Lemme Ask You This
From the minds of Talib Kweli and Tef Poe comes Lemme Ask You This, a podcast that lives at the intersection of art and activism.
Lemme Ask You This
Episode 7 - The Ballad Of Tef Poe
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For the last show from this Minneapolis run, Talib decides to interview Tef Poe. Talib and Tef start out by showing love to Minneapolis and then they discuss Dave Chappelle's Minneapolis show. Tef tells a story about a conservative Chappelle fan he met. Dave Chappelle's politics are discussed which becomes a conversation about the similarities between comedy and battle rap. Talib begins to interview Tef. Tef talks about growing up in St. Louis and being inspired by his brother, Black Spade. Talib and Tef show love to MC Hammer while talking about how elitist NYC hiphop can be. Tef talks about rapping in chat rooms and on message boards and then talks about how hard he used to go to promote his own music. Talib asks about Tef's Cheers For The Villian album. Tef breaks down his journey to NY for 106 and Park Freestyle Fridays and talks about his connection to battle rap. Tef and Talib recount how they met. Tef and Talib discuss respectability politics and the pros and cons of organization building. Tef talks about how his trip to Palestine changed him and why he pulled back from music in favor of activism work. The conversation then turns to Tef's Black Julian albums and his time being a Nas fellow at Harvard University. Talib asks Tef about his diss songs aimed at St. Louis politicians and about going from an independent artist to signing with Tommy Boy.
Shot and Edited By Chino Chase. Additional Filming By Aaron Ross Media Co.
What's up, people in a place to be? My name is the BKMC, the Little Lebowski Urban Achiever, Talib Kwali.
SPEAKER_00It's your boy, the POE, the Van Glorious. I'm back with the big dog for another episode, man. Let me ask you this.
SPEAKER_03Let me ask you this. The show where the questions that are on the mind of real niggas everywhere are answered. What's up, Chapo?
SPEAKER_00Man, I'm chilling, man. Happy to be here, man, on location with you, my nigga. You know, we making it happen. Um, it's been a joy filming this show with you, uh, interviewing activists, artists, uh, regular everyday people. You know, it's been quite a journey, but we're just getting started.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities showing us so much love.
SPEAKER_00Oh man, it's been phenomenal.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, shout out to Dave Chappelle. Shout out to Wintana Melakeen, shout out to Rod Adams, shout out to Toussaint Morrison, everybody we've been running across.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man, it's been amazing. We got to see a master at work. Uh speaking of Mr. Chappelle, um, just the apex, the zenith of what he does, uh, and seeing that on the front line here in Minnesota, uncut, unsolicited, ready for the archives of history. How do you feel about that?
SPEAKER_03I thought it was a good show. I like the way he showed so much solidarity for the Somali community, the immigrant community. I like the fact that he had billboards all over the city that said, I'm pulling up, because you know, Chappelle got fans who are racist. Chappelle got fans who fuck with ice. Chappelle got fans who are Trump fans. And I like the fact that while I respect the fact that he puts his politics in his comedy, um, I wanted to ask you this. Let me ask you this. You told me a situation where you and Chino, shout out to Chino, walked outside of the show. Well, actually, y'all couldn't get back in because y'all was smoking. But um, y'all went outside to smoke and you had a conversation with a fan outside. Uh, like, tell me about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it got kind of crazy because we weren't really asking for the conversation. Uh, but buddy started talking to us and he was saying that he was disappointed in what he was seeing Dave Chappelle do. And he was really kind of emotional about it. He was like, Man, I didn't really come out here for this, man. You know, um, I could talk to my friends about it. And he was trying to kind of find a way to make the fact that he was in support of ICE make sense to himself. Uh, and he wanted us to kind of talk him through that basically, as two people of color standing outside the venue. He wanted us to uh, you know, help him fix that internal problem. But he was saying that basically, you know, sure, I didn't vote for this version of this, but I voted for this, you know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, sounds like a white guilt complex that really don't got nothing to do with Dave or nothing to do with child, but he had to unpack it and unload on y'all. A lot of people who taking art don't understand the cultural rev ramifications of black art. What we do is not just to be pretty pictures on the wall. Everything has a function. Everything is within practical use. Right. Right. So even when they steal from us, when you go to the museums, European museums, and you go to the African section, and they in the in the African art section, they got like bowls and spoons and shit like this. It's like even the sh everything we did that was practic practical was art. Right. And for someone to recognize that Dave is the goat, which is why you go to see him.
SPEAKER_00That's what he said. Exactly. I didn't say that part. He said he's the goat, but I didn't come to see this.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, like if you recognize that Dave's the goat, but you don't understand that he's the goat precisely because he's saying these things that he's saying, then you are a culture vulture. You are not deserving of that experience because you're not appreciating. I I see that all the time, especially with the Unstoppable Nigger Act, which is an amazing special. That's not just a special, that's like that's like a history lesson. That's like a blueprint on how to view the world. That's an incredible piece of work right there. And some people commented on it saying, of course, I gotta state my bias because Dave's the homie, but they commented on it saying that uh they didn't like the politics of it. And that is precisely what I liked about it.
SPEAKER_00When did we get to the point where people who are fans of David Chappelle didn't know that politics was a part of the platform?
SPEAKER_03I think the whole time. Think about the reason why Dave left the country. He left because people were misunderstanding the point behind those skits. To this day, and and with respect to the transgender community, because I try my best to be intersectional, right? And I try to give everybody space to have they grievances. Like I'm I'm a fan of comedy, but I'm also a human being and and I try to be an intersectional activist. So I just for me to speak on it, I gotta, I gotta weigh in with this part of it. Dave Chappelle has always done comedy that has leaned into generalizations. He always says the N-word, he always says the B word, he makes fun of black people as a whole, he makes fun of white people as a whole. And some might say because he's he's a privilege that when he makes fun of groups that he's not a part of or groups that are not marginalized like white people, that he's punching down. Um, yeah, I think that's a fair criticism, but then I think that that's not the type of comedy you should go see. Like, I don't have a problem with someone like, and it's me personally, I'm not speaking for everybody else. I don't have a problem with someone like Andrew Dice Clay, right? His comedy is obviously racist, right? But in the realm of comedy, I understand artistically what he's attempting to do. So I can understand that I can see the entertainment value in that, even if I'm not the audience that he's speaking for. I don't think that he should someone like Andrew Dice Clay or someone like that should be canceled, or someone who, you know, maybe says the N-word. Like there's comedians like uh, well, Louie did get canceled for something else, but he didn't get canceled for saying the N-word. You know what I'm saying? Like um Sarah Silverman has had has said and done questionable sketches and things like this. There's a lot of comedy out there that you would think, right? I'm speaking on this because people would assume because of my politics that I got a problem with that. But I respect the art of comedy the same way I respect the art of battle rap. Battle rap is not a politically correct situation, neither is comedy like roast battle. Correct, right? So I guess my question to you is do you see the obvious, well obvious, I'm standing. Do you see the parallels between like roast battle and battle rap? Uh or between like edgy comedy and or what they call edgy comedy and battle rap.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. Uh because in many cases, as a stage performer, you're gonna say or do what you gotta say or do to get over in front of that audience. In wrestling, they got this term called get over, where they'll send uh rookie wrestlers out and they'll Chino, is he right about this?
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I'm I study a lot of wrestling. We got a perf we got an amateur wrestler in my crew.
SPEAKER_03Hey, we we got one in our crew too, his name is Chino Chase. We need to do an episode about wrestling and about everyone's journey with wrestling.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that'll be dope. Yeah. So they got a term called get over, right? And a lot of times in hip hop, artists think they're getting over when they not, you know. And sometimes, depending on the geography, depending on the location, depending on the politics of the space, different punchlines work, different jokes work, different presentations work. You can't even wear certain stuff on stage in certain places if you hope to get over in front of certain audiences. So, I mean, I think there is a correlation.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, Teff, we started this podcast and I'm having a good time, but I realized doing it that I've done like 300 episodes of People's Party. And you was never a guest on People's Party.
