R.A.P. Ferreira - Respectdue (video premiere)

what if we could stretch out further? what if vitality was a virtue? what if you knew me by my drums? by my vocabulary? by how i make my sinews expand at will to encompass whatever i wish?

it became imperative sometime last year that i begin to make music under my real name. as fate would have it my chosen stage name had become tarnished by dubious associations both psychic and actual, categorical and mistaken. in short, there was jus too much baggage with the old four letter nom de guerre. and that's what it was. but now, i write songs and i know they shine particularly.

this song is called Respectdue. it samples myka 9 of freestyle fellowship for the hook. it has a thunderous bass line. i told kenny i wanted my own "don't sweat the technique", somn to lay down some principles to. the jefferson park boys are kenny segal, mike parvizi and aaron carmack as well as their homies and cohorts who circle in and out of their homes, studios and shared neighborhood of, you guessed it, jefferson park. they are musicians of another caliber, which is to say they've moved beyond base motivations and are refining and have been refining their craft into expertise daily for several years. what i'm trying to say is these doods are heavyhitters and it ain't no joke to have their ear, their eye or their attention. i don't take their work for granted and i want(ed) each word to fit like the jewels in the gem encrusted sheath of the illest ceremonial sword. peace to the JPB!

in my own journey as an artist i've come, after years of avoidance (honestly), to the frontier of abstraction. i'm trying to cut down my economy of words, i'm trying to rap how i speak or how i remember speaking in dreams but without missing a beat or a cadence. i'm finding natural speaking cadences to be my biggest source of inspiration, especially from my family. at 27, i have been rapping to eat for 8 years and i crib/steal from whomever whenever it pleases me. there are no rules to making art and certainly not rap other than to be dope. this is a game. the universe wants to play and i do too. what's most exciting is if one plays well one could potentially wind up with ... land?

that is what i would do with Rapper Money.
i'd buy an old ass motel and the land around it.
i'd flip the rooms into studios for artists and the center pool into a food forest.

i mean i'm cappin right now but i'm not.

anyway.

Respectdue

this song--
what does it represent?

it's the first one i've ever put out using my real name.
suppose that means something

custard (film debut)

peace to all reading this.

back in the afrolab 9000 from some 29,000,000 miles of travel the last couple months.
in march, on tour, my ifone broke in many pieces so i replaced it with a
flip fone. this joint has me properly tuned up again as a 90s baby should be--
i'm connected but not to the hive mind, to tendrils. i can text and call, no apps doe.
parroting mark gonzalez, does a parent really need a smartphone? probably not.
let's read more. my son imitates me whenever i read. that alone was plenty reason for me.

an interesting effect too has been how profound the trauma and death spectres of
social media attack me now that i spend longer space away from them. someone posted a video
of a father being accosted by police on his yard as the police called him by numerous identities other than his, and told him of warrants that were impossible to have been his, and the psychic barrage was immediate, tissue deep. my heart racing. programming already unfolding itself onto me. whomever makes these videos wants me to be panicking, whether they consider themselves my ally or not is almost irrelevant at this point, my panic is being actively sought.

what's disturbing about this line of thinking is that i am already quite familiar with the concept of the allostatic load. this is the amount of stress one's body can handle before destruction. i assume that what is available to me is available to anyone else sophisticated enough to make these videos day in and out, and the culture it creates, of panic, of worry, of stress.

life is for enjoyment, for loving, for creating beauty, for humor, for building, healing, and cultivating understanding. at minimum, that is the good and noble work. doing this despite life's shit odds and chances is what makes the sweet twinkle, what lends the shiver inducing quality when Busta commands: "we gon sparkle now". and if that opportunity, to sparkle, doesn't ever come again-- to demand upfront the appropriate exit from the game, on one's feet, staring in the eyes of the aggressor and yielding nothing. we are hunting grins and belly laughs, on the prowl for the Good Time, can you hear that beat? 

as an artist i want to add propaganda to the social sphere that i think operates as an antibiotic to the allostatic load, to the worry they systematically breed into us. i want to make work that invites meditation and instills a rhythm of peace in the participants.

with that thought in mind, i worked on a short film called custard. it follows my last month's travels, in quiet beats, with friends, on a quest to bring beauty to people far from home. we will never fall the fuck off, we promise.