The Reminders

brain dead. Yeah, you shouldn't win, Turtle Mitch still trying to shut down the government and the news got quite the addiction that got how when the white girl's missing, they don't see the indigenous victims. You're trying to talk about it, and they're like, no, listen, welcome to the show. Y'all got a bunch of dope. Should I want to show y'all? I can't believe. I just run and show y'all twice. I'm dope, Knife, Frank. We are waiting on

reparations that should be today. We're here with Barls born mc Disna and Queen's born m C and vocalist Asia Black. Together they are the reminders both married couple and hip hop duo based in Colorado. So thank you so much for joining us. How many you can tell us a little bit a bit about who you are and what your roots are, both musically and politically. Okay, I'm Baxa Mayor. I was born in Belgium, raised in Congo, moved around quite a bit. My mother remarried. My stepfather was in

the Air Force, so I landed in Colorado. UM musician, father, husband, just all around hard worker and uh, you know, I just stand for I just stand for the people, for what I believe in, um spiritually and and just you know, I'm here to uplift people. So mine is my Both of my parents are from the House Queens. I was born in House Queens. My whole family is from Howes Queens. UM my my grandmother, my mom is Puertrican and Dominican,

uh and my dad is Jamaican and French Creole. And I have super duper hip hop roots in my family just because being from Holles Queens, my aunts and uncles and dads were there in the seventies eighties when all of this stuff was really starting to come in and pop off in My grandfather is actually one of the first black reporters for the New York times. Um, he tried to be an editor, and they said that his race kept him from having that as a possibility, and

that kind of broke my grandfather's spirit. But on my father's side of the family, where my grandfather is, they've always been very involved in political understandings. On my mother's side, it's always been very involved in politics in terms of how they infected the community. So I remember one thing

my grandfather told me. I was young and the nineties and everybody's ranting Malcolmax shirts and everything, and my grandfather was like, if only he would have had that support when it mattered, Um, it was dangerous for people to be associated with Malcolm X or Martin Luther King at the time because people are losing their jobs. Um, they're

being oppressed for different reasons. They were being blacklisted if they were supporting out of these movements and they had white employers, and so, you know, my grandfather kind of brought that to me. And I've been, you know, championing different causes ever since I was small because I was encouraging that way. What would you say is y'all's biggest music influences? Oh Man? When I was I was raised, my parents I really a clept the music taste, so

jazz blues. My mom really liked like Woodstock type of music, like rock music, because she understood that it was a derivative of blues, and so it was really important for in my house for us to understand every kind of music. I was really inspired by Lauren Hill when I was young. I loved larn Hill, but I also loved Miles Davis. I love Prince Um. I really used to love Freddie Mercury uh a lot because I loved how he I loved watching him as much as I loved watching James

Brown people like that. So for me growing up, you know, I grew up in the Congo, so a lot of Congolese music like Papa Wembay. But then when I moved to Belgium, one of the first artists I listened to was Michael Jackson, you know, in the eighties, and then from there it's everything from classic rock for jazz, reagae um, you know, pop, R and B, just everything in the soun Just do you feel um those influences come out

and what you guys have been making. Yeah, mostly I think for me, mostly in my creative process, I really like artists like New York like I like artists that have really open, honest freedom of expression, um in their creativities. At Mamma is the same way. She kind of just starts to basic sonic elements to start putting me together. So definitely comes out because my music will go from reggae to hip hop too, blues, two roots to America,

like kind of all over the place. Yeah. So any born in New York, but you got family from Puerto Rico and Jamaica, and Samir you hail from Belgium, but you're racing the Congo. And I'm very curious how your experiences of of a blackness outside of the US or you know, drawing from other places in the Dietsphora influence

your view of your your music as well as your worldview. Um. You know, one thing Asian and I always talk about is how growing up in the Congo we had we deal more of colonization and not so much slavery, So that was more of my upbringing was more of uh, you know the history of people coming into your country and taking over there, right and then you know my

my my mom is half Congoles, half Belgium. So then we we went back and forth between Belgium and the Congo and just feeling like an outcast whenever we're in Belgium, like they don't want you there, but somehow they came to your country and took over, do you know what I mean? And it's the same experience for even Algerians in France. But then coming to America, I got to I got to see and experience something completely different, um,

with the black American experience. Talking about slavery and where uh where a lot of the history come from h starts and where uh. You know a lot of Americans say, you know, I don't know anything. Ask this in terms of where I'm trunk, you know, in terms of my lineage and things like that. So um, you know, I'm thankful for the for the rich history that that I haven't that I can that I can U go back to,

you know. Um, but I know it's it's different for here. Yeah, my experience with blackness is very interesting because I was raised like super black, like in a super duper black household, like in kindergarten. My mom has a picture of me and I have like eyes on the prize shirt, you know what I mean, Like super duper like black history trivia games. You know, my father, my grandfather's half white, um and then have a quarter Cherokee and quarter black.