SPEAKER_00No, I was not.
SPEAKER_03So I never really got to interview you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03You know, so my audience or people who follow me may or may not know key aspects of your story.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So I figured for this episode of let me ask you this, I would like to do the lost, never done before People's Party episode featuring Tef Poe. We're here. Let's do it, man. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready, bro. I got my notes. I did my research. I did it just like as people.
SPEAKER_00Quali is a researcher, man.
SPEAKER_03That's the part of it I like. I like being able to tap in and learn things about artists that I didn't know and get more familiar with people that I like and that I that I do know. Um, so yeah, man, this is gonna be fun.
SPEAKER_00Let's do it, man.
SPEAKER_03All right, so yeah, this is let me ask you this Tef Poe, a true soldier. This is a friend of mine. Tef Poe is a rapper. He is more than just a rapper, he's a musician, an activist. He's from St. Louis, Missouri. He was a key organizer and activist in the Ferguson Uprising. Rest in peace to Mike Brown. Yeah. He is focused on making sure that people lock in with local communities and do local activism rather than focus on the big corporations and things like this. As an activist, he's been able to travel all over the world from Switzerland to Palestine. He spoke at the United Nations. He has been with organizations like the Dream Defenders, Black Men Bill, Hands Up United. He's been very involved in not just activism on the ground. He took his talents and his skills to the academic level. He was a Nas Fellow, or it's the current, right? Nas Fellow. I like the current one. I was Nas Fellow, don't worry. Nas Fellow at Harvard University. You know what I'm saying? Shout out to Cornell West, who used to be a Harvard University. Tef Poe got music with Cornell West. He got music with me, with Big Crit, with Killer Mike, Dead Press. He got records that are classic, like Cheers for the Villain, Black Julian 2. He got the new crow life situation cracking. He got diss songs out about the mayor. Give it up to the homie, Dev Po.
SPEAKER_00I got all types of stuff going on, man. All type.
SPEAKER_03How you feeling?
SPEAKER_00I feel good, bro. Uh I'm here chilling with you in Minnesota, man. We grinding, you know, doing what we got to do to connect with the people. I feel like we kind of low-key running for office or something. You know what I mean? Like we campaigning. How many people we can touch, you know?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we tapping in. I like the fact that we tapped in with the right people, the people who are not about the respectability politics or the optics, but the people who are really about the work. And it's been a challenge for us to even get to those people. Can you break down that challenge?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the challenge is, I think me and you both realized a while ago that there's a bit of a gap between the sincere activist, organizer, political community, and the artist community. And some of us exist in both of those spaces. You know what I'm saying? But for the most part, there has long been um two different worlds running at the same time, and people who kind of jump in and out of both of those worlds. And we did some ideation and said, you know, let's go out here and see what we can do to bridge the gap, to touch the people, to really get in front of some of the indoctrination that's happening from the other side to see what we can do differently with the internet, besides argue with people on it and combat, you know, trolls. And we here to really have a different level of impact. So that's what we're doing, you know.
SPEAKER_03From the corner of shoot and run. We got an episode named of this. I love this phrase that you came up with. Yeah, it describes North County.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I actually took that from my partner Rockwell Knuckles. He always says that, like when people be like, Where y'all from? He'd be like, We from the corner of shoot and run. And uh Tell me about growing up there. Uh so um I'm really from all over St. Louis, which is uh what makes my story unique. But um specifically, my family migrates out of a area called Wellston into an area called Pine Lawn and Jennings, and then eventually we ended up in Dalewood. And you know, that's a neighboring community to what most people know is Ferguson and all that stuff. Um when we first moved to Delwood, it was a white adjacent community. It was a white, it wasn't like the the most peaceful place in the world, but it was a decent amount of white folks there.
SPEAKER_03Y'all reverse gentrified the neighborhood?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we reverse gentrified, man. And then I start seeing piece by piece, people start leaving the neighborhood, you know what I'm saying, and then it just got blacker. And uh so my family has been there for a long time at this point in the game. And um it's it's something for me now to be a grown man in it, you know what I'm saying? Because it's like I can contextualize different things about our culture out there differently than I could. But at some point I probably had a disdain for my own community, you know what I mean? And I think I think a lot of people not honest enough to say that because the world that I come from is so small, it's not like I could go outside and interact with a nigga from New York or go up the street and meet a shorty from Detroit. Like I'm really from the bellies of St. Louis County. You know what I'm saying? Like, this is a county of Missouri, my nigga. You know what I mean? Like we we we are at St. Louis's, we black, so we dress it up in a certain way. You know, we want our city to be comparable to the other major metropolises and so forth. But the real deal of it is I'm from the goddamn like river valley. You feel what I'm saying? I'm from the mud for real. You know what I'm saying? The valley of the Mississippi.
SPEAKER_03You got a lyric about that. I don't remember the song or the lyric exactly, but we talk about wanting to burn the city down, but also wanting to uplift the city. You know which lyric I'm talking about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can't remember which song it's from, but I know exactly what you're talking about because it sounds like something I said already.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man.
SPEAKER_03Um, knowing you and spending time with you, I hear you often use the term split families. Yeah. You talk about your upbringing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And there's a lot of people who have experienced this. What's your experience with split families and how did it affect you as a man?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm a I'm kind of adopted by uh a family called the Berries. You know what I'm saying? I'm not my uh father's biological child. You know what I'm saying? My mother started dating him when I was a very young person. And he was a man that came into my life, and his brothers and his his family embraced me like I was their child. You know what I'm saying? My father is a man, my biological father is he passed away in 2019, man named Frank Jackson. Um so I understand how you could be many different things to many different people through that, you know what I'm saying? Because the culture of the Jacksons ain't the culture of the berries, you know what I'm saying? And even within that, with with it being two men involved, they're gonna have two different leadership styles. They're gonna have two different uh religious preferences and um cultural ideas and so forth. So I grew up uh understanding how to be many people inside of one person. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Your brother is Black Spade. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You speak on it, but I feel like you have to remind people of this because y'all have kind of different musical paths, but y'all still do this music.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he got a song with one of your friends, uh, Rubik's. Rubics? Yeah, he got a track with Rubik's. Why is that hilarious? U shout out to Rubik's. Yeah, I didn't know that. I I didn't know that until like recently when uh somebody saw me out there kicking it in New York. They for some reason they was like, you know, but Spade got tracks with quality people. Uh I said, who?
SPEAKER_03He's like, tracks with Rubik's. Rubik's don't come outside and rap that often as often as people might want him to. So that's why I'm like, Rubik's? He heard doing features I don't know about?
SPEAKER_00No, I think it's an old track. Okay. But uh, Spade has been coming to New York, Detroit, all those major black musical cities for years. So I used to sit back and watch him travel. He'd been, he just got back from London not too long ago. He got this big ass band called Black Spade and the Cosmos. Uh I often stay up at night pondering what the fuck he's doing next. Because even though we both the same DNA, sometimes in my region, that's my only real competitor. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's the and it's funny because other rappers from where we're from probably think I'd be tripping off of them. I don't. I really be looking at my own brother. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03That's a blessing.
SPEAKER_00It's crazy. That's a blessing. He's so creatively beyond the beyond. Like, we got this track, I mean, this album together called uh Preacher in the Trap. For years, people have been like, man, why y'all don't do nothing together? And we have done stuff together here and there. He's on different records that I've dropped and stuff. He's always produced on my stuff here and there. Uh and I started out on his label as a young, young man. But then, you know, I always knew I was gonna have a different path to Spade because he was more closer to like a Yasseen, closer to a Adilla. Uh, while I'm influenced by that stuff, uh, you know, I'm my lock and key hip-hop is more like Scarface and uh Nas and Pac, you know what I'm saying? Throw some El Zai in there just for the sake of lyricism. And, you know, I was just something died.
