Boldy James - Medusa
"They aint tryna hire you with jailhouse tattoos. On your left forearm, staring, looking at you."
Album: Manger on McNichols [3rd album]
Genre: Hip Hop, Gangster Rap, Midwest Hip Hop
Release: July 22nd 2020
Length: 3.26
Producer: Sterling Toles
Vocalist: Boldy James
Label: Self released
Official Audio
Charts, Streams & Sales
Spotify = 460,000 +
YouTube Music = 47,000 +
Credits
Bass guitar, drums, cello (real instruments not samples)
Details
- 2020 was a busy year for Boldy James seeing the rapper release two critically acclaimed albums. The first, The Price of Tea in China, came out in February while this record dropped four months later.
- The entire album was produced by Detriot's Sterling Toles. Toles, who has a background in sound collage, views himself as a healer and uses music as his medicine.
"I saw constructing the sound for this album as creating adaptive, evolving architecture, to act as a place of catharsis, healing, and self-realization" which at first glance is gibberish but I think means that he adapted the sound of the album to fit James so that James could be honest and express himself as a way of healing.
In hip hop especially the relationship between vocalist and producer can be pivotal in finding the honesty that makes everything click. Sometimes real honesty is surprising even to oneself. I find the idea of using the studio as a form of therapy an interesting one. People from the streets can't afford a therapist. The next best thing? Write an album. Thinking about spending a few k on therapy? Why not write an album instead? I might get a psychiatrists license and start a business where I get the mentally ill to write albums just to see what happens. It would probably be 99% dogshit but I bet 1 in a 100 would bang. - Tole's instrumental can be found here.
- Boldy James wrote his verses between 2007 and 2010. It would be over a decade until the public got to hear them.
- Without Sterling Toles offering words of encouragement James might have quit rapping. They first met in 2000 when Boldy was 17 and unsure about a career in music. Ultimately, acting on advice from Toles, Boldy decided to keep at it even if it was just to express himself as a form of therapy.
- Detroit, home of the legendary record label Motown, is known as the motor city because of it's reputation as a giant in the automobile industry. Motown even takes it's name from the moniker 'motor town'. Despite it's reputation, the reality is that modern day manufacturing jobs aren't available today to the extent they were in the past. The shift to globalisation started in the eighties and hollowed out the American industrial base which made working people poorer and eroded opportunities. This shift hit Detroit particularly hard.
The intro for 'Medusa', told by James Boggs, laments this fact. The jobs are gone. Seeing as this is track 1 on the album it sets a tone of industrial decline and social deprivation present for the rest of the record. Some people might call the lack of employment an excuse for crime but statistics show a causal link between a lack of meaningful employment and an increase in criminality, which leads to a difficult to escape from downward spiral. It's a link not only borne out of statistics but also the life experience of Boldy James as he says on this track.
"They aint tryna hire you with jailhouse tattoos. On your left forearm, staring, looking at you." It's easy to blame a rapper for describing his reality but the truth is that Boldy is simply recounting a ground-level perspective of decisions took by Reagan in the eighties.
When people in high office decide to send manufacturing abroad the reality for people in the former industrial heartlands will quickly turn grim. Manufacturing jobs and the wealth that comes from them can't easily be replaced. Detroit was a ticking timebomb that was for too long ignored by the federal government and it's unfair to hold regular people responsible for a long-term strategy that has impoverished them.
Artwork