My grandfather worked for the New York Times. But we were always just raised black, like. I never questioned my blackness, right, White people always said I was black, like I was always black. And then when I went I went to Florida and m for college, and that was the first time anybody ever questioned my blackness because of the way that I spoke or the way that I navigated things,

or my ideas or it wasn't at the time. It wasn't popular in two thousand and one to have an afro and to like be natural, like this whole natural movement was not there. So I was holding that the whole thing down solo, you know what I mean. And they were saying, like, you look like animal from them

up with babies. And I had a culture shock because you know, in New York is so diverse, right, and you see people that look like you and that don't look like you, and you kind of feel the same way about it, you know, And then and fam, I kind of have culture shock. Then my father got stationed in Colorado and we came to Colorado, and I had culture shop there too, because it was all white people everywhere, you know what I mean, And and they were I was very black to them, you know what I mean.

Our friends started this project called the Very Black Project, and I told him, I like that you started this project because my experiences having to tell people all the time, no, I'm not just black, I'm very black. Like I'm a very black person whether I'm kayaking or fishing or enjoying Freddie Murcury or b York. Like, I'm a very black person. And our identity is infinitely expensive and all directions. And just because you have a limited understanding of blackness, it

doesn't compromise my blackness in any way, you know. And I think my experience with blackness has really just been defending the expansiveness of it, whether it's Afro Latina, whether it's black people being able to be light skinned, very very light skinned, all the way to the tip of creole people. Two people in Africa, you know, talking to them about the African American experience, Like it's always just

been in defensive blackness is expensiveness. My experience with them, we talked a little bit about lineages, um and you know a lot of people like we you know, I myself, I'm the whole y'all line. But like my you know, millennials and gen Z and younger, we're actually like the post hip hop generation. So we were like, you know, we may have uncles or parents that were growing up, um when hip hop we was like first kind of popping off, I'm taking taking the world by storm, but

we've sort of come into it. It's like a second

uh second wave of of its of its evolution. And then particularly I mean as hip hop spread across the country, there was also this disconnect from how it was very rooted in like the geography of New York City and the culture of New York City and so um age, I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about, um uh, the connections that you have sort of like the genesis of hip hop with like battery and right in your family, those folks being actually

involved in like when it was popping off, and how I might give you a different perspective than some of us who maybe removed either geographically or generationally or otherwise from like the roots of what hip hop is. Yeah. Sure, So my uncle was a DJ Blue Massive Beef, So he used to do like all the park dams and stuff like that. My mom uh new Rust of Simmons and ran DFC so before Rust of Simmons had Deaf

Champ Pop and off. He used to hand out flyers and stuff for part dams and my mom would help him. My other aunt was dating Curtis Blow at the time. My uncle designed the first logo and T shirts for Biggie Down Productions, very involved in it. But one thing I learned, because it's like a lot of people like I referenced my like ethnic cultural backgrounds, but my cultural background is music, like growing up in music and an

urban environment and hip hop pretty much. So what I learned about hip hop is that hip hop is like a vehicle. It's like a spirit, like a vehicle, right, and it aligns itself with the stories of the youth, like it aligns itself to maintain its life. It has to get fresh stories and fresh perspectives and fresh understandings. So I've never been a person that's rooted in what

hip hop definitively is, you know what I mean. I've always been a person that understood that it's going to change shape and or based on who it's aligning itself

with and how they're expressing it, you know. And so I get in a conversation with old heads all the time, Like I'm all, you always see me arguing with like some old hip hop heads saying, I understand that when you were growing up, it was this expression that you had, but it's almost like a memory, I mean, of some thing being extant cement and not being fluid, you know