SPEAKER_03Are you fronting on MC Hammer? I know MC Hammer was an early influence on you, man. I love Hammer though. No, I've seen that you listen media interview. Shout out to the to them dudes over there. I I I I like that interview a lot. Yeah, but you fucked me up when you said the MC Hammer shit. Man, come on, hammer, don't get enough credit. I agree with you. Listen, like I come from New York, right? And in New York, we did not fuck with MC Hammer, and so much so that he made a song about it. Go back and watch that video for Turn This Mother Out at the beginning. Hammer, you went hit in New York. Is that why he went and got with Death Rogue? I don't know, but that might be, we have to ask Hammer. But what I do know as a young fan is that there was like little beefs between Hammer and certain East Coast artists at the time. Like the him and run DMC. And me being a young dude, all I knew is like that's run DMC. So I didn't even have the understanding to know what whatever the problem with. I just knew that I was, if run DMC said fuck hammer, if third base said fuck hammer, it was fuck hammer. And so that's how I felt as a young man. And I remember as Diddy, no Diddy, but it was Diddy, who was the first person I heard be like, you know what? I respected MC Hammer because he was a businessman. He did this for his people. And I'm like, and when I heard Diddy say that, I was a little older. And I was like, you know what? I need to revisit how I feel about Hammer.
SPEAKER_00So let me tell you this. What the world don't know. And Hammer know this. If you ask Hammer, Hammer, say this. Man, you know how many St. Louis niggas Hammer fed in his prime?
SPEAKER_03Man.
SPEAKER_00Like St. Louis and Hammer got a special relationship. Like, he came through there and got guys and put them on the road, and you know, they fed their kids off of Hammer's sweat equity. And um I don't know if he did that in every city he went through, but he came through our town and got a couple dancers and changed their lives. So I'm at the crib as a shorty watching these dudes that's from the crib on stage dancing with him. This must have my first examples of people getting out the ghetto. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And uh that's he didn't have to do that. He could have got those people from anywhere in the world. So uh I remember me and him at Exchange Online one time, and he was like, Man, we I got a special relationship with your town. I've been fucking with St. Louis for a while, you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I met Hammer online as well. I met him on Twitter, and when I came to Oakland, he came to a Black Star show, and then he took me and Yassine out to get some fish.
SPEAKER_01That's crazy.
SPEAKER_03And then we went to his studio and we recorded a Black Star song at Hammer Studio in Oakland. So shout out to MC Hammer because that's a full circle moment for me because I came from a young, ignorant fan. And I want to uh segue from that story into this, right? New York, I know for a fact, if anyone tells you that New York wasn't elitist, they lied to you. Because I know for a fact how New York looked at any other music that was it wasn't from New York. How hard was it for you breaking in as uh into this hip-hop industry as an artist from outside of New York with how elitist New York is?
SPEAKER_00Oh my god, my nigga, almost impossible. Almost impossible. Like, you damn near gotta be willing to die to do to do what I've done. Um and I look at other people who think that they may be ready to step into the gauntlet of accomplishing that. And nowadays you don't gotta go through as much as what we went through. I will say that the internet moves a little faster. There's a little bit more connectivity. In the preliminary stages of my career, we literally had to start with saying, Yeah, there's a hip-hop scene that does exist. But is it really a modernized hip-hop scene? Because we so far behind. Niggas might be rapping like niggas was rapping in New York 15 years ago. But that flow brand new out here. And then you got me somebody like me who's just downloading constant hip-hop, listening to hip-hop, and you know, I'm in the I'm in the millennial bracket. So we move, we we grabbing a little bit of this, that, this, that, this, that. And I'm taking this piece, I'm going, okay, okay, that's how the niggas rock that. Okay, cool. That's how the Wu Tain niggas do that. Okay, cool. And then I'm taking the West Coast shit and I'm taking the down south shit and I'm putting it in a pot and trying to figure out what the hell is the alchemy to getting up out of Missouri. You know what I'm saying? And different people do that differently where we're from, you know. So, like, uh, you know, the ticks come out of St. Louis, Chingy come out of St. Louis, but these were acts that where we was from, they was local for a while. You know what I'm saying? They weren't like brand new acts to us by the time they were brand new to the world. So I knew that it was gonna take a little bit of work to get there.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Shout out to Nico Is. One day I heard him talking about rapping in chat rooms and rapping online and message boards, and that sounded so foreign to me. It sounded so crazy. And you've told me that people have recognized you from seeing you in the chat room. That's so nuts to me because for me, there was an incubation period where you had to go out to the park or you had to go to certain places. The idea that you could rap battle or even make a name for yourself online uh in a chat room, man, it's kind of like breaking my brain.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man. Think about this. When we first start rapping in these chat rooms and rapping on these message boards and stuff like that, um people have no concept of what we're doing on the internet because they don't even realize all the different things you could do on the internet yet. So I remember it being incredibly difficult to send somebody an email with a picture in it. Let alone, excuse me, let alone make a whole song on the internet, edit it, mix it, upload it, you know, have a place to store it for people to hear it. You know, it it was a lot. So folks would use those chat rooms to kind of get their issue off real quick. Like, you know, they could play the beat in the background. It was supposed to be voice chat where you could be talking and having conversations, but you know, niggas gonna modify anything. Yeah, so they start playing the music in the background and rapping, and you would have entire rap tournaments on that joint, man.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Somebody who did a video for you recently. I know him from that world. I don't know him as a video editor, right? Uh Nimi Hendrix. Nimi Hendrix, shout out to Nimi Hendrix. I know him as Nimrod from back in the day, who used to be in them battle rooms online. You just blew him up. Wait till I speak to Nimi Hendrix. But he was a nice MC.
SPEAKER_03He was a he didn't he didn't tell me none of that.
SPEAKER_00I mean, he he's not my whole video. He hasn't been that in a while. Okay, but that's who I knew him to be back then and to see him take that same. He was always ultra creative then. Like he was back then, he was one of the most creative niggas.
SPEAKER_03Man, I need God to love me like God love hitmaker. Because that guy gets a lot of second chances. All you gotta do is change your name. You go from Nimrod to Nimi Hendrix, you got a whole new career. I love it, man.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he did, he's been uh Nimi Hendrix for a while, though. I I think the Nimrod thing might have just been a short-lived thing and you kind of just had to be there to see it, type type shit. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03Okay. So when you first started rapping, well, first, before I get into this question, break down for me what is Foot Clan and who represents Foot Clan.
SPEAKER_00Well, Foot Clan is old now, it's defunct, but it was a moment in time where uh that was we built a movement based on putting in the work.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh so in the Foot Clan era of my career, we uh terrorized St. Louis with marketing and promotion. Okay. Uh we went so hard we had the cops looking for us uh in various incidents. We didn't give a damn. We would roll up uh the people outside the club waiting. We we took these tactics directly from the New York niggas. We was the first people to bring litter flyers to St. Louis where we don't care where the flyer lands, we just gonna throw it, throw it out the window.
SPEAKER_03That's crazy you say from New York niggas, because that's a that's something you and me have in common. A lot of things we have in common are uh growing up with vinyl in the crib, we have in common mothers being in the education field and starting our career with flyers. I started my career handing out flyers for Jessica Rosenblum and Funkmaster Flex and people like this. So yeah, we we started.
