SUEDE GOD

2. 

The precedent for suggesting superheroic poetics in hip-hop is congenital. Captain Sky’s “Super Sporm” traveled through the vas deferens (vas def?—mos def!) in 1978, smooth operations and muscle contractions assured its arrival in Big Bank Hank’s “Rapper’s Delight” lyrics in 1980 (“I can bust you out with my super sperm…”), and Kurtis Blow accepted the secretions in 1985 (the same year he told us, coincidentally, AJ is cool—no question). Seminal indeed!

Redman’s “A Day of Sooperman Lover” (1992) is Blowfly-level spoofing—not so heroic or chivalric as the song turns from rescuing a kitty cat to a Crying Game situation where our caped crusader unexpectedly “felt the bozack” of his beloved. Worth noting that when Reggie “dipped into [his] Sooperlover suit” it was accompanied by a “quick flash.” The rendezvous might’ve been chaotic but it was no Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos. Suede needs that steel to be ultra-conductive—something like Tricky’s “Black Steel” rendition. Something similar to “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” (1981). Flash’s early opus of the scratch and prismatic turntablism relied on disassembly of The Official Adventures of Flash Gordon (1966) record as much as it did disco data and funk fodder. Look up in the sky—yeah, above the clouds like Gang Starr in ’98, with Preemo pulling from Superman: The Man from Krypton, a 1978 children’s record.

The fixation probably apexed with the Last Emperor’s “Secret Wars.” “What if I had the power to gather all of my favorite MCs,” he proposed, “with the illest comic book characters and they became archenemies?” The original writing and recording of “Secret Wars” dates back to 1995 and ’96. Last Emp told David Ma that MCs and superheroes both operate as “modern day mythology.” Hip-hop heads decolonized comic conventions like Fanon, placing Black Masks over White Skins: Jean Grae, Ironman, MF DOOM, et cetera, and it don’t stop, and it can’t stop. 

3.

The fact that most Black superheroes use electricity speaks to a historical tendency for [particularly non-Black] comic writers and illustrators to codify stereotyped representations of identity. AJ Suede, though, celebrates the commonality of so many Black superheroes with an emphasis on their weaponizing of electricity. Purveyors of potent defenses (a double portion of protection, ELUCID would say) whose Main Source of power derives from an [ec]static breaking of atoms.

Suede deads the myth of superpredator and elevates a superhero mythopoeia super-suited to an Age of Incendiary Devices. He assembles a team (in hip-hop we might call it a crew) of comic book characters to demonstrate that most Black superheroes use electricity. Whether he presents this as a tired trope or point of pride is left ambiguous, but I prefer to think of it as a salute to the commonality.

4.

AJ Suede holds a “couple of lanterns, lighting the path,” and the desire path leads us to Edison’s Lab in Menlo Park, New Jeruzalem. It was there that Lewis Latimer took eight steps to perfecting the carbon filament after Edison caught the L. Latimer literally wrote the book on electric light: Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System. History, as it goes, has made Latimer the lesser-known, but we can measure his impact in such luminaries as Bigg Jus. “I blow mics like filaments,” Jus rapped on CoFlow’s “Silence.” “I’m tungsten light within that causes something.” Something. What it causes must be too ineffable. Suede describes his “armor like tungsten, wolfram, / Wonder who indestructible.” Last Emp teased, Inconceivable? Unbelievable? On “Electric Relaxation,” Q-Tip claimed to be “stronger than Teflon.” We can thank Lewis Latimer for the threaded socket as well. See it on the cover of the Project Blowed compilation from 1995: a bare bulb hanging down, suspended in a white void, hinting at the empty-headed ingenuity of the most virtuosic freestyles to emerge from the MCs serving the Good Life. “There’s something special inside of my mental cargo vessel,” Aceyalone raps on “I Think,” “and it runs on lethal, ethyl methane, profane, / Kinda like a flux capacitor.” He thinks—bright bulb idea sharer. 88 MPH stream-of-consciousness thoughts. 1.21 gigawatts powered by either plutonium or hooked pole + lightning bolt. 

