ADVENT COMMENTARY, Track 4, 'Artsy Girl', feat Lana..G7's thoughts

IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD THE SONG OF THE WEEK, GO TO HTTP://WWW.MYSPACE.COM/ADVENTISHERE TO LISTEN TO IT.


This Maker track on Shooting the Breeze is wonderful. It's called 'Live It Pt 2'. It takes me to a realm where I feel that all the disjointedness in the universe, and the disconnect that I feel as a creative soul amidst a reality with stereotypes and stigmas for how Black people are to be and act, molds that that do not fit me, are 'redeemed.' As a simple drum loop translates into a polyrhythmic symphony over a droning 70ish deep funk melody with lush dark guitars, Maker has taken me back to my original home. A land where, to quote myself in 'Artsy Girl', '... the trees are violins playing/and the children train in glowstick raving'

'Artsy Girl comes from an experience I had once while driving to my parents home. The South Side of Chicago area known as the 'Wild 100's', is predominately Black, and an area where certain accepted norms of Black youth (rap music, so called 'urban' ways of dress, modes of speech, etc). One day, while passing by the Woodson Library on 95th and Halsted, I saw a black girl who defied all of these accepted norms of 'Blackness', having the appearance of an emo rock enthusiast with torn jeans, head down in her own world and all that. Now of course this isn't the first time I've seen something like this, but the way it hit me at that particular instant and where were a 'kairos' moment to me, providing me a perspective of this that I never had before. The Woodson Library was a place that I would go to as a child to raid their music collection for the likes of Queen, Neil Young, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Beatles, and everything I wasn't supposed to be listening to as a 'Black' kid growing up in the 'hood.' My friends used to laugh at me for it. In the girl's face, I saw the same sadness and alienation from her surroundings that I felt. At the beginning of the song, I say that she must be my sister, because in this South Side of prescribed notions of being 'Black' and 'normal', we had the same appearance. We 'looked alike'. We possessed the appearance of those who would venture creatively outside these boxes, and treat art as life. The picture that comes out is unlike any other. To see her crossing the intersection of the very library where I had broken down my own notions of 'Blackness' and 'normalcy many years before' and understood who I really am was ethereal and divine.

I.B. sampled Susan McKeown, one of my favorite Celtic singers, for this instrumental, providing a melancholy flute for my bleak, unveiling lines. The 1st verse is about the artsy girl, the 2nd is about me. Of her I said, 'Cus the South Side ain't no place for Afro Beatles, Coldplays and Evanescences/For a split second, she lent me her presence/She'd rather not be messed with/So I admired her from afar/Caught in a world only she and dead guitarists possess/It's purple painted and wretched/From Black folks disconnected...' Who she is is not what 'Black' or 'normal' people are understood to be. Her very existence ruptures the understanding of those around her about identity. This verse is a sketch of her. In vs 2, I speak of myself as a person who went through and still goes through this. Except I paint myself as an alien who happened to fall in this planet but seeks to get back to where I came from. I put on records of envelope pushing rock and jazz, and they remind me of home. When these artists died, '..they disguised traces of their essences as they sunk back into the clit of mother earth/So here I'm stranded/By peers reprimanded/Scorned for being different 'til I could stand it.' As a person who has ingested the aesthetic and art as my life, my religion, my 'Bible', I can't be from this planet. The fact that I am synonymous with art restructures every racial bias and boundary, putting the power of creating my identity in my own hands, as well as the power to exist in the world without adhering to the legalism that these categories usher in. I determine what it means to be 'Black' for me, and I even determine if I want to do away with that label, for the letter kills, and the spirit gives life, to steal from the Apostle Paul. Sometimes we're not understood by others and even ourselves, as these oracles and emotions come through our earthen vessels to you, oracles and emotions we have no control over. I say about this 'And I wondered why they'd run when I use my pen/It would pierce them/I only saw it as red wet paint/I knew not it was a bloodbath/Cus when I spoke the darts they laughed' Art that cannot be readily understood (read Walter Benjamin's 'The Artist as Producer') is shunned by the masses many times. Skech 185 catches this sentiment best when he exclaims 'Fuck if it's real, I need some shit that I can ride to/You're all being lied to' That is the 'running' that takes place when people flee from what's real. It pierces them as soon as they hear it, see it, etc. It slaps them out of their dream of rims, hoes, business as usual, and confronts them with the grittiness of a failing economy, racism, poverty, and outdated models of God that cannot speak to these ills. We, who wield this presentation of reality as it is and not as the record company told our favorite rapper to tell it to us, are ridiculed many times. 'That's that weird shit. We don't want to hear that. Throw some d's on that bitch.' Our speech and way of life is 'otherworldly'.


Lana sums up the song perfectly with her chorus that entraps us into the heart of the song, and bring this very heart to each of our chests. She says 'We meet in between these two worlds/We come together as one/We are against the world/Me and you/And I love you too. As soon as I.B. and I heard it (a piece that she freestyled in the studio), we were like, 'That's it!" I almost cried. Wonderful. But this is exactly what is. Brother and sister meet in this song, even if only in passing. We're not from here. If you're not from here, come back home with us. Let's join with this world and help to change it before we take our spaceships to that Electric Church in the distance.