When you inhabit the city, you cannot shake the city. A city can get inside of you: its noise, neon lights, concrete, and hard smells too, like exhaust and ripening refuse. Hard with soft interiors. Fast paced, but loving slow and thoughtful behind closed doors. The city. It beckons many; to write or flight. D-Town denizen Boog Brown (now an ATL resident) personifies her hometown to the core, but don’t think gritty or whatever other negative connotations you conjure up at the mere mention of the Motor City. Instead, just listen to Boog Brown‘s flow and let her paint a different definition; rap has vocalized portraiture. Let the stereotypical fall to the wayside, and allow Ms. Brown to reassign the colors on the canvas of your mind. Her words, paint like Lucile Clifton verse. Better yet, let her cast vibrant moving bodies drawing historical reference. South to North, and in her case traveling back south again. Not retrograde nor regression, but akin to the Sankofa bird; looking back to see one’s way forward. Watch her paint, much like an augmented work of Jacob Lawrence and his profound Great Migration series. It’s all there in The Brown Study Remixes, the lows seeking higher ground, the ugly burgeoning with potential beauty, and above all, resilience and wisdom mastering its lower-self. Cities can be tough, make no mistake about it. But cities, like life itself, is also survivable; even desirable. Inhale. Detritus and refuse disintegrating, spoiling under a hot sun and critical eyes. The smog, exhaust, foul-mouthed spectres and city saints there here, and interwoven throughout this metroscape there exist their stories. Stories not all bad, not all good. Learn from the bad, but cherish the good. Like the poetry which drifts from the full-bodied honey hued lips of Boog Brown. Peace.
Where the food sounds good, and the music is pretty tasty too.