5.

Granville T. Woods got labeled “Black Edison,” but—actual fact—Thomas Alva should’ve been dubbed “White Woods.” Edison tried to jack Woods’ steez, claiming ownership (as oppressors are wont to do) to his patents, but Woods was having none of that litigious noise and won in court. Edison wanted credit for a creation that wasn’t his, but Woods was like, “That goddamn credit? Dead it, / You think a white inventor paying you back?—shit, forget it!” With his Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, Woods equipped trains with magnetic forces for the purpose of communication long before DONDI and FUTURA were bombing ’em.

And what was Edison up to in the meantime? He produced an 1896 film, The Watermelon Eating Contest, which featured “two of the colored gentry eating melon on a wager.” In 1905, he promulgated a worser racial cinematic vision with the Edwin S. Porter-directed The Watermelon Patch, which depicts a melon heist by “darkies” and a pursuit of the thieves by scarecrows-turned-skeletons. Subsequently, we see bloodhounds and cakewalking. On “Most Black Superheroes,” AJ Suede circumvents the mob. He moves “left with the science, but right with the math.” Red-right, white-left, Buck 65 rapped in 1999, memorizing his RCA cables. The wrath of Suede’s math is on par with Jeru’s—he knows how and when to plug in, to plug tune, when to summon storms from the grass surrounding the watermelon patch.

6.

That AJ Suede is singing about Black superheroes distracts from his own heroics. Behind his “Ark Flashington” alter ego, Suede gathers the “harvest abundant [for] feeding the village.” The pun on “arc” weds his electrifying powers to “ark” in a Noachian sense. “Ark,” from the Latin arca, meaning “chest,” alludes to a coffer for storing secrets (abilities, identities) or a chest in an anatomical or figurative sense: the seat of emotional strength and fortitude. The “ark” in Ark Flashington, there-to-the-fore, is the chest from which AJ Suede’s arcane language springs. As purple lightning flashed and purple haze lifted, Cam’ron rapped on 2004’s “More Gangsta Music” about “walk[ing] around like [he’s] got an S on [his] chest.” He had the “Tec on [his] left,” but it’s not a TEC-9 in Suede’s case; it’s a high-voltage technology.

7.

As AJ Suede welds words together, there’s the constant risk of an arc flash—something, as his loyal listeners, we’d masochistically welcome. The way he tangles spools of l’s (“billionaire”; “still feel”) and coils conductive short-u’s (“deductibles”; “government”; “clusterfuckable”; “but”; “wonderful”) leaves us feeling vaporized. (We caught the toxic fume vapors!) 

As such, we should come correct in PPE. Contact artist Lonnie Holley to commission a replica of his “African Mask” (2004)—a welder’s mask, actually, wreathed by a radial tire. Ribbons of rubber and sockets hanging like talismans and outlet boxes. This assemblage of scraps links [literally] the millennia-old metallurgy in Nigeria with the 20th century segregated workforce at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham. Rockin’ the protective Holley headpiece will have you “feel[ing] wonderful,” as Suede says. You’ll be ready to drop a gem on ’em or, conversely, run the joules. You’ll look like the masked figure on the cover of Ark Flashington—all psychedelic oversaturation and electromagnetic energy exuding outward. Replace the S on your chest with the same inflammable material emblem from Massive Attack’s debut—embrace a “Safe from Harm” simmering beneath the surface of your epidermis.

8.

“Alternating current in the blood gets channeled,” AJ Suede raps as he morphs verb into noun. You’re sitting on your sofa alongside Canibus tuning into Channel Zero, but the cathode-ray tube is on the fritz. Screen all fulla snow. Suede juxtaposes the light and dark of alternating current electricity in our TV sets and—like David Lynch—reveals the light and dark media representations of humanity. 

