Q: (manuel@salon) What makes boohab so damn fresh?
A: I'm unleashed. I've been able to dip into a lot of flavors and they compliment my native tongue. Totally unrepentent and satisfied with my inner homeboy, I'm grounded and secure. I never let tragedy destroy me, just re-orient my baseline. So every victory is cream. It took years of grief and facing unanswerable questions and hundreds of pages of fine print in my journal agonizing over the arcane. What is America? Why are things fucked up? How am I supposed to deal with this? Am I black? How can I succeed? How do I cope with failure? Most frightening of all I took it public, and opened up bold enough to be laughed at - not for the sake of acceptance, but for the sake of engagement, 'and dem respond!'.
I recognized the power of poetry while trying to explain Bootsy. All you can do is repeat him. Ah, you can't explain him, baby bubba. So I let my own words twist a bit, and labored to lift with a verbal riff. In time, what once went clunk, found the rhythms of funk.
The realization came that history is long and deep. Others bodacious encouraged my actions. Who was I to be called a leader, with only 55 names in my little black book? So there must be more to learn and do. Happy as I was, I just had to get my philosophy straight. And so a new journey began.
Listen closely. It's the simplest and most profound advice. And so I did and became a remix of Emerson, George Clinton, Sonny Rollins, Stephen Crane, Henrik Ibsen, Moliere, Umberto Eco, Richard Feynman, Malcolm X, Akira Kurosawa, Ishmael Reed, Jose Luis Borges, Sandro Chia, Yukio Mishima, Broun Fellinis, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Cornel West, and beleive it or not Booker T. Washington. All that and family too.
I'm only fresh for a while, but recognition makes me smile.