Still Runnin'
Lyric Breakdown #1: Tracing The Ideas Behind The Music
There is a certain amount of self mythologizing that comes from explaining one’s work.
Something I’m very proud of is that all my original lyrics come from study of Black scholars and political frameworks. Some lyrics are crass, blunt, and violent, but I do believe every layer is deliberate and well thought out.
Introducing the literature, thought, or event that inspired each line I think may open the hood of the music, transcending it from “shocking” and “powerful” to “grounding” and “understood.”
Still Runnin’ was written in the basement of my friend Eli’s childhood home in Eagle Rock in late 2019. There were too many of us at the session, but that was deliberate. I thought it would be funny to have a ridiculous crew of people try to write a silly song. A group of people who had never worked together before.
Still Runnin’ was written collaboratively by Eli Fowler, Emily Shearman, Ben Higginbotham, and Blaize Adam, produced by Aoun Hamid, and featured musical contributions from Guillermo Goldshmeid and Jacori Robinson.
Originally, it started as a song about partying, but as we wrote we found it would shift in and out of political commentary. We finished the first verse, chorus, and outro, and left the session having succumbed to the second verse curse, that stanza remaining blank for several months.
On May 25th, 2020, a few months into the global lockdown, George Floyd was murdered by the police. His killing briefly changed the world. The country mobilized in droves to protest his killing.
Despite medical recommendations and mandates to remain in the house, I, among 10s of 1000s of people attended protests with a rage in my spirit. Feet to the ground, tutorials on how to stay safe, spray bottles of milk to fight the pepper spray.
I watched as cop cars drove by our groups, many of them laughing at the spectacle. I couldn’t hear the words they said but there was abundant inference available from the wrinkles below their eyes and the angle of their smiles.
“Don’t these idiots know we’re here to protect them”
“They don’t even know what they’re protesting.”
At one of the protests I was badly pepper sprayed. I don’t remember what escalated it, just that at one point my eyes were burning and I could not see. I ran to the side of the street to wash out my eyes with the 2% milk I had brought with me, and promptly called an Uber home. This was not my first protest, but it was the first where I had experienced physical harm.
I had been protesting with BLM , doing marches, and sit-ins since 2014, when we were protesting Micahel Brown on Berklee and Boston campus.
What felt different to me is that there were so many more people showing up for George Floyd. People of all races.
White people I went to high school would message me apologizing for past behavior, beg me for insight on how to stand up, I wondered what made this different. I had been making the same pleas, the same arguments, and marching the same routes since 2014. My parents and grandparents have had this same fight since inception. But finally it felt like some people were showing up and understanding.
I like to paint myself a realist who fights optimistically. I think for the first time white people had to sit with no other stimulus. The lock down forced people to bear witness, and did not allow anyone to look away from the injustice they’ve been ignoring their whole lives. And because they had nothing else to care about at the time, they began to care about Black people.
This became the framework for this song, and I was finally able to finish the second verse.
Still Runnin’
I need no introduction
When i pull up at the function
There is a Japanese Personality test where one of the prompts is designed to understand one’s ego.
Upon taking it, I’ve discovered that my ego is massive, unbelievably large, practically unscalable.
Mind erupts, my third eye is open
There is often a layer of denial that comes before one understands racism.
I’m pointing to when I came to understand the world for what it is, and not what I believe it to be, increasing my clarity.
I get dumb but I be knowing
In real life, I consider myself jovial and silly.
Then eventually, with every new friend, there will be a conversation that unlocks a deeper layer of understanding.
I do attempt to be analytical, emotionally literate, and thoughtful. I have faults but I think my goofiness and my thoughtfulness are both very extreme in the spectrum and one only works with the other.
All I see is liars and choosers.
There was a group of white men I thought I was very close with in college. We would party, drink, hang out, play video games. At one particular party, midway through Senior year, the police were coming to investigate a noise complaint.
All of us hid in the back hallway while one of the house mates went to send them away. He charmingly convinced the police there was no one in the apartment and that they got a false alarm or a wrong address.
Once the police left, all of us came flooding out of the hallway giggling and reaching for another PBR to play flip cup with.
As the police drove away that white boy yelled out the window “Fuck the popo, nigga!!!!”
I was a bit stunned. So I chose to leave the party. I pulled him to the side before our conducting 2 class and said “Hey man, I don’t think you meant anything by this, but when you said ‘fuck the popo, nigga’ I was really uncomfortable.” He apologized profusely and I dapped him up and assured him we’re cool.
I was never invited to a party at that house again.
