Blu & Exile - In Remembrance of Me

"Life is cold, life is pain, pain is growth and every seed that grows sees rain."

Album: Below the Heavens [debut album]
Genre: Hip Hop, West Coast Hip Hop, Conscious Hip Hop
Album Release: July 17th 2007
Length: 4:05
Producer: Exile
Vocalist: Blu [age 25] & Miguel
Label: Sound in Color

Official Audio


Official Audio

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 2 million
YouTube Music: Over 100 thousand
XXL Magazine: 2007's Most Celebrated Releases

Credits

Details

• At heart, Blu is a storytelling emcee who recounts his experiences to the listener in three act structures. On Cold Hearted, Act I is experiencing violence at home, Act II is him walking round with a gun and Act III is him finding a better way through rapping. In In Remembrance of Me Act I is about being a little kid, Act II a high schooler and Act III a young adult. Blu was only 25 at the time of release so the experiences, especially from Act III, must have still felt immediate to him.
  
  When it's done well conscious hip hop relates to the social experiences we all have via the conduit of a rappers personal life. In their verses the rappers share about their abusive childhoods, hopes for the future and learning experiences in a way that can feel like a stream of consciousness, as if you're in someone elses head. It's the type of thing that, under normal circumstances, only close friends share with each other but it's made available to the listener in conscious hip hop as a byproduct of the rappers honesty as opposed to being by design. On In Remebrance of Me Blu acknowledges this with the lyric "you gon know my whole story by the time I get done."
  
  The listener FEELS the song because it's coming from the lived experience of a human being. It's the difference between "a hundred dead in a flood" and "my son died in a flood". The latter statement is more impactful because it triggers an empapthetic response in the listener as it's made clear to them that there is someone in pain. It can be easier to process the story of one person than one hundred.

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