William Hutson

H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism is only terrifying if you’re a straight white man and you thought you were the center of the universe anyway. To anyone else – and this is why his racism comes into it – finding out that you’re not the most important thing in the universe is a relief. I think it’s interesting that his characters go mad when they figure out that humanity doesn’t matter. It’s only terrifying if you ever thought you were important, if everything in society has propped you up as the dominant category.

Todd L. Burns

Why’d you guys want to tell this story now?

William Hutson

Well, we wanted to tell it two years ago when we finished the record. Honestly, there were so many articles about Afrofuturism in the past two years that I was panicking that we were going to release this the moment that Afrofuturism was not cool. We were ahead of the curve and didn’t get it out in time. Also, we were going to go in the studio the weekend after Michael Brown was killed and we were thinking, “OK, the next song we make has to be a fucking banger.” I remember calling Daveed a couple of days before we went in and was like, “I don’t feel like I want to go to a party.” We were all bummed out. So we made a song sort of about police violence. I remember we had to sort of couch it in, “Hey, usually we don’t do such overtly political things –”

Jonathan Snipes

But how can we do anything else?

William Hutson

We hadn’t worn our politics on our sleeve up until then. We were trying to do something that was a lot more coded in its politics before that. I think we just sort of let it go at that point.

Daveed Diggs

The intention of removing the first person perspective from clipping. made us hyper aware. You had to be sneaky about getting your politics in there, right? The way we sort of did that was by being really gender fluid with pronouns. Things that you’re not going to catch unless you’re really listening. That way it doesn’t assign a person to this non-person. Right? The reason I never say “ni++a” on a track is because that assigns, in rap music, a non-white persona to it, for the most part.

William Hutson

Yeah, there are very few white people who have said that word on record.