The current carries “through the fingertips and eyes, / Talking to the skies” like Lynch settles his camera on #6 utility poles. Over the course of his career, the Twin Peaks director has been partial to electricity. “I don’t know why all people aren’t fascinated with it,” he said in 2006. “It makes beautiful sounds, and it makes a lot of times some incredible light. It runs many things in our world, and it’s beautiful. It’s sometimes dangerous, but it’s magical. It’s such a power….” He speaks to the ethos of Ark Flashington, and Suede’s “Most Black Superheroes” delves headlong into the racial components. Sure, Lynch has the soot-blackened faces of the Woodsmen (“Gotta light?” one infamously asks). He hideously birthed the “jumping man” (leaping tall buildings in a single bound…) above the convenience store in Fire Walk With Me (1992). The “jumping man” is acted by Carlton Lee Russell, a Black man, though he wears a mask of white plaster. A second Black man, credited fittingly as “the electrician,” is also present in that surreal scene. But these racial undertones are just that—rarely discussed contexts secondary to Lynch’s infatuation with the direction of electron flow and the nature of good and evil. No more than minstrelsy of the manic and unhinged, if that. AJ Suede sacrifices everything on the gallows-like altar of a transmission tower in order to get us closer to overstanding.

9.

Remember how they treated Black soldiers after Nam? By simply raising the question, AJ Suede raises hell and reminds us. “Never give help,” he says, subverting the saves-the-day super duty tough work of your typical superheroes, “’cause they don’t give a damn.” History is a weapon which can be used to recognize the difference between a worthy rescue and an informed recusal.

In Seize the Time (1970), Bobby Seale’s account of his days developing the Black Panther Party, a current navigates through his narrative—“current” in both senses: contemporaneous to his volatile times and the flow of charged particles. Writing at the height of the Black Power movement [calculate Black power in wattage], he notes that our “modern, highly technological society” includes pervasive “electronic surveillance,” in addition to and aiding the efforts of “cops armed and equipped for overkill.” Electricity found its path into his earlier employment struggles, too. “I worked at Kaiser Aerospace Electronics near Oakland,” he writes. “It involve[d] testing for microscopic cracks in metals by a complicated chemical and magnetic process.” Despite mastering the trade and finding the knowledge rewarding, he quit a little over a year later because he conscientiously objected to where the company was moving: “[T]he war was going on and I felt I was aiding the government’s operation.” Government clusterfuckable, in Suede’s words. Later, as Seale was transported by US Marshals across state lines, he spent a layover in a Salt Lake City lockup, what he refers to as “a completely electronic jail.” The future shock of his detainment, with its “doors [that] opened and closed electronically”—absent the necessity of any human touch—reminded him of a “streamlined concentration camp.” “I was on a political charge,” he writes [my emphasis]—quarks, protons, and electrons notwithstanding—and ultimately this seeming scientifikal fact limits his options. “If I escaped,” he reasoned, “everybody would believe I was guilty of all that jive, those trumped-up charges. At the same time I knew darn well the power structure is going to move and do everything they can to try to convict me and railroad me into prison and the electric chair.” And there’s no glory in damning yourself to the living/dying embodiment of Eric Haze’s iconic Death Row Records logo, is there?

10.

Black people must ultimately come to realize that such coalitions, such alliances have not been in their interest…[I]n fact, the whites enter the alliance in many cases precisely to impede that progress.

—Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967)

Ture and Hamilton point to labor unions to emphasize “the treacherous nature of coalitions.” As unions achieved collective bargaining rights nationwide, Black workers experienced “deterioration.” In the 1940s, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (Suede’s new crew name, if I had my way) got their victory, but Black laborers were contracted out of the union. Ture and Hamilton quote Myrna Bain: “The excuse was advanced that, since their union contract specified ‘whites only,’ they could not and would not change this to provide continued employment for the Negroes who were at the plant before the union was recognized.”

“Fuck what you got,” AJ Suede raps, liberals, well-wishers, and allies “can’t change spots.” In fact, it’s not a matter of “can’t”—they won’t change spots. The only math they know is a zero-sum game. “After handshakes people still change plans,” so like Public Enemy said, you can’t truss it. 

11.