what I mean. And so I'm always encouraging young people because for a long time, stories of people like us were suppressed, you know what I mean, like really pushed down, like you couldn't tell these you couldn't people would never hear these stories of the things that were happening in our neighborhoods. If you were like a kid that was still closeted and was coming from a rough neighborhood, there was no place for you to tell your story, not on TV, not on music, not in in books anything

like that, you know. And Audrey Lord is somebody who always talks about that a lot, the important importance of finding a medium through which to express yourselves, you know, and hip hop just happens to be the most successible. Yeah. I mean you can go on YouTube and get beats and download them and wrap to them. You can just like have your friend beatbox. You can just snap and wrap. It's a very accessible art form that allows people to

express their stories easily and fully. You know, whether they can do it at the capacity of kendrickal Mark really isn't the purpose of it, right, It's really just letting people know that they have that vehicle. When hip hop was first coming out, you have people on the East Coast, like in New York, putting the life experience into music, and the people around could relate because they you know,

they're telling the story of what's actually happening, right. And then then on the West Coast was the same thing, whether it be the game band culture on the Bay, the pimp culture, and everybody around was like, Yo, this is our lifestyle and this is what we were rocked. Even run DMC like, Yo, we rock aldi we dressed like this. And it wasn't until you had music videos that people started seeing, Oh, that's how it is on that side, that's s how it is on this side.

The difference with you know me at the time I grew up in Belgium in late eighties, and it made no difference. We didn't know what East Coast West Coast was.

It was just all music. It was just all hip hop, you know what I mean, So we all that's how that's how hip hop reached people overseas, was that we just took it all as one one music and not necessarily East Coast, West Coast or you know what I mean, not exactly and and and I always always like to bring that up because, um, you know, when people come from New York they have that experience, and people come from certain certain parts of the country, but when people

come from outside of the country, they just took it all in as as just one body of music, and I just appreciated it off what it was. It's it's interesting in hip hop because like most music changes hands regionally, right, It's like you go from East Coast to West Coast to this style or even blues you have like Hill blues and Delta blues and Chicago blues. But hip hop

changes forms generationally, you know what I mean. It like changed forms first regionally, and it was just such a big thing that then now it's like, but now I'm going by generation, not by region, you know what I mean.

I think the internet was huge in that book. It's interesting to watch it because people really hold tight to their definitions of it, and then when the next generation gets in their hand, they're like putting hip hop, you know what I mean, and they're like, it's almost inevitable. I'm imagining, like in the net like six or seven years, you're gonna have people who are like being like, ah,

he's sixteen year olds. Just so I don't know how it was like, yeah, back in two thousand and fifteen, when hip hop is really good, hip hop is like it's a rebellious spirit, like it sparks, It sparks something inside of people that gives them the courage to express themselves in the ways that they need to express themselves. I mean, that's why hip hop and politics are so closely a line, very closely a line. It's a very

intimate relationship between those two things. And we're already at the age now where you know, songs are being remade that we were listening to, you know what I mean, not too long what feels like not too long ago, and kids they're remaking it and I'm like, what are you doing to this. He's sounded like our parents, you know what I mean, like whenever uh snooping, Dr dre was sample and stuff. And but what's interesting is that our son will play if he hears a song it

came out two years ago, He's like, no back. I'm like, that's just two years ago. Like to me, a throw back and something twenty years Well, how old is your son? Wantes he like the seven or yeah, so like two years. It's like his whole I half was like throw back years.

It's relative. I think that might be a way of how we consume media now though, because I even find myself when i'm you know, going on YouTube and I'm looking for videos like if I see something that came out like even last week and yeah, yeah, so I don't need to watch that. I'm good exactly, You've got like eight seconds of it and say you saw it, Yeah,