SPEAKER_00We learned those tactics from people out east who were coming to our way to promote records for Depth Jam, promote records for Interscope, different companies, you know what I'm saying? Most at that time, we the Depth Jam promotion team in St. Louis was one of the most shiniest. They had their shit together. Uh, but I came in to the promo game under the under the shroud of a brother named Fenster, who was also an MC. One of his co-partners was a uh brother named Solo, who's you know, deceased now, unalive now, rest in peace. But he gave a lot of us a chance to learn a lot about the business. And I was just a shorty run around with these guys hanging up posters and sniping buildings. And I was just outside, you know what I'm saying? I took it seriously because it was my my first opportunity to touch product. I'm holding the uh promotional materials from my favorite rappers in my hands. So I'm looking at this on some karate kid shit. Like one day I'm using these same tactics to build my own company, you know. Yeah. So that's what Foot Clan was. We uh St. Louis has a lot of vacant buildings. And I just saw that as real estate for posters. Uh sometimes, you know, we'll put them up, they'll come rip our stuff right back down, you know. Uh there'd be other times where I get hit up by DJs, be like, yo, y'all gotta chill. Y'all wildin', y'all done put this shit on the blah, blah, blah. I remember one time 50 Cent was staying at the uh, it was a very expensive hotel, the Ritz. He was staying at the Ritz in Clayton, and they called, my man Fence called me, said, Yo, I need you to bomb this joint with uh Phipp's uh promo materials. It was one of the times where he had trusted me enough to start going out by myself. And I said, Oh yeah, y'all got 50 Cent coming, nigga. I went crazy, right? He uh he called me, he was like, Yo, you did you did too much.
SPEAKER_03He was like, I mean, what you I did what you asked me to do.
SPEAKER_00He was like, I didn't know you was gonna do all that. He said, I got their manager on the phone being like, son, he blazing up the spot. You know what I'm saying? I was like, my bad, you know, you told me make sure they see it. You know how I get down, you know. So that was my style. Like, if if we went out in them streets, you was gonna see our stuff. And sure, I believed in my rapping ability, but also what I believe in more than my rapping ability is my ability to not be outworked by nobody.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So Foot Clan went from St. Louis, East St. Louis to Southern Illinois, and I think we were the first crew in that area that extended across the river. So we started to even pick up like white MCs, and that became controversial because people would be like, hot tef talking all this stuff, but rolling with a few white boys, you know what I'm saying? So, but that's a whole nother story because I have always had a different analysis that this didn't stop with race. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03Oh, absolutely. I mean, hip-hop is a universal language, hip-hop is a great equalizer. The ethos of hip-hop is you are not here because of race, you are here because of your skills and because you participate in it. Hip-hop absolutely is started by black and brown people. Absolutely, and that needs to be respected and spoken on. And white people or people who are not black, or brown from the culture, who come into the culture, have to come in with a reverence for that. Let's not get it twisted. But hip-hop is a unifier of people, people, not a divider of people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, bro. So that was a moment in time in my life when I was a younger man. I was on a war path, you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03So yeah, around that time, you come out with this record that I really like. Cheers for the villain.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Shout out DJ Burn one.
SPEAKER_03Shout out DJ Burn one, shout out DJ Track Star. This record is unique because it's like a play or like an opera. You telling a story from front to back. Rest in peace, Little Greg is part of the centerpiece of the story. Um, tell me what inspired you to do that.
SPEAKER_00Uh the truth is initially, I don't even know if I wanted to really make Chip for the Villain. Because I really wanted to make um, you know, some regular music like everybody else was making. Something that was less heavy, something that was a little bit more spirited. But um I was coming from a position where I was getting a lot of attention coming out of 106 in Park, being a Freestyle Friday champ. Uh, and I had a big mixtape called War Machine 2 that was just everywhere in the streets, like my first real just disastrously everywhere tape.
SPEAKER_03War Machine 1 and 2 was the first time I really heard you as a rapper. Like War Machine 1 and 2 and like made at Malcolm X joint. I remember you came out and performed the Malcolm X Joint.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03At what was we at in at the Middle East? I think we was at. That shit was crazy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. That was all um, all that music was made around the same time. Okay. I've always tried to make music that uh talks about how I really feel about the world, but also sounds like the shit I listen to. You know what I'm saying? So I came up listening to Master P and Black Star in the same setting. I came up listening to uh stuff like Megahertz and Copyright, but then also listening to Tila and Swab House, do or Die. Uh, you know, I listened to the Crucial Conflict album and then listen to Wu-Tang album. So if you listen to my music, that's basically what you're hearing. You hearing uh the gump, that that factor. You're hearing the dude who thought at some point Inspect the Deck was like inconceivably cold, but at the same time, I was listening to Brother Lynch for some reason. So uh Cheer for the Villain is me not having a lot of self-mastery over that, but working with one of the best producers uh out the South and his production company, Burn One in the Bakery. And what they did for me with that album was they took my crazy ass concept of being taking my cousins last night alive uh in a high speed from the police, which St. Louis is the high speed capital of America. So much that we don't even got drill music in St. Louis. Y'all got drilled, we got high-speed music.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Where the kids put it in the car and drive as fast as they can fleeing from the police. You know what I'm saying? You steal a you steal a car, uh you get in that bitch, you go and you just drive that thing as reckless as you can to as loud as music you can play, and it is what it is. You give a damn if you live or die. You know what I'm saying? Um, so I'm in a I'm making music in a place where that type of mayhem exists, and I gotta make it all make sense while not sounding like I'm trying to be too self-righteous about it. So uh Cheer for the Villain was me just entering into a world where it was gonna be like, how do I start to have some conceptual precision around what I'm doing and not sound so ADHD driven? You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03As you was describing that high-speed music, I was seeing a pitch for a film and I would pitch it like new New Jersey Drive. I would pitch it like New Jersey Drive meets Fast and Furious.
SPEAKER_00Perfect. Perfect, perfect. So yeah, I got a project coming out with my homie uh Sean Ferrari. He probably like, nigga, I gave you those beats ages ago. Why you ain't put that shit out yet? But um for me it's kind of revisiting a little bit of what me and DJ Burn One did, but uh maybe evolving it, you know. And I would love to work with Burn One again, too. You know, that's one of the best. Real good dude, real good brother.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, man, shout out to Burn One.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so uh that that Southern Bounce type of shit is always an aesthetic in my shit, even though I might be trying to write rap like Ferrell Munch, you know.
SPEAKER_03You mentioned 106 in Park. You were a freestyle frighter's champion of 106 and park. For people who know that is a very prestigious title. How did you even get involved in that?
SPEAKER_00My Cody, my my boy Jay Stretch, he was my manager, my business partner, pretty much be involved in everything that I do even to this day to some extent. Um he came to me, and I gotta give him a lot of a lot of the initial credit for uh turning me into something that the rest of the world could digest. Because I was doing everything humanly possible to make sure that that never happened. And it was a lot of his wisdom and his guidance that said, no, we're gonna do this. I can't tell you not to say that, but if you are gonna say it, we can at least do this behind it. And so he came to me and said, uh I want you to consider auditioning for 106 in part. Uh and the thing that makes this situation unique is they reached out to us. I didn't have to go hunting this down. I think you should consider doing it. And I said, Nah, man, you know, I was so removed from battling and ciphering people and all that shit. And he said, Well, you tell me how you're gonna get on TV in front of six million people an episode. And if you got an answer that's better than this one, come talk to me. So it's real talk. So I laid down in bed at night and I thought about it, and I said, damn, this nigga right. You know what I mean? So from there, I'm a strategist. I don't like going into nothing with a clear pathway up uh or an assumption of how I'm gonna get out of it. So I I kind of just started to change the way I was living a little bit and put my mind back into the mode of having to be on TV and battling people, you know. And that's a whole thing that isn't really a fun thing to endure.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that sounds like a lot. You don't know what you face. Yeah, it sounds like some science.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But you have a strong connection with battle rap. You tell me about battle rap all the time, and it's like that. The 106 Apart thing is just a chamber of battle rap, right? Yeah, yeah. So what do you think causes your deep connection with battle rap?
