Last month, Shabaka announced his new album Of The Earth and released the singles "A Future Untold" and "Marwa The Mountain." Now, he's back with "Eyes Lowered."
"Within the process of compiling my beats, I had this idea that it would be cool to rap, but I hadn’t done it before," the British musician said, continuing:
This became a really fulfilling exercise in approaching a new creative endeavor from scratch and trying to figure out what I’m guided towards. One of the last things Wayne Shorter told me as I visited his house in the year before his passing was an adage Art Blakey would recite to his bandmates: "Gents, you can’t hide behind your horn forever." I take from this proclamation a call to confront all aspects of the emotional self, a rejection of self-imposed definitions, not hiding behind identity frameworks imparted by any particular medium and the acknowledgement that at some point there will be a reckoning whereby it won’t be about what you can play on the instrument you’ve spent the most time practicing and systematizing, it won’t be about skill or perfection, it will be about music and the depth of transmission. Sometimes the pursuit of technical prowess dumbs us to this dimension of awareness.
While writing I kept coming back to the dialogue between Tupac (posthumously) and Kendrick Lamar at the outro of the last song on "To Pimp A Butterfly." It kept me grounded. Kendrick ruminates on the centrality of vibrations in the space where he’s deep in the music. He says when he’s behind the mic he doesn’t know what sort of energy will come out, to which Tupac replies "because the spirits, we ain’t even really rapping no more, we just letting our dead homies tell stories for us." This notion of surrender and the ability to channel words from a source that goes beyond the temporal plane freed me up from needing to rationalize why I’m choosing to write anything in particular. Letting my mind go and my pen flow.
Listen below.
Of The Earth is out 3/6 via Shabaka Records.