I saw that. As you mentioned rebellion a little bit, and also because I know you have to run, I had this question for you about on your song if you didn't know you you say you steal the key from the oppressor's at the cage bird carey, I'm paid into the cadence of Freda Scott king that he should bas Asada, Angela and Kathleen, And so I wanted I wanted to ask you in the line of talking about like what rebellion means, what do you does stealing McKey

from the oppressor mean? And how do the women you reference um in the song kind of influence your work towards that end? You know. The thing to me is it's twofolds, well even more than just twofold. I'm talking about women number one, who were women, right that were incredibly intelligent, right, And a lot of times when women who are incredibly intelligent get discredited a lot or people go out of their way to discredit their intelligence. Right,

do you have women who are very intelligent? You have in that group of them women who were mothers, right, And they were all black on it. And so what they did, like even like just rocking and natural is like a huge statement, right, or showing up somewhere with your children in your community to say, yo, like this is mad racist, right, And I got my kids, right, I'm nursing a kid, I got an afro, and I'm

like confronting the police, you know what. I just like occupying that dynamic and also like mediating conversations because of education. You know what I'm saying, Okay, look, we're gonna sit down and we're gonna have this conversation this way, learning

to understand and navigate emotion. You know. Um, I really love all of those women, all of their published works, all of the things that they said, all the things that they stood for, because a lot of times, intelligent Black women that stand up for their communities are always marked like they're just racist, right, as if race wasn't a condition that was strusted upon them, upon them to operate inside of the same thing happened with Lauren Hill.

When Lauren Hill said I don't make my music specifically for white people to listen to. It's not their experience. They're like, oh, she's a racist, But that's not a racist thing to say, but it was an honest expression.

And in naming those women and taking the key back from the oppressor is being able to stand in your being and in your person right without compromise, you know, definitely with conversation, with confrontation when it has to happen, you know, with with compassion, but not with compromise in terms of who I am as a mother, as a woman and as a black woman, all three equal of equal importance. We're gonna take a quick little break. We

will be right back after the job. So yeah, I mean, we're we're a show about hip hop and politics and most we talked about poblic policy. But there's all these ways of being political. It's into personal. It's you know, in uh, resisting oppression by standing in your truth, by being who you are. And so I think feel like you were speaking a little bit of that. But to me, I wonder if you want to librate a little bit on what you see how you see politics. Man invested

in hipop as well. For a lot of young people, for people who listen to it, sometimes that's where they find this information from. They have no idea what goes on on the news. They don't turn the TV on, but they turned the music and whether they be Kendrick the Chuck d and they get this information from there. And I've always looked up to that. I've always looked up to artists like that too, artists who who um express themselves and where they stand in the music, you

know what I mean? And I and uh and and uh. I made a conscious decision to to always do that as well, always speak my mind. When we were younger and we weren't as well in farm, all of our like the emotional center of a lot of our activism came from like anger or frustration, you know what I mean, our disappointment or and then now our activism comes from a very positive center. Like it's not reactive, you know

what I mean, it's proactive all the time. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to be reactive because of what's happening, but we try to be proactive. And the thing hip hop and politics is so dope because there are two mediums that show people that black people are not a monolate Like there's still conversations we have that we don't all think the same and we don't move the same we

don't all do the same things. But it kind of lets us see like the areas where we can have these conversations because generally it isn't until something happens and some type of activism have to take place in our to remedy what's happening or have a conversation about what's happening that people actually have a conversation. I think politics

and hip hop both do that, like very prevalently. You know, you might sometimes refer some kids are hearing about any political concept might be through a hip hop song, and the first time kids that are active on politics are hearing about community concepts are do a hip hop song, you know what I mean. So those two they're like they inform one another, hip hop and politics. Yeah, it's like to some people, hip hop makes makes it makes sense,

you know what I mean. Like you're sometimes the politics people just don't understand the language that comes from the TV, you know what I mean, They don't understand what they're reading. But then you get killed Mike. That breaks it down in the language that we speak. Now all of a sudden, people are like, oh, that's what you meant. Like now I'm putting you into together. Now it's like the total condition.

Like you have rampant conspicuous consumption and capitalism and hip hop like with flaws in and balling and all that stuff, and then you have people just talking about being dead broke and like having nothing, you know what I mean. So you get if you look at hip hop thematically, you get so many political like concepts that are available to you at one time. Like here's excess of capitalism. Right, here's when we have no community programs. What happened. Here's

people consistently being chased down by the least. Like every every political aspect, uh, every political point that's affecting that community is going to become clear right through the music you hear. It's telling the story of the communities. Um, would y'all say that y'all's music at this point is like a extension of your activism, Like do you kind of view them as one and the same? How kind

of it depends? It's like, yes, on one hand, directly, do we directly talk about political concepts a lot of the time? Yes, But in music so much stuff is veiled. Right. There's sometimes when you wrap and you're like this, this and this. But I might write a story about a sun that hasn't come out in thirty days, you know what I mean, and be talking about something very political.