SPEAKER_00Well, coming out of St. Louis, we feel as if we have a rap deficit to feel. Uh we feel like we want them cities where everybody got their chance to have their super MCs except us.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00You know what I'm saying? Um, and that's no shade or disrespect anybody that's already came out. But um you'd be lying if you say if you come from St. Louis and you say that's not a factor of w what has stimulated so many of us to rap is that uh for a while everybody wanted to take their crack XC and if they could be some version of the lyricist Messiah out there. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so it became a very, very competitive rap market to the point where some of the best battle rappers in the world come out of St. Louis because everybody was battling. It wasn't no point as points of unity. Cruz wasn't saying, like, hey, how about you take your best rapper and our best rapper? We pair up and see if it really creates some type of wave in the region and pushes up all up out of there. Now that wasn't a mantra, you know, like it was uh a lot of people in a small pond pulling out knives and daggers to go at each other and see what could happen from there. And so in the midst of that, it trains a lot of us to be straight up killing machines. Because you trapped in the box with the same, you fighting the same niggas over and over. Certain people I had to battle hundreds of fucking times for no reason. Just just because they were there, I was there. And there was some aggression against that we were both holding the line against, you know what I'm saying? And so that's where my initial affinity for it comes from is uh I wanted to be respected as a real rapper, and it was a quick way for me to prove that to people, you know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, man. Now you and I, we don't meet in rap circles. Well, you said we met, you said you booked a show for me before.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I did. And to tell you how real, I'm gonna tell you this. You didn't even know me from Adam back then, okay, but we knew you was a real nigga even back then because you gave us a play on the show.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00You know what I'm saying? And I think it might have been around the time you had the situation going with the Nazi shit or some shit or something.
SPEAKER_03That's the whole time I've been on the internet.
SPEAKER_00So this has to be in the internet era, but that's the whole time. So you was like, you know, you was talking, you was talking to my man stretch, and he was like, Yeah, man, you know, normally it's this, but I'm feeling y'all's energy, you know what I'm saying? Y'all handling business, I'll do it for this. And I was fresh off 106 in park. We did it at the spot called the old rock house. It sold out. Lines was wrapped around the building. Uh, it was a good show. That show, even before you knew me like that, that show had did a lot for my momentum. Because they was like, how this nigga on 106 and bringing Quali to St. Louis. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, that was a real big moment. That show opened up a snowball effect of shows for me because then people in the region and people in the market was like, if he performing with on the same stage as this dude and it's selling out, we gotta start putting him on bigger bills. So I started rocking. I did shows with Trinidad James after that. I did, I did everything. You know, if there was, if you name it and they they had a name, I was on stage in the same arena as him at some time, from small venues to stadiums at St. Louis.
SPEAKER_03Now I'm glad we did business back then, but we didn't really connect until the Ferguson Uprising. Rest in peace to Michael Brown one more time. I met you and Tori Russell at the same time. I was with Rosa Clemente, my man Seth Bird, uh, Jessica Care Moore. We talked about this on the podcast, how I came down there. I was inspired by J. Cole to come to Ferguson. And you were one of the first people I met on the ground. You took us around, you introduced us to the people that we needed to know, much like you're doing now in Minneapolis. It's kind of dope that we're having this conversation in this full circle moment in another ground zero location like Minneapolis. But what led you to be so involved in the Ferguson Uprising?
SPEAKER_00So I'm literally from the area where it happened. You know, I still live there. You know, and that's against the advice of a lot of people. A lot of people say I'm crazy for still staying in the actual neighborhood. Um I feel the vibration of the people differently. I'm able to talk a little less pretentiously. Uh I I get checked when I say stuff that people don't respect or people ain't feeling or people ain't understanding. Um I'm I'm still uh infected with the reality of a working class poor person's situation. So um everything about me is representative of that, you know what I'm saying? And so I get involved in this situation because I was already involved. I didn't involve myself, you know. Um they've been killing us for millennia. And unfortunately, at that time, it wasn't new that the police would kill somebody, uh, a black male um who was innocent and minding his own business. It wasn't new that they would do that. Uh I've had cousins killed by the police. I've had friends killed by the police. I've been ran down by the on by that same police squad that killed Michael Brown myself as a young man, leaving the studio late at night, catching the bus back home from downtown, knowing that I gotta walk to my parents' crib, knowing that I'm gonna encounter a cop just like he did. And true story, I'm a bit more of a asshole. So I remember one incident vividly where I'm walking home and the cops uh rushes past me on West Florence and loops back, cuts me off, shines the light in my face. I'm so ignorant, I raised my hands kind of like to mock him, like, hey man, don't fucking shoot me, you dumbass. You know what I'm saying? But he thought I was really like submitting to the will of his authority, you know what I mean? Yeah, and yeah, so you have to deal with this, that, and I gotta tell motherfuckers that St. Louis is an intense gang environment. Like imagine Chicago gangs, LA gangs, you know what I mean, with niggas who cousins is from Memphis. You know what I'm saying? Like everybody got cousin and Mint from Memphis out there. So you imagine this, you know.
SPEAKER_03I keep hearing DJ Quick's song in my head. St. Louis.
SPEAKER_00You don't even want to know. Just like Comp. You don't even want to know what that song did to St. Louis. You don't even want to know, man. Rest in peace, Gus, the man he met. That's a whole nother story. But I was out there because that's just culturally where I'm really from, man. And the situation had magnetized me to be there because it was my actual childhood neighborhood. It was a neighborhood. It was, I had been through the same things. I had seen the same things. I encountered the same type of racist ass white boys. And in my mind, I always wanted something to be done about it when it happened to me. So I was an able-bodied person who could be there. At first I was just curious, though. I will say that.
SPEAKER_03You brought up the gangs, and in your music and in your politic, you always make sure that we are inclusive of everyone in the community. And you push the idea that we don't need these respectability politics to be respected just because we might have flaws or just because you might not understand why somebody might participate in a gang or participate in something that the system is deemed criminal doesn't mean that we need to leave these people out in the cold. We need to bring everybody in together. And I appreciate that about you. Where do you think that comes from?
SPEAKER_00When you really are the proletariat class, what else is there? You know? I don't come from this world where we could pick and choose who we get drafted by. You know, you get drafted, you gotta play for who put you on the floor. And in my lifetime, that's the team that I've had to predominantly play for is the black team, the poor team, and uh the team that is the closest to the people who ain't got shit. So that could be the white boys in the trailer park, or it could be the niggas in the JBL. You know what I'm saying? Either way it goes, I'm typically around and with and of the yoke of the niggas who don't got shit and want to know why they ain't got shit. Like they not just happy with the notion that they supposed to be subjugated. Uh, I would have been in the bellies of the ship with the niggas who was like, bruh, how the fuck are we gonna get up out of here? Like, as long as you and my friends know this about me, as long as I'm on the floor, the floor, we got a fighting fucking chance. Yeah. Because I'm never giving up. You know what I'm saying? Um, I don't roll over and uh just let depression soak into my bones and tell me that things are impossible, or I don't look at the white man as if he can't be beat, or as if white supremacy is unbeatable, or I just don't, you know. So, because if if that's the case, I might as well go ahead and just blow my own brains out right now. You know what I mean? It's powerful.
SPEAKER_03You definitely put your money where your mouth is, and you don't just talk about it, you be about it. You don't just talk about what people should do. You try to create action, you try to, you've tried to fundraise, you've tried to build organization, you've you've joined organizations, you've created organizations. Some people feel like I don't ever want to be an organization. Some people feel like we need organizations for everything. What are the pros and cons of organization building?
