V. Bozeman isn’t your typical artist, especially when it comes to issues addressing self-identity, perceptions of beauty and cultural assimilation. This Black woman is creating music on the outskirts of popular music. She’s flippin’ the script and making the masses come to her instead of the other way around. Ballsy. But true to self.
V. Bozman has penned a deep and penetrating ode on the periphery of commercialism. She swings a heavy bat and breaks open a pathway illuminating the underpinnings of self-loathing and cultural despair. But in the end this is about introspection and rebirth: the veritable Phoenix affect. A people arising from the ashes of self-hate. This is music as an antibody attacking a deceased host. Not a cancer per se but the antidote.
The track Race Jones is a thrashing river threading its way through the gray matter of your consciousness. A river cresting the banks ans washing way the old and making way for possibilities. It is both silt fertilizing fields and salt stinging within ancient wounds still fresh with pain a thousand years old. It rattles cages, slaps faces wide awake and combats the very real issues of race and identity. Period.
This is the African Holocaust, Jim Crowism, Strange Fruit, The Black Panther Movement, Four Little Black Girls Blown To Bits, The Civil Rights Era. MLK and Malcolm X. It is every inhumane atrocity perpetuated against black skin the world over rooted in bigotry, racism and racial prejudice. This is the song we sing when we hand gospel songs back to the plantation from whence they came.
In short, the song encapsulates the very real psychological aspects of what it means to be assaulted by, to struggling with, and coming to terms with race from a victims point of view. But, more than anything Race Jones is about coming out of the other side a survivor. Not solely just a survivor for the sake of surviving. But a survivor in the sense of having become a well-developed and self-aware individual who looks into the mirror and loves the image reflected back. Yes. Black is indeed beautiful. Peace.
Artist: V. Bozeman
Album: Music Is My Boyfriend
Featured Track: Race Jones
Lyrics:
I’m Black! Matter fact I’m blacker than that.
I’m Black in yo face and I’m black when you turn your back.
Black when you stare. Black if you smile.
I was black back when it wasn’t even in style
Blacker than before the movie starts during the trauma and the laughter
The light-hearted jokes and in the end I’m black right back after.
Blacker than being burned and I still didn’t crack cracker
I’m already black as hell then I go an act even blacker
Blacker the right, blacker the wrong
A work in progress, a work of art
But my black is not painted on. NAW it’s the way I was born.
THEY CALL ME RACE JONES
Blacker than a panther made of black lacquer
Blacker than cancer. Blacker than chewed up tobacco
And the only reason I’m not blacker than Santa, is because Santa was my Grandma. Santa was Nana.
JUST LET IT BREATHE!
I often imagine, my skin being lighter and the sun shining brighter,
my hair being longer and somewhere I belong to a house being bigger and not being a nigga.
They would pay to paint then it gets in my eyes and I can’t see
And my friends love me so much that they’re afraid to say that it ain’t me
But they let me fake it because they still need me to make it
Give ’em a piece of your mind and not your heart cause they’ll break it.
OOOOOH! HELL ACCEPT IT! ACCEPT ME!
FOREVER AND EVER!
HELP ME! HELP ME!
BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACK!
BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACK!
BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACK!
BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACKER THAN BLACK!