(NO) TIME BETWEEN A LINE (BETWEEN) A TRAP & A JOYFUL SPACE
#calltocreate2019 process notesI used to feel immense pride when reflecting on how good I was at doing things to completion at the last possible minute. Later times in life, I felt that same type of pride when I discovered my improv skills. But in college, while frequently holding pop-up rap cyphers with my friends, I discovered I could be a freestyle battle rapper. That pride came with a weight—an urge to bear down & push myself into a new.
I became obsessed with perfecting the art of thinking fast enough to rhyme using only what I could see & feel in the moment. I started using my meditations to practice filtering out unwanted mind chatter & focus on what I was looking for.
Whenever I try to explain how my practices in yoga, mindfulness & meditation were fueled by my practicing lyricism & finding my distinct poetic voice, (& vice versa) I always get very serious doubt & short-sighted judgement from my folks on each end of those spectrums. Surprise.
Looking back, this was the inevitable path of progression for me. This curation of songs, voices, lines, lyrics, questions & answers that are making #SuiteTrapBlues has been what I’ve been making, truly, for many years.
Back then, my friends & I would infiltrate the all-male cyphers with our uninvited rhymes about Womanism, Black Power, & the Mystical Finesse of the Divine Feminine.
About the ain’t shit & the best at the shit & all the in between.
Some nights, we would be silent. We would hold each other’s arms & sway in the shadows of the Spanish moss that hung from the lynching trees they refused to mark or cut down near campus. We would stake our space in chalk or whiteout, even. Silently writing, drawing, lightly humming, singing. Sometimes harmonizing in a background that revealed its truth as a root.
Other times, we were the beatmakers. We kept the pace with our snaps, our taps, our slaps, our hands cupped together to catch sound & only let out enough to snare.
Out, at clubs or bonfires or warehouse gatherings, we’d dance until somebody got on the ground & took too long to get back up. We used our bodies to make the statements & at our best, we were the only bodies you saw & the only voices you heard. We postured and positioned and performed on our own terms, then, before, & now.
We create our own ceremonies & perform age old rituals using a carefully crafted combination of words we’d always learned, words we created, & words we deemed necessary to transcend.
***
The spirit of trap music is fluid. Sometimes, the beat moves us to put or own words on top of a mood in the sub-textual layers. Other times, the words tell our stories in and between their lines and it is not hidden. It is plain pain and joy, coexisting. It’s all the way live.
When asked what is not working? I know that attempting to make myself smaller does not work. While doing what I thought was redefining myself (classic mid-twenty something millennial meltdown style) I haphazardly rubbed dull some of my sharpest, most well-crafted and beautiful edges. I got a couple degrees out of it, though.
I am moving in a space that denies my existence. Here, in this trap, every day that I have is a triumph. In #SuiteTrapBlues I am telling the stories that are of my worlds, in what feels like an attempt at radical normativity. I expect to have to play defense for this project. I expect the theorists to reason with themselves that me and my life, the way we see & work are misguided. But we are just as complicated and encompassing as the expansive blackness of soil. I'm moving our dirt up a few notches on the hierarchy of grit to be examined, taken seriously, admired, enjoyed, & felt with hands & feet.
I am calling on every woman in me, in this project. I am calling out the project & allowing it to define itself through only what its contributors see it as. I need to call on others to grow, to maintain my space and size in this world, which is why #SuiteTrapBlues is an interactive, multi genre, intergenerational, conversation that is being held together by its distinct connections and threads. This mixtape experience depends on every voice that has ever lifted me up via song. The earthly, & the heavenly coexist in my versions of liberation gospel.
I have my lens, & it is a spiraled prism. I am trying to capture without trapping.
I remember when “trap music” was not a phrase.
I am thinking of all the discussion, confusion, & disgust running concurrent to "Pretty Girls like Trap Music" & the joy being performed at the Pink House.
I remember when we were our own cool, & that was standard enough.
The standard changed with the naming. We didn’t name ourselves. Our standard for ourselves changed. Then, our parameters of joy and pain shifted to a layer behind the text, or, still visible in the reflection.
I am my full and fuller self when I grant myself permission to be as big as I need.
We catch ourselves trying to combat the gaze that got us looking at our own shit like a study in respectability, not an expression of music and movement and oneness and real life.
This is real life.
In the naming of the many pieces to this #SuiteTrapBlues project I am interrogating the lenses through which I am discouraged from seeing a multitude of selves.
My knowings & what my expertise as a writer, artist, Black woman, Detroiter, 1st generation college grad, direct African descendant involuntarily American by way of generations of forced chattel slavery... each of these come with strictly imposed expectations.
Yet we are on all the edges, existing, if not living, if not thriving.
It’s been 2 years since I first said aloud that I wanted to write a mixtape about Trap music. This process has been bigger than anything I’ve done alone, thus far. #SuiteTrapBlues is a web of voices, & for it to succeed, I must surrender to the master weaver. I must be lucid yet detached. I must guide my own meditation & listen to the voices that came before before before. And those, too, that come up now, here, where we all are.
I no longer see my last-minute pressure writing as a talent. I see it as another tight space I called a comfort because it seemed like my only option.
We working on the other side of time now.
This study of Trap inserts the female voice
in conversations & spaces where we have rarely been heard, on record.
Here, we are:
On the record.
&
Recording ourselves.
We have always been here.
We do, did, & done done it all.
#SuiteTrapBlues The Mixtape Coming Soon.
Breauna L. Roach