There was a white producer from that same friend group I was working with in 2017. Incredibly talented. We were friends for years and had plans to play a major music festival together that summer. At another party, as we listened to music, he chose to rap “nigga” along with whatever Migos song was playing. Fed up with diplomacy I shouted, “Yo cut that nigga shit out over there!” and then returned to the party.
A few days later that producer asked me to meet him for a conversation.
When we met he told me “Hunter, you made a lot of people uncomfortable at the party when you called me out.”
I said “Were those people white people?”
He pauses and goes “Yea.”
And I said “maybe you should talk to the Black people who were uncomfortable with you saying nigga,” and then walked away.
During 2020, he began posting about how upsetting the BLM movement was and that he needs to stand up for racial equality.
In the past few years as a producer he’s contributed to Megan Thee Stallion’s discography. I haven’t spoken to him since 2018.
This lyric is mostly about the white men who claimed to be my friend, violated our friendship with the slur, distanced themselves from me, and then chose to be publicly sympathetic to race relations.
They will continue to capitalize on Black entertainment at the highest level, with likely little to no public reconciliation with the harm they’ve perpetuated. And I will look back on those moments wishing I did a better job of standing up for myself.
I was a king till my mind was ruined.
I couldn’t sing till my worth was proven
Once my perception of the world shifted, I felt much smaller.
However after studying, reading literature, and examining my place in the world, I feel comfortable speaking up.
I am fascinated and enamored with the political philosophies of the Black Panther Political Party, so much so that I have a tattoo of their logo on my left arm.
One of their most important internal tenants is that political education is not optional.
My college mentor often refers to contemporary writers as plagiarists.
With that in mind, I think it’s so important that I engage with the study of the great thinkers like Carter G Woodson, Malcolm X, W.E.B Dubois and so many more before I share my own work to make sure I am expanding upon ideas, not regurgitating.
If you have read Ta-naheisi Coates (who I adore) without having read James Baldwin, you lose the shoulders that Coates stands upon.
Please clear the room if you’re not with the movement
How you sittin down when the bass still runnin’?
How you stayin still when the place keep jumpin’?
Yea we takin shots, while the streets still gunnin’?
How you sittin down when the bass still runnin’?
The chorus invokes the imagery of a party.
How can you stay still at this party while the music is loud and unavoidable?
But then in the third line, “Yea we takin shots” the shots become both alcohol shots and literal gun shots moving the imagery to critique those who are able to stand on the sidelines while great violence happens, loud and unavoidable.
Working on my masterpiece
They said im too dastardly
Fetish for all the anarchy
In these lyrics the narrator has moved on from the questions being asked in the chorus. The masterpiece is a world without racism, however to achieve that the narrator sees himself as needing to become a villain.
If I’m deceased, don’t ask police.
In the original version of this song the lyric was “horny for some deceased police.”
I thought this was obvious satire but enough conversations over the year have shown me it is not universally received as such.
So I softened the line to make it more palatable and more defensible.
IF you find me dead, don’t expect the police to answer any questions.
They said I’m being too extreme
I say that’s my reality
So come on over valerie
I got wine at the house
This lyric is actually a throwaway.
As a professional musician, I’ve had to play Valerie for work at nearly every professional function for nearly 15 years. I hate the song Valerie, and I thought quoting it would be a fun and callous lyric to fit into this space. The casualness it fits in, I think highlights just how normal the violence in the earlier verse is. It’s as ubiquitous as a song like Valerie.
I got Wine at the House is both an invitation to sip on a crisp Sauvignon Blanc but also a nod to Amy Wine * House*
Black blood on the pavement
Black blood helps to pay rent
And we the ones on gang shit?
I really have to say this?
The work of Cedric Robinson and Waltner Rodney very cleanly illustrates the relationship with race, racism, and capitalism.
This is not meant as a metaphor, as much as an illustration that violence on Black people quite literally keeps the capitalist engine running.
With this knowledge, is incredulous that Black people are the ones who are depicted as violent.
Im drownin in these libations
Fuck all this being patient , man fuck!
How you sittin down when the bass still running
how you stayin still when the place keep jumpin?
Yea we takin shots, while the streets still gunnin
How you sittin down when the bass still running
Alicia’s barely walkin down her street
Wondering why would Tarzan ever leave
It was so simple in the jungle
No need to barter for your hunger
It was so simple in the jungle.
These lyrics were meant to imagine a world where capitalism does not exist.
Why would Tarzan leave the jungle when all the things he needs, food, water, community are present.
The human world is much more unjust, and the cruelty is conjured.
That life seems appealing to me, more than Jane or ever could be.