SPEAKER_00Man, um in the United States, that's a layered question because a lot of times um personal things go into building organizations. And I've learned in other countries, you go to places like Brazil, South Africa, uh the political line is so thick that it almost makes like personal stuff impossible to destroy it. And there's a different type of clarity around the purpose of the organization with those types of political lines drawn in the sand. So I try to create my containers to be the same thing because I know I'm not perfect and I know I'm organizing imperfect people. So a lot of times I think there's too much of a focus on trying to make sure uh everybody is of some form of the same ideology. Um and I say you look at white folks and the recent uptick in Nazism, and anytime there's an uptick in Nazism and white supremacy, you see a few things, common traits, and they will instantaneously deputize other white people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00They're not standing at the door going, I don't think you are a real Polish person. I don't think you're really from Sweden. I don't really think you really are European descent. I don't think you really are a super whatever. They just know you want to be a Nazi nigga, you a Nazi. You know what I'm saying? So they're able to scale up capacity so quicker than us because um they're preparing for a different style of fight than we are, and they're giving their membership a different style of opportunity. So what I've tried to do is do that for black men in different cases. Uh bruh, I don't care if niggas is Crips, I don't care if niggas is bloods, I don't care if niggas is GDs, I don't care if niggas is Moes, I don't care if niggas is ox, I don't care if niggas is Hebrews, you know what I'm saying? I don't care if niggas is whatever you bang in, claim it, I don't care. Um, I respect it. And I think that my ability to show respect for the different um sects and organizations that people emerge out of, and my ability to have an understanding that um in some cases were not effective because if a brother is uh uh a member of the Rolling 60s, where I'm from, I use this as an example. I'm gonna come to him and say, hey, I want you to join this group called uh 50 Black Men, we'll call it that. And I want you to join us and get indoctrinated with us and start repping us and throwing down on our symbolism and our language and all that. Bruh, he's already in an organization, right? And this organization is so critical to his identity, he ain't released himself from that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So you coming to him, how we gonna have rolling 60, 50 black men? Sometimes you gotta be cool with letting niggas cook with who they already are. And within that, I'm able to go to those organizations, because that's still an organization that that man comes from that he ain't relinquishing himself from. I'm able to go to them through the fact that I do respect the fact that they exist and got their own uh way of standing up how they do exist to people. Without me disrespecting that, I'm able to say, hey, where can we work together? What part of what y'all on makes sense for what I'm on? And outside of the work, where I'm where I live at, I'm growing up with people that's bloods, people that's Crips, people that's Muslims, people that that's Christians, and you know, all of this is on top of each other as is. So for me to kind of take the time to parse out all of that shit and pick who is the best Christian and who is the best this and who is the best kappa and that best alpha? I'm wasting my damn time. You know what I mean? I'm trying to put people into motion around things that are killing us versus uh untangling their beliefs, you know what I mean? Like, I ain't really here for that part of it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I hear you. How is it for you spiritually, mentally, to transfer from being someone who was more local and more focused on things that happen in America, as you have black men in America, to now your activism leads you to a place like Gaza, excuse me, place like Palestine. You didn't go to Gaza, but you went to Palestine. And it's important for black men to travel. It's important for black men in America to have a passport. You got to go to Palestine based on your activism. That's a hell of a journey. My question for you is how did your trip to Palestine change you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it changed me dramatically, honestly, because I think that was the first person I ever went overseas.
SPEAKER_03That was your first time.
SPEAKER_00I think so.
SPEAKER_03So the first time out of the country was Palestine.
SPEAKER_00I believe so, yeah. That's crazy. That's a thing in the perspective. It was either Palestine or London. And I but I think it was Palestine. Um first of all, it changed me because I realized we being lied to about everything.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And it's hard to unsee it once you see it. You know, those those roadblocks that they put up in the hood to make the traffic flow one way, those cameras on the corner, the shot spotters, the surveillance, the idea that we would be comfortable living uh on top of and next door to the National Security Agency just because we live in the ghetto, you know, that's the real. And to me, that's what makes somebody like me dangerous. Because optically, I look like one thing. Sonically, I probably sound like another the same thing you think I look like. But but verbally and intentionally, I'm far from that. And at this age, I have made a commitment to tell the truth to people as much as I can. And I'm not a rich man monetarily, but I'm hella wealthy with the truth. And, you know, my social capital with the truth don't necessarily run out. So when I went to Palestine, uh I saw a lot of things that I want to touch on for real, that I never really get to touch on. Um I saw a burial of the fact that this was actually some form of African land as well. Uh I saw a disconnect from um the fact that Islam and Christianity are both religions that come out of and Judaism, or all of them are religions that come out of uh some type of an African birthright. And when you go into this land and you see you in Bethlehem, and you in Jerusalem, and you in Nazareth, and it just becomes clear that somebody not telling us the whole story. And the the pieces don't start adding up in ways that a critical thinker is gonna go, some may making right making sense. So if we use the Bible, we use the Quran, Torah, all these things, stories are similar because history don't change if this is the truth. And the the man Jesus went as a child from Palestine to Egypt. His family hid out in Egypt. I also went to Egypt. And I'm like something going on here because this is an African country as well. And how are they looking for a brother in an African country? How are they looking for a brother in an African country that's supposed to be looking like he from Switzerland? Yeah. And then I start to analyze my place in the world differently, like, damn, I'm not seeing any of this correctly. I'm not seeing any of this correctly at all. You know, um, it's almost like I'm living in one big J. Electronica verse now.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. That sounds like a J. Electronica song, which you just broke down. I can see him like, yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00You know, but yeah, the political suppression of those people over there, too. So the religious stuff and the denial of blackness and black activity in the region is one thing that really bothered me. But also uh the political persecution of uh the Palestinian people over there, man. Uh the genocide of those folks. Um and then, you know, when we came back to the States, folks were saying, well, y'all wrong for comparing the two struggles, what's going on in black America, with what's going on in Palestine, what they got to do with them, what they got to do with this. Uh the truth is the colonial tactics don't change from environment to environment. The white man is not a creative genius. Uh, they're just doing the same shit from face to face, from moment to moment. And we sort of give them this credit, it's geniuses. Uh, we give them this agency around violence as if they reinvented the mold. But the truth is, it's the same shit over and over. You're trying to figure out how to kill a mass amount of people as quickly as possible.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_00And um right now, as we stand, even though a lot of people are talking about it, it's very few people who really want to tell the full truth about it. That's indeed.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for sharing that part of your journey. I've had a good time with this. I want to talk before we finish a little bit more about the music. Black Julian, Black Julian 2, these projects kind of brought you back to the music world because I feel like you put music on the back burner and put the activism first for a while. Is that accurate to say?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I didn't really mean to, to be honest. Um, I knew that I wanted to kind of divest a little bit when I did get so invested in Ferguson. But I didn't know that I wanted to completely pull back from hip hop in a sense, because that's what I had done for so long. And it's really the only thing I really knew how to do. Uh, like rap became my trade. You know what I mean? Like I studied how to become a good MC, not just for the sake of vanity, but so I could actually eat off the culture, so I could have a job. And that was something I had to practice years upon years of becoming. I just didn't become a real performing, a good rapper overnight, a good MC overnight. And I had honestly reached the point where I was starting to get some light recognition for that, but I didn't know what to do with it while still being in the streets doing so much stuff in the community surrounding so many different explosive incidents. And I was kind of crucified differently than other rappers in a sense, because I ain't necessarily never had a national hit record, right? So people will have a little bit more mercy on you when they have a certain level of nostalgia with your music, certain level of connectivity with you. Uh I I have that maybe regionally, but I don't necessarily, I'm, you know, I've never been on the billboard charts. You feel what I'm saying? I'm a for real, for real underground MC. So um with that being said, the fight was different because I started to discover people don't really get that much of a damn about rap like that. And I have been standing my whole identity on being a lyricist who also was in the community. And I discovered that um, sure, they cared, but they didn't care in the way that I thought they cared. So I could either let that do to me what I see it's doing to a lot of people who came after me, quite frankly. I look at a lot of uh my contemporaries or younger MCs who looked at me as some form of a blueprint, and a lot of my steps that I took, they try to take or are currently taking. And that's the part that if I could yell back down the hallway, I would try to help them through that part because um I didn't live in a world completely where people didn't judge me for trying to be a rapper and an organizer or an activist. And I had been involved in organizing since I was a kid too. So for me, the two were always one world. So I never saw the need to kind of split them. But um when I made the Black Julian first project, uh I was still a little angry. So it had a lot of angry ass records on there, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_03You ever see a Bentley with a bullet hole? That's my shit.
