welcome to black bottom, part 1

I’ve developed this habit, lately, of journaling by hand and then taking a photo of what I’ve been writing, and feed it to Claude to build a website out of it, based on a template that I’ve been designing ahead of time. I’m a fan of the way this part of technology removes the friction of getting my writing to a place of polished presentation. But, ironically, in this way, “AI” is enabling me to be even more “acoustic.” I love writing about music for this very reason. The computer can’t really listen to music and write about it; the best it can do is aggregate what folks like me are writing.

I produced a song called “Welcome to Black Bottom” six years ago, and within the context of the body of work that I was producing, this song’s lyrics were written last and they were the hardest for me to write. The concept for the album that I was constructing at the time was a coming of age story. I had taken an adaptation course that Mary Kurgla was teaching at Loyola Marymount.

I found Mary to be one of the most inspiring people that I’ve ever met. Mary’s philosophy of story, writing, and psychological exploration encouraged me to explore the full canvas of myself to pull out literary truths. In the first adaptation assignment, we were asked to provide a take on Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Quite surprisingly, my take on Faulkner extended enormous sympathy and empathy towards Faulkner’s protagonist. This sympathy and empathy was all made possible because I saw shades of my mother in the story. I grew up in a home that reflected a very chaotic embodiment of hard times, psychological breakdown, and neglect. And Mary’s class is the first time I found the courage to unburden myself about this enormously heavy experience.

Adaptation allowed me to find the freedom to express my own experience. Fundamentally, I have always been fascinated by the nature of interpretation and adaptation. When I was a teenager, Walt Disney as a force of culture started to obsess me, and I understood the importance of using context as a launching pad for new insights. Hip-hop is the ultimate embodiment of everything I love about all of the artistic disciplines, and its postmodern textures inform my cinematic preferences. In the context of this concept album, I wanted to take a franchise disconnected from emotional and political truth and embed my own biography and political philosophies into it. Always fascinated by the cassette aesthetic, when I learned that there was a Decepticon Transformer whose natural state was a boombox, I wanted to satirize the way Hollywood might take this character and make a product geared specifically at black teenagers. Somewhere along the way, my world-building began to eclipse the initial idea in a way.

In my concept album, Soundwave wakes up with amnesia, and he’s unaware of his villainous past. Found by a boy named Eric, who lives in Black Bottom, Detroit, Soundwave’s “Iron Giant”-style bond with Eric presents him with the fresh choice of choosing a different moral path.

In real life, there is no “Black Bottom, Detroit” that you can travel to today. The neighborhood was demolished to make way for Eisenhower’s infrastructure program. Setting the story in this neighborhood, and imagining a retrofuturist world where it still welcomed middle class black families, was my way of keeping a franchise that gave us Witwicky.

The protagonist, Eric Bridges (named after an old co-worker of mine), lived a life similar to mine. He grew up in a chaotic house, and the poem I wrote about my life brings this character to life on the track. I performed these lines slightly different, but the final engineer moved by take and sped up some syllables on the opening line. I’ve grown to like it.

The lightning hits my face, and honestly, it smells like bath water in the living room right now,

nigga, pipe your ass down, you know what it means to keep a roof over heads here? This shit might leak, but it’ll be together next year, or next, next year

I hate how I can’t bring friends here
Niggas always stressed here
Feels like a nigga might go deaf here
Speak up, yeah, louder in my deaf ear
I might get up out of here
Live a life where all my checks clear

To write this verse took a lot out of me, and I initially tried outsourcing these lyrics to someone else. At some point during this process — a process I’d like to repeat again at some point — lyrics and verses from several different writers would be accumulated for each beat. Later, I would pick and choose the best lines from a mix of demos to finalize my own rap verses that I perform, since rapping is not my God-given ability. For this track, a writer gave me the opening line, “the lightning hits my face.” The remainder of his poem wasn’t anything that I could use, but when I read this line, it took me back to the experience of growing up in a home with a leaky roof. In a normal, healthy home, a rainstorm sets the stage for a romantic reprieve from the outside world. One of my favorite songs ever is Cheryl Lynn’s “Come In From the Rain.” In my house, thunder and lightning was an event; furniture had to be moved and rearranged to accommodate the arrival of pots, pans, and buckets that would now catch all the rainwater leaking into our living room.

In the morning, you’d awake the musty smell of water in the air. Hence, the lyrics in the song. Musically, this song’s production is a team effort. Built off an instrumental groove made by Ulysses Randolph III, who appears in the song as a vocalist as well, the song’s bassline and synths were designed by a keys player. I encouraged him to study the way Hit-Boy modernized the soul sound for his collaborations with Nas. He understood the assignment. There were a lot of beats that I had made and considered for “Welcome to Black Bottom” as the concept and vision for the song predated actually having any music produced. One such version included an elaborate composition of orchestral elements, replete with parts for flute and clarinet. I had been fixated on this song from Carole King, “So Far Away.” In the end, I still sing King’s melody as background vocals.

The chorus of the song is sung by Austin, the engineer who would ultimately master this track as well. It’s a lovely piece of writing:

Go ‘head and be blunt,
you don’t know me well
now just face it,
I’d rather be broken then basic
but you don’t....
So go ‘head
throw out the old and replace it
pick up the pieces and escape it
on to the next,
and you do it all again,
yeah.

While there are two sequel songs to “Welcome to Black Bottom,” they are explorations of music, melody, and composition, and don’t showcase some of the unique personal storytelling in the first part of the song. Part three includes more lyrics from me about my upbringing, but the music itself distracts and pulls away from the song’s core meaning. However, given my Indian background, I love how these influences are incorporated in my production.