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Another thing that stuck out to me in album details was that the track ‘Walk Like a Panther’ is referred to as a love letter to A$AP Rocky, Drake and other pop star rappers, but the rest of your notes do not make it sound like you have much esteem for them or their music.
Fisher: It comes from my work. My best friend runs a club on the Lower East Side, and he gets me work there checking coats just so I can make some cash when we’re not on the road. I’m really grateful to him for doing it, but at the same time, it completely sucks your soul dry. The music that the clientele wants to listen to is nothing but Drake and Nicki Minaj and bling era hip-hop. It’s a mostly white audience and it’s a white DJ that’s spinning this stuff. It starts to grate on you when you’re in this subservient position and you’re listening to this music. It’s total blaxploitation. It really plays into this narrative that I have been fighting against my whole life which is what is expected of you in the eyes of, not just the mainstream American culture and in the eyes of other black people. Authentic black representation is this bullshit that you hear on Top 40 radio and that you see in fucking movies, which is all fucking manufactured and perpetuated by white-owned corporations and it’s completely fucking destructive to black identity.
Listening to songs like ‘Fucking Problems’ with 2 Chainz and A$AP Rocky with that one line, I can’t get over it: “They say the money makes a nigga act niggerish / But at least a nigga’s nigga-rich.” It’s a room full of drunk white people singing along to the fucking lyrics and, in the meantime, I’m waiting on them. That’s fucked up. And I got sick of it. When Ryan and I were demoing ‘Walk Like a Panther’, he laid out the beat and everything, and he was like, “Just improvise”. I did something, I don’t really remember. He cut it up and re-arranged it and presented it back to me. I wasn’t singing any words or anything. I heard it and I immediately had this image of a modern day Reign of Terror, post-French Revolution, and the black aristocracy, so to speak. The people, the real people, went and rounded up all these motherfuckers for selling them out and they were gonna bring them to the gallows and execute them for their crimes except for at the last minute, they don’t get executed. You realize, ultimately, they’re just playing into the hands of The Man, and if you love somebody, if you love something, then you discipline them. So that’s where it comes from. It’s a weariness and an anger with this entire culture which has gone on uninterrupted since the early ‘90s. This is the pervasive image of what it’s like to be a black person in our culture and, therefore, the rest of the world. It’s bullshit and I’m sick of it.
Read rest here: http://www.factmag.com/2017/05/16/algiers-the-underside-of-power-interview/ ******************************************
Falcons, Braves, Bulldogs and Hawks
Geto Boys, Poison Clan, UGK, Eightball & MJG, OutKast, Goodie Mob
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