SPEAKER_00Uh so by the time I get to two, I'm like, we gotta get back to making more anthemic records just so we can be on stage, you know what I'm saying? And that's where I get into the Bentley with the bullet holes and all of those, you know what I'm saying? Bullet, which became one of my biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest tracks. And again, I'm gonna say it on camera so he don't say that I never said it. J Stretch, I sent him bullet and he was like, nigga, this is it. And I said, What? Like, I just wrote this shit on the plane. Like, I ain't even think taking this shit seriously. He was like, You maniac, this is it. Man, that song had been on so much stuff, video games and shit. I couldn't even conceive how far that record is went. It's a blessing. Yeah, man.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, Cornell West, Dr. West, that's the homie, he's a family friend on that record.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the whole album.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, he's narrating the album.
SPEAKER_01Crazy.
SPEAKER_03Uh Cornel West used to be at Harvard.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And then you ended up at Harvard.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03How does one become a Nas fellow at Harvard University? Break that down.
SPEAKER_00Well, I was already the American Democracy Fellow the year before at the Charles Warren Center, thanks to a uh historian Walter Johnson. Uh, he wrote this really amazing book uh called The The Broken Heartbeat of America, talking about the history of St. Louis. It's becoming like a cult classic, like a like a St. Louis version of Behold the Pale Horse type.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh, but I lived with him for many years, not many years, but now I have been in and out of his house for many years because we're friends. But at the time, uh, I stayed with him while I was out there. And um, I was collecting a lot of momentum, and he said, I'm pretty sure you might be able to pursue the uh Nazir Jones fellowship if you wanted to, you know. And the way a lot of these fellowships and things work is I believe they don't have an assumption of who they want to pick, but it's just like kind of like the rap game. Like, you gotta work your moxie to become hot enough for your name to have a certain style of relevancy when it is time to select you to be the fellow. So, like if you're just a nobody applying, you might get it. But if you're doing the work to make sure that, okay, I'm writing articles, I'm in publications, I'm putting my opinions out there, I'm standing myself up as a public intellectual in a way where it's gonna be a little hard to deny, you got a better chance of getting it. So in my case at that time, it was really no hip-hop intellectual kind of doing what I was doing. Um I I was a part of organizing uh a books and breakfast program with my comrades back in St. Louis. That was a great program. And that spread like wildfire. And we had chapters all over the country, then the chapters all over the world. Um and I was just in a in a we was in a a different type of uh a different type of magic was manifesting with what we were organizing at that time. It wasn't always perfect, but it was connecting. And I think you took take that piece, when I'm doing with the music at that time, it just created a good trifecta for me to have a to be the person that received that fellowship. So that's really what happened. Uh Professor Marcy, rest in peace to her soul. She was the person who um ran the archive when I was there, and I learned a lot from her as well. She did a lot of work with Project Blow.
SPEAKER_03Okay. Well, now you out here, and instead of battling rappers, you battling the mayor.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So can you break down what's going on? Because you got records dissing Wesley Bell, dissing Kara Spencer. Oh man.
SPEAKER_00Talib Kali.
SPEAKER_03Tell them who these people are.
SPEAKER_00Talib Kwali's podcast ability.
SPEAKER_03And break it down. Um, I think that's hilarious that you dissing politicians rather than rappers. I think that that's like a nick positive.
SPEAKER_00So I'm kind of known for doing that too. So uh, real talk, rappers diss me, I probably won't even respond sometimes because I don't really get dissed by rappers. I be like feeling. And like this nigga can fuck with me for real. You're like, half the time if you dissing me and you throw a shot, like if you ain't like a quality or a killer mic or a black thought, like these the niggas I look up to. So I don't even be tripping off of no uh you know struggling underground rapper trying to get his Instagram momentum going. But I say that to say uh that leads to why I focus on politicians. Because for one, if you're gonna have an op, it might as well be a real op. Ah heard. You feel me? Heard. That's a bar. Like a lot of times people pick distant rappers because you don't really want no smoke. You know what I'm saying? Y'all want to word wrestle and you know let it fall where it falls and you know, throw machismo around with each other and you know, do the IG lives and all of that. I want a different type of op for myself personally. You know what I'm saying? If I'm gonna have opposition, at least let it be real. So um, when I was a kid, I used to listen to the ice cubes and the Tupac's. Even Nas, man, you know, he don't get a lot of credit for it, but uh he used to confront the social norms of the day, a lot of his music.
SPEAKER_03Nah, Nas still do, and Nas only did that more as he got older. Nas fits squarely in the conscious MC bag. Like he's does not, let's not get it fucked up. Nas has street streams and Uchi Wally and all that. He has gangster music. He has music where he's trying to get in the club and all that. Most of us do. But Nas output absolutely puts him in the conscious rap category. It's not even, to me, that's not a debate.
SPEAKER_00So with that being said, that's kind of where it comes from for for me. Um I'm a student of those guys, and it's like I I learned coming out of Ferguson that if I said the right thing at the right time, I could freeze the whole city.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like if I said the right thing at the right moment, people are like, why you say that? So with that being said, for me, that's that's something I learned from like studying the New York rappers. Like, just because I'm not as big as a Jay-Z, don't mean in my own mind, I'm not learning from them about aura. So when I go at the mayor or when I go at uh Wesley Bell and these niggas, and I'm trying to figure out how to get everybody to listen at the same exact time, that's what I'm doing. I'm summoning them niggas that I grew up listening to who say this is how you send a heat-seek precision missile using the tactics of hip-hop to get your message out at this exact moment. So um that's to give people context on why I use the music as a weapon.
SPEAKER_03Um it's a nonviolent form of protest.
SPEAKER_00It's the most nonviolent I could do. It's the most nonviolent I could do, bro. And so I got involved in a discourse with uh our current mayor in St. Louis, where um she used to be a person who hung out with folks in the movement, and she kind of used the Black Lives Matter movement to gain a certain type of political momentum for herself. And she is now kind of completely partnered with the white, moderate, and Republican sector uh to do something to us that they've been wanting to do a very long time, which is displace and remove people from certain areas in St. Louis City in order to re-whiten the city. They want white folks to come back to the city. And they've always had what I call a nigga problem. And she presented herself as a person who could fix the nigga problem. And my problem is white people don't know what to do when they they when black people have our own glitches in the matrix. So for black people in my world, I'm a glitch in the fucking matrix. Like these the rest of these niggas might look like me, talk like me, walk like me, but they don't know what's going on. You know what I'm saying? They dumb, deaf, and blind. Not me, short there. So I'm gonna do my part to sound the trumpet and tell niggas, hey, you might want to watch out. They come in the bulldoze your grandmama house. You might want to watch out, y'all really don't own that land. You might want to watch out, they plotting on you. That's all I'm responsible for doing as a musician. Now, after that, it's your job to listen. It's your job to take it serious. It's your job to actually apply the maturity to say, hey, is something really going on? Something can be done about a dog trying to give me the warning, but what I'm gonna do, you know. So uh that's Kara Spencer. Now, Wesley Bell is a black man. I'm gonna say this on camera because this is a provocative thing to say. I didn't really want to go at Wesley Bell. Uh I have a problem attacking other black men. I really don't try to do it because I know that when you attack other brothers, it can go into a space where neither one of us could dial it back because at the end of the day, we both men.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And we can't protect the outcome of those scenarios. So a lot of times I try to find a space with black men and black women where it don't go there. Because even again, even with black women, you might think you're styling on her. That don't mean she ain't got no cousins or no brothers or somebody that's been a ride.
