“As an artist, I love wordplay. I love being artistic and creative, but I love being communal and I love being practical.” – Bomani Armah
Excerpt from an interview between Bomani Armah and Jessica Wallach (lightly edited)
As an artist, I love wordplay. I love being artistic and creative, but I love being communal and I love being practical.
It’s the kind of art that I want to make. I don’t want to be over people’s heads. I want to be so accessible that young people catch me immediately, but also deep enough that 10 years later they’ll come back and listen to it.
I want them to think, “I didn’t even catch that other metaphor, and it didn’t even matter at the time. But now that I’m a grown person, I catch this other thing that he was saying, but even at the moment it was easy and it was accessible.”
So being an accessible hip-hop artist before I was a teaching hip-hop artist made that transition very, very easy for me.
My songs were about loving your neighbor and about appreciation for my community from the beginning. I wouldn’t curse and I would be talking about family.
My non-offensive rhymes meant I didn’t have to switch up my style. I think when you’re doing something for children, it needs to be formatted for children.
Influences
My earliest artistic influences are gospel and Go Go music. I feel like it’s a responsibility to get some kind of response and reaction because that’s what you do in gospel and Go Go Music.
I definitely was deeper into gospel music than anything else as a child growing up in a very religious family. And then hip hop started happening around me. I think a lot of my peers might have been more into hip hop sooner than I was. My family didn’t listen to secular music at all so I had to hear it outside the house.
But then when I started being able to listen to music on my own choosing, I was a huge fan of Special Ed, Kwame, big Public Enemy and Tribe Called Quest. Tribe Called Quest’s second album is probably the first album that I had that I was like, “I love this, this is my stuff”.
Outkast is my favorite group of all time. Outkast is a huge influence.
Then in Go Go and Gospel there’d be like, Richard Smallwood, John P. Kee…and when I say gospel I, have to be careful. I haven’t listened to gospel in a while. When I say gospel, I mean like 80s, 90s gospel, probably 70s gospel as well…just combining all these.
Poets Yusef Komunyakaa, E Ethelbert Miller. My former employer is an amazing poet, Yao Glover.
So I take bits from all those.
Read more blog post in this series: Bomani Armah: Language, Math and Engineering & Rap Songs
Watch Bomani in action: Writing Process
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