Florida, or Cape Coma as we referred to it, is a place with not much going for it. Its beauty is powerful in the way of nature and simplicity of life for the common resident, but those moments of beauty are few for a kid with no idea of a bigger picture to fully appreciate this small slice of life. Living in a neighborhood with few kids, the day I found a small off-brand MP3 player on the side of the road was a life-changing one. There were only a few songs, most notably “Juicy” by B.I.G., “My Life” by Game and Lil Wayne, a corrupted file of “Kiss Me Through The Phone”, and “The Food (Live)” by Common and Kanye West. Though now the studio version of “The Food” is a YouTube search away, it sounds like an unfinished demo more than a song that brings me back to my childhood. I gravitated towards it as a kid more than any other song on that MP3 player thanks to my pastime of sneaking late while everyone slept to watch Chappelle Show reruns on Comedy Central whenever I could, even though I hardly knew Kanye songs outside of the radio hits, and even less of who Common was. “I walked in the crib, got two kids, and my baby momma late” sounds like a snapshot of a nightmare to my now 22-year-old self, yet as a kid who had no idea what it meant for his baby momma to be late (Was she at work? Who was babysitting the kids?) leading me to sing along to it every time. Thanks to it being a TV performance it was also censored so it got the full volume treatment whenever I got home. Though now as an adult I realize it’s a record about the pains of life, as a kid the piano loop and sticky hook snapped me from my own mundane childhood into the world Common painted of a man struggling to maintain.
Listen to "The Food (Live)" here
The late Gil Scott-Heron in the early '70s. Photo credits here.
The Dusty: Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where The Hatred Is (1971)
If you ask me, Gil Scott Heron was the first solo rapper. Moving from a poet and writer of critically acclaimed literature pieces like “The Vulture”, he, thanks to the encouragement of the legendary Bob Thiele (who produced this record along with many more Gil Scott records), moved away from his spoken word LP’s into creating "Pieces Of A Man". Still based in spoken word, but with more definitive song structures leaning on jazz and the pop music of his era for the sonic foreground. Though The Last Poets are credited with the first every hip-hop release (though now it seems like caveman wall scribbles in comparison) “Pieces Of A Man” stands head and shoulders above it, and marks the Ground Zero for the idea of a solo rapper. Among the songs lining the tracklist, “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” strikes a chord with the world of today possibly more than any other song from this collection. The song's true meaning is a multi-dimensional onion, but on the surface it speaks on a struggling addict and his want to avoid the place he calls home. He avoids his home to duck judgment, and because he knows once he is home he is alone to do the very thing that has brought upon such judgment. The nuance around contemporary drug addiction runs through the veins of capitalistic greed, a general lack of empathy, and mental health, and though Gil Scott would eventually pass after becoming ill in 2011, in part due to HIV which he contracted from this same lasting drug addiction, his life and struggle is not for nothing. His messages were heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, at times comedic, but more than anything they were soulful. The kind of soulful only someone with a ravaged spirit from years of battles in whatever sense you can imagine can create. He put a section of his soul on the line in every record, and in return, those pieces of himself will matter as long as there are people to listen.
Listen to "Home Is Where The Hatred Is" here
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