SPEAKER_01That's right.
SPEAKER_00You know what I'm saying? So with our own people, I try to show grace. Now, in this scenario, the brother took the job of West uh Bob McCullough, who was the prosecuting attorney who was in power at the time that the Ferguson Uprising was going on. And he had had the job for close to 30 years. Um we got him out of office, and Wesley Bell took his job. Uh he promised that he would reopen the case when he got in there, and then of course he didn't. Um he basically uh used the community for personal gain. Then he made a call to the sister Corey Bush, who was uh an incumbent for a position that he wanted and told her that he wasn't gonna run against her. Uh APAC came with a lot of money knocking on his door, suddenly he runs against her. And so now we at this point where we got APAC in the black community. Through somebody who y'all trusted. Through somebody that, well, I never trusted them. I don't think we ever really trusted them. I think we was, everybody is playing three-card Molly in politics. Okay, yeah. Right? So it's like, we know you fools gold, but I mean, I want to wear some type of jewelry, you know what I'm saying? I ain't trying to be outside completely neckless, you know what I'm saying? Naked, you know what I'm saying? So we all knew what it was, you know. In St. Louis, it's a small city, so you hear shit from girls that a nigga might have dated, or uh people that the nigga might have, you know, helped lock up, or you know, people got their own touch points with people. So, you know, nobody was ever blinded by the fact that, you know, any of this was possible. It's just that when you making high-stakes business deals, sometimes you want black people to have hold the line around a certain level of sophistication, just like any other group would. Uh, you know, if we was Italians and some damn people from another community come knocking on the door and say, hey, we want to talk to Brother John, Brother John's gonna come holler at us first and say, hey, they came knocking on my door, what y'all want to do? Maybe we could all manipulate these people together. Instead, you go off with them to manipulate us as a whole. And I'm just disappointed in the lack of sophistication that we have around those types of conversations. Okay, word up.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for sharing all that. The last question I'm gonna ask you is about Crow Life. Break down what's going on, Crow Life. You play me some new music. The music is incredible, especially this one song you got. Uh really want to smile today. That's like a different side of Tef Poe. It's very joyous. It's not that your music is not joyous. I don't want to give that impression. It's additionally joyous, extra joyous, unapologetically joyous.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03And it it feels warm and inviting, but it's still that revolutionary shit. Talk about what's going on with Crow Life.
SPEAKER_00Um Crow Life started as an offshoot of the culture of B and Black Men Build. Um Black Men Build St. Louis had a lot to do with what Black Men Build as a mass aesthetically became and still does. Uh those brothers are still doing phenomenal work. Um the symbol of the organization is the crow. Um I made crow life in the midst of that because the mantra that we were building politically was really starting to help me save my life in different ways. I was it was helping me deal with things that that religion and other things wasn't necessarily helping me find a solution for. And um the more I leaned into those principles, the more I noticed that I start feeling better about myself and uh wanting to do things for me as a person. Um so I sort of took the crow life thing and just created it, a ideal ideology around living better, thinking better, doing better, and wanting better, you know, being connected to the source of life however you can. And creating for me became a way to really uh healthily express my opinions versus jumping on Facebook and writing three, four, five paragraphs that people might take the wrong way. I could just make a song and I probably say the same thing in the song, but people respect me more for the song because they like the song more so than they respect my opinion, actually, or how I'm stating my opinion.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00So I just went crazy with it. And I started to do a bunch of direct-to-consumer projects, mixtapes. Uh, I had reached another point where I felt like people maybe had started to see me as too much of an activist and not enough as of an artist. So I wanted to just start creating like crazy. So we we reached a point where I dropped over 10 mixtapes. Uh I wanted them to kind of be hard to find even before we start filming. You was like, man, well, I can't find this and this and that. I was trying to create a pathway for like my ultra fans uh so I could see who they really were. And I wasn't really able to do that on Spotify and Apple Music in a certain way. Um so I just wanted to try to have a real touch point where I could email the person right after they hit me up, or if you wanted this song and I say, hey, you just bought that song, yo, let me send you this. Or sometimes if people even bought uh a certain amount of music, I hit them up and be like, yo, I'm gonna create an album just for you. Nobody else has this, take this. This is, you know, just you know, specifically for you. Uh I had a deal with Universal a long time ago, coming out of 106. And I've been signed to Universal and I've been signed to Tommy Boy. Uh I was on Tommy Boy, freshly signed, as the De La Soul uh situation. I can't remember that. Was unpacking. Yeah. And I was like, what a time to be signed to fucking Tommy Boy, because it was somewhat of a negative press associated with that coming from black folks, because they love black folks love de la soul. As they should. So it was. Thank you, Dave. You know? So that was a wild situation for me, too. That's another story. But I did have a good time. I ain't gonna bash Tommy Boy because they did have a lot of uh they they had a lot of respect for what I was trying to do, and they totally had my back on a lot of stuff, you know what I'm saying? So I was a risky artist to sign, and they was they was with it. But um with that being said, Crow Life comes out of me being with Tommy Boy for a little while, seeing what was going on with with different deals and different labels. But back when I was with Universal, not to jump over that, um one of the first things they asked us was uh how many engageable fans do you think you have? And I said, I never heard the term engageable fans. I don't know what that means. And they said, we don't really care about all them Twitter followers and Instagram followers, and if we put something out right now, who paying$10 for it? Do you got a number on that? Can you you got some proof of that? You got like verified fans, not just shit that could be manipulated, and like anybody could buy these followers, anybody could do this, but like where's your verified proof that you're actually a real artist with income coming in, income going out, people actually wanting this product? Yeah, and that really did change how I approach releasing music because what's the point of dropping music into like this black void? Now you just got a hobby, you don't got a career, you got a hobby. You know what I'm saying? That's not your job, that's not your occupation, that's just something you're into doing. You you are wasting your light money on making songs that make you get a good dopamine hit, but they never have any aspiration for doing much of anything beyond that. So I'm the kid that grew up. Once again, I'm gonna listen to Black Thought to learn how to rap, but I'm gonna look at Tony Draper for how to release this music. Salute Draper. You feel what I'm saying? I'ma look at uh Yasim Bey and Talib on how to be political, how to stand it up a certain way. But then I'm gonna look at Percy Miller on, okay, I got my album, but I need this nigga album. I could be on the treadmill working out, not rapping one bar. Right. And have 12 songs out from this cat and eating possibly better than I would eat off of my own 12 songs because guess what? He's gonna make three, four records that I wouldn't even bother making. And, you know, I got the privilege and the honor of releasing them. And that's kind of how I think. So we got a few artists. Uh, and I used to have a problem, no offense to nobody out there, but I used to have a problem with like all the underground boutique labels in my city solely being ran by white boys. So like I felt like all the black record labels was more like into like trap and club and dance music, and we didn't never really have a space where alternative music could live and be released from like people who uh didn't have six-figure budgets behind it. So I said, fuck it, I gotta build it. So that's what I did, you know.
SPEAKER_03And if you build it, they will come. Pause. Shout out to my man Tef Poe. Thank you for participating in this episode of your podcast that you co-host with me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But as a guest, yeah, man.
SPEAKER_00Let me ask you this.
SPEAKER_03I'm glad I got to do that with you, man.
SPEAKER_00I want to shout out uh a few projects we did release. Um, I got Crow Life 10 currently on All Streamers. Uh my man Fresh has a brand new album, all produced by him. It's a compilation project with some of the most cold underground rappers on there. And my guy Rockwell Knuckles, he just stay dropping fire. He just dropped a new album, King of the Volcano 2, produced by Black Spade.
SPEAKER_03So yeah, I heard some of that. That's fire right there. Shout out to Rockwell. Shout out to Black Spade, shout out to everybody who's independent, shout out to everyone who's doing it yourself. This has been let me ask you this. Peace.