The Fine Print

While introducing the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago last Thursday, Former President Barack Obama didn’t use his time at the podium to call out the current president, address detractors, or stoke anger.

He did what he’s spent much of his career doing: trying to inspire hope.

“It’s tempting to give in to cynicism and even despair, to stop trying,” he said, before adding that giving in to apathy now, allowing democracy to die without a fight, would be “a betrayal of our founding ideals, a betrayal of our faith.”

Some might consider such a sentiment, especially coming from a man who, along with his wife, has consistently been a target of hatred and dehumanization simply for being the nation’s first Black president and First Lady, to be naive. Hope alone isn’t enough to change America, as Obama’s two terms in the White House showed.

But we’ve also seen the truth of what Obama warned us about. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t take threats to democracy seriously, when we take freedoms for granted, when we stay home from the polls.

The American people lose their power, rights, freedoms, and humanity. 

Holding onto the rope, carrying the weight of democracy on the other end, is exhausting. But to let go is to let it fall, and nothing will stop that from happening but us—all of us—working together.

The sound of our souls
By Khari Thompson

Juneteenth has passed, but our celebration of Black culture doesn’t end there.

June also marks Black Music Month, first created under President Carter in 1979 to commemorate the multitude of ways Black music has shaped American life—its influence on popular genres like rock and roll and pop, its innovation and expression through hip hop culture, and its raw, radical messaging in the hands of truth-tellers like Billie Holiday. 

And who better to help The Fine Print explore the depth and power of Black music than Boston-born Black artists Zakiyyah Sutton—Zakiyyah, for short—and James Fortes—aka DJ Mez.Wav—two of Embrace’s current Artists-in-Residence who live, breathe, create, and curate Black music every day?

Here’s an excerpt from our conversations with Zakiyyah and Mez, lightly edited for clarity and length. Read the full interviews on our website.

Zakiyyah: Looking to the past, I'm thinking of Lauryn Hill. She makes music that's conscious but still fun. That's something I strive for too, because sometimes people don't want to hear the conscious stuff, but you can still draw them in if it has a good beat. I also think about Leontyne Price, who is like my vocal mama, and my brother Ripshop, a Boston rap legend who taught me a lot about rap indirectly just by being in his presence. Sampa the Great—she is someone I would love to collaborate with one day. The first time I heard her music, I was like, it's just so unapologetically pro-Black and so raw. The power she holds in her artistry really resonates with me. I can see myself in her, and I find that very inspiring.

For me, it's a matter of being authentic to what I'm feeling. The Black experience is complex, so just by engaging with my art in a way that allows me to express various facets of myself, I'm by extension also expressing various facets of Black identity.

Zakiyyah. (Photo: Embrace)

Mez: In middle school, I used to make mixtapes for my classmates and sell them. That urge to find new music and always be up on what was fresh just followed me into college. I used to run a music blog [in college]—just highlighting new music, putting people on.

Then at a family party, the DJ—a close family friend—needed to step away and told me to just press a button and hold it down while he was gone. When he came back, I was already mixing on beat. He asked how I knew how to do that, and I told him I'd messed around with some apps. That was the moment the bug really hit me. This was back in 2018. What's really helped me is having a deep love for music, and finding the people who had that same appreciation. It's been a blessing.

On what the celebration of Black Music Month means to them

Z: I think it's important that we acknowledge that so many of the contemporary music art forms we enjoy today were inspired by Black music and Black culture—it is the origin of so much of what we do. Connecting back to Black history overall, Black music has played such a pivotal role in disrupting harmful systems, empowering Black voices, and speaking truth to power in ways that other traditional mediums couldn't.

Mez: For me, Black music means so much. So much of the music in the world comes from Black music. You think about rock and roll, hip-hop, R&B, house music, blues. Even down to the instruments—the banjo, for example, stems from Africa. Black culture has its finger on the pulse of all kinds of music genres. And even now, when I play events, the music that really resonates with people is the stuff that's been sampled from earlier eras. You'll hear a song going crazy right now that's sampling something from the 2010s, and that song was actually sampled from something from the '70s, which was itself an interpolation of something even older. For me, it's timeless—it's only going to grow.

On the importance of using music as a vehicle for change

Z: I think what needs to happen right now is truth-telling. We need truth tellers. Hip-hop, in its early beginnings, was the counterculture—the voice of the people going up against systems of power. Over time, it began to get exploited and swallowed up by those systems, because the people in power realized they could make money off of hip-hop. That changed things. And I think it's time for us to, No. 1, acknowledge that, and No. 2, not allow our desire for validation to trump our need for liberation.

Mez: Through history, Black music has always been a space to express ourselves, and I think we should get back to that. I don't think that tradition has been lost—I just think it's been pushed out of the mainstream. I was young when Public Enemy and KRS-One were in their prime, but those were extremely political songs that people were actually dancing to and that were getting the club going. I feel like that needs to be brought back to the front. That's what makes Kendrick [Lamar] so dope. He's just engulfed in his Blackness—he radiates it. And I think the run he's been on these last couple of years is starting to trickle down. It's beginning to inspire younger rappers, musicians, and singers to really embrace their Blackness and speak on what they're going through and what our people are going through. I'm excited to see this new rebirth.