7. “MILES”

This feels more like a character study than other tracks on the album, like you’re stepping into the shoes of Miles Davis.

“Miles” felt like a persona poem, where you learn about the author through the lens that they choose to take. I used to love writing persona poems; I once wrote one from the voice of a pigeon.

Also, I have been thinking a lot about feminine and masculine energy, and how I aspire to have both in a good balance. It’s harder for me to be masculine and assertive—to say exactly what I want, speak up when I feel like someone is doing something wrong—so stepping into the voice of someone like Miles Davis is a good feeling. Miles used his power: He would speak really softly in meetings with white executives so they would have to lean in. He’d turn his back to the audience, like, I’m not here to perform for you white people, I’m playing my music and I don’t need to shuck and jive for you. I appreciated that.

8. “MUDDY”

This feels like the most overt tribute on the album, because you’re singing about what Muddy Waters did—not to him, not as him.

Yeah, that’s true. I wrote this song after the poet Kevin Coval asked me to cover a poem of his, which starts with: “Motherfuckers won’t shut up.” Then it explains how Muddy Waters originally decided to play electric guitar in Chicago because people were talking too loud in the bar. I thought the poem was super dope but I didn’t know that much about Muddy Waters, so I watched all of these interviews with him. That became a theme across the album: watching interviews with artists of color, where the interviewer is usually a white man asking the dumbest questions, and then seeing how they dealt with it. In this case, the guy asked Muddy Waters, “It seems like the white teenagers really love your music. Do you think they could ever play the blues like you?” And Muddy laughed, “Like me?”

When white people participate in cultures that black people have created, there’s erasure. But at the same time, you can’t counterfeit that. Yeah, there’s blue-eyed soul, and there are white rappers, but it’s not like they’ve stolen, because you can’t possibly steal hip-hop or the blues from black people. In that interview, Muddy is like, “Of course they can play it, but they can’t play it like I can.” It was empowering.

9. “BASQUIAT”

How has the art and life of Jean-Michel Basquiat impacted you?

I really love his art. And in an interview I saw with him, he’s asked about what makes him angry, and Basquiat just pauses for a long time and says, “Oh, I don’t remember.” Basquiat didn’t present as someone who was angry all the time; he was the radiant child, the genius child. It was almost like that interviewer wanted access to this interior emotional space, and Basquiat was like, “I’m not actually going to grant you that,” or, “There’s so much shit that could make me angry, I can’t even make a list for you.” I related to that because I feel people have often said to me, “Oh, you’re so nice, you’re so quiet, you’re so shy,” almost like it’s a compliment to not be angry. But I don’t think it should a compliment when there’s so many things to be angry about.

With social media, the whole idea of needing to express your anger about a particular topic feels different in this current moment than in the past. Especially around the time when there were so many police shootings of black people back-to-back, I saw black artists who said, “I’m not going to talk about this on Twitter for my mental health.” And others were like, “We need to talk about it publicly; it’s our responsibility.” It’s a different sort of pressure.

For you, does creating topical music feel like meeting a social responsibility?

No. The social responsibility I feel is to be my most authentic self, because there are often so many barriers to that. I don’t feel like I have to write a song that talks about black culture, but it’s what I want to do.

10. “SUN RA”

I love the line in this song: “This marble was doomed from the start.”

[Sun Ra’s book of science-fiction poetry] This Planet Is Doomed was a big jump-off point for the song. Afrofuturism has been a really cool lens for me, just thinking about what it means that so many writers of science fiction hadn’t imagined black people in space. What are the implications of that? But for Sun Ra, it wasn’t an imaginative project. He was actually like, “I am from space.” I love the idea of making your narrative and owning it.

11. “OCTAVIA”

Octavia Butler is another Afrofuturist icon, right?

Yeah. I didn’t even know her name for so long, but I knew that my mom had this purple book with a black woman and two aliens on the cover. I was reading her Xenogenesis trilogy when I was maybe too young, because there’s a lot of amazing sex in it. Those books were mind-blowing because, for the first time, a black woman with dreadlocks is the one who survives at the end of the world and meets aliens.

A museum released her notebooks in which she wrote down her manifestations, the things that she wanted to have. On one page, she wrote all her creative and professional goals, and every single one of them happened. I was thinking about that as I was reading her book Kindred, where the character goes back to slave times, and it made me want to research all of these intricacies about slavery. I was watching clips with actors reading slave narratives, and I was fascinated by how they taught themselves how to write and read. Then, trace that to someone like Octavia, who used her writing to bring her dreams to fruition. That’s why the first line of the song is, “Don’t ever let a textbook scare you.” I wanted to affirm that your people have struggled and done illegal things so that this language can be passed down.

12. “BALDWIN”

Speaking of great writers, here is a song named after James Baldwin. It includes a line about a woman clutching her purse as she sees a black man, the casual racism of that.

This song was inspired by advice Baldwin wrote to his nephew. He talks about white people, and how they don’t always see us as human—but he’s saying, These innocent people, we have to accept them with love. The way Baldwin talks about love is so complex, and it’s always an active choice, but that was always the part of the letter where I was like, Really? It seems very difficult to accept all of these people with love. Accept Dante Servin and [George] Zimmerman with love? That’s a lot, James.

I was struggling with this, and my producer, Slot-A, suggested we watch some battle rap, because in battle rap, you have to almost love your opponent in order to successfully battle them. You have to know them so intimately; you have to know about their mom, where they live, what size shoe they wear. That helped me approach the writing more from a place of empathy, to try to understand the inner workings of the violence that I think white people commit, knowingly or unknowingly.

That’s where lethal fear comes in. So often when officers of whatever race are killing, they’re saying, I feared for my life. They’re wielding their fear as a weapon. It’s the same thing with the clutching of the purse, calling the police.