What recourse does AJ Suede have? He signals the skies and gathers the [Black] powers available to him. He recruits Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington III’s Static, giving props to Virgil Hawkins’ namesake static bolts that sizzle and criss-cross into a Malik El-Shabazz “X” on the front panel of his cap. He hangs a banner from the 1994 inaugural issue: YOU DON’T START NONE THERE WON’T BE NONE. Time is illmatic, of course, and Nas tells us he “keep[s] static like wool fabric”—linking electricity, beef, and even “the kinkiness of Black people’s hair.”

Suede calls upon Black Lightning, tapping his ability to ionize illbient beats and throw up a force field before fists. He brings in Black Vulcan from the Super Friends in case they need to spot-weld the Fugees' "Ready or Not" submarine (on loan). He looks to da baddest bitch—no, not Trina (though she fellates at a pace “like lightning”)—but to Storm, relying on her to psionically and atmokinetically keep the peace. Hardware heads over with metal alloys looted from Alva Industries. In the same way Milestone Comics diverged from the prevailing archetypes and tokenism of Black superheroes, AJ Suede builds a posse that can apply pressure through a low-pass filter or phaser.

“Most Black Superheroes” survives on the subtle cracking and clicking of the Geiger counter in a tick-tock Doomsday clock loop rendered rhythmic: a molecular metronome. Drums tapped out on a cellar circuit breaker rather than an SP-404. Yes, most Black superheroes use electricity, and AJ Suede turns his sine waves square through a fuzz pedal. He abuses the tube amp until he achieves Electro Harmonix. He regulates the barometric pressure between Seattle and Bristol, rhyming at a rainy-day downtempo BPM, tautens the tripwire, and sends the circuit breaker tripping. His woofers thud the trunk of the jeep with melanated melankolic bass tones. “Most Black Superheroes” is an electric boogaloo of AJ Suede’s own mad scientist invention—a hip-hop park jam of resistance and Vedic possibilities where ohm meets om.

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3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

Notes pad but not limited to that. If I could, I’d do the Jay-Z thing and memorize bar-for-bar, but at this point I just write everything down so I don’t forget.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

I write in ways that are more like mathematical equations. Time signatures, iambic pentameter, and rhyme schemes I vaguely remember from smoking before my 10th grade English class in the Shakespeare unit. That mixed with the fundamentals. It’s all math. 

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

Complicated question because even the “bad” stuff can be repurposed when it’s in season. Some of the bars might not flow because of time and place, but that’s always subject to change and vice versa.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

There are things that I want to do, but I don’t wanna say preemptively. I’d rather show if I end up being serious about it.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I don’t often edit verses, but the longest part of all the album processes are the mix and master. Especially for the self-produced projects.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

There’s no right answer. Every song and beat combination requires different things. I do prefer to write to a beat 90% of the time, but sometimes you unlock new pockets when you write in silence and puzzle piece it together.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

No comment. Can’t demystify the whole process.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

Anything goes based on what the beat demands. I like to be like water; my style is similar to Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. It’s a mixture of all the fundamentals, but I assume formlessness based on the musical situation. The stronger the foundation, the more flows and schemes you have access to. It’s just a matter of where and when each style is going to present itself.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

I love all my kids, but always proud of the verse that I haven’t written yet. That will be the best one every time.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

I wholeheartedly wish I could. I’ll leave that to the people.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

Yes, I do feel strongly about punch-ins. I will restart a whole verse before I allow myself to punch-in. I can always hear the punch-in, even on other artists' songs. If you have to punch-in a million times, your live show is going to be a disaster. Punch-in artists often perform with their vocals playing over the instrumental. A real lack of breath control. If you’re doing it from an artistic standpoint, call-and-response etc., I understand. 

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

I would be here all day. I love a lot of music.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I’ve spent less time with self-doubt than most others, but it is a very natural feeling. I believe in what I can do and I’m validated by most of our favorite rappers, so I know I’m dope.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

ABSOLUTELY NOBODY. We all start off similar in one way or another from childhood influences, but I been in the game a long enough time that my rap DNA is 100% my own.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I just want to make the best music and let that speak for itself. I don’t have any concerns in the rap world. I just want to make a living off the music and take care of my own. 

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.