But I'm a poet as well, right, So the power of being able to use metaphor is that you can give emotional context to something and give it a lot deeper meaning, you know what I mean, And when you look at a lot of poetry is also directly involved in the political and active sphere because you're basically taking

something and giving it more significance. And by taking a tangible object like say, for instance, you have UH Team Suicide, and you take a visible object that people can understand, that they can picture, that they could smell, that they could taste, that they could touch, and you explain this object and you go into depth about this object, and then you turn the object around and say this object is me right, and people go, oh, my gosh, you are like a bleeding orange or whatever it is that

the thing, you know what I mean. But metaphor increases depth of meaning. So we are incredibly active and political in our music, whether the meaning is apparently clear to everybody initially, not always, not always, yeah, and a lot of times we just you know, we are people who push ourselves creatively, whether it be it means Okay, we're gonna try to do this type of song, or well,

you know what I mean, you're trying different things. But for example, you know, a few years back, we were in the Bronx and our good friends Rebel Daza just came back from Ferguson. They were documenting what was happening at the time. They were working for uh A Latin news news station, and so they showed us the footage that they gathered and we're talking about how things were on the ground. You know, we had just met Tefo and directly after we watched this footage made it beat.

You know, we were in the studio and we created a song that people with you as political right, And so I think it just depends on which song we're working on at the time and what the spirit in the room is. Yeah, we played different positions all the time. Like we played it we might we were not we recognized now when we were younger, it's like we were out there like you will see pictures of us, like look,

and now it's like our position has changed. Like a lot of my friends who entered politics like to become members of political organizations in their county or country or state or you know, local area. They say, Okay, now the way I navigate this has changed because I can

affect change differently from over here. Right. You might not see me at the protests like banging, you know, banging for the cause, But I'm the person that's making sure that the litigation is getting discussed, and I'm the person making sure that the laws are gonna change, and I'm the person. So I feel like like the music gives visibility to the problems in the community, and the politics address those problems, you know, and and we have we We also work a lot with the mental health crises.

We developed the financial literacy curriculum. There's a lot of stuff we do, but when it's in speaking to the point I made earlier about you know, talking about things through music speak. We we were dealing with a lot of suicide. Colorado used to have the highest team suicide rate in the nation. We're getting ready to go do a performance in a town where they had seven suicides in one week, right, and so we're dealing with deep, deep loves of depression and people are not even paying

attention to the kids. You know. I love the phrase the kids are all right, because that's what people always say. These kids are so resilient, but they're getting damaged. Right. They don't express themselves the same way that we do. You know, sometimes they can endure a lot, but that's not always healthy. So we have this song and it's I just say, I have a friend who lives on the moon. It's always winter, even in June. I visit

often but I leave too soon. My lovely friend on the moon, she traveled quite slowly, one step each day, or things all around her slowly turned gray. Used to be close. Now she's so following my lovely friend on the moon. And it's talking about the helplessness of having a friend that's dealing with depression, right, But I'm not

specifically referencing depression. I'm just saying I have a friend who lives on the moon, and I'm in and I get to see her every once a while because the moon has phases like somebody who's depressed, you know, And and that would be that would be a way we built something closely tied to our activism in our music. I know, you got a jet so while three minutes, but I love talking to it. I'm like flushing it to appreciate it. You got the music coming out soon

or anything people should? Uh, you know. We just put out a couple of singles. The latest one is called ten Kings, got music video out for it. Our music is easy to find, it's just the reminders where at the reminders on those social media So yeah, make sure you check out tin k y'all. SA have a song called the Moon but I was check. I was taking that out this morning to yo. That song is by here,

thank you. So that's like one of our thinks, like it's our political and active presence in all of our music. It's just a matter if you if you understand us enough to catch what it is at happenings. Sometimes it's direct, like the Moon, but sometimes it's interact like tin K and again. You know, last year we locked in for a week during the summertime with our friend Carcarell, and

he produced a lot of the music. We just locked in and you started recording, but every day was a different energy, you know what I mean, Like tin K and the moona wire recording, you know, two days back to back, but the energy is different. And we have a lot more songs like that. But you know, the Moonba came from a conversation we were having then once we turned turned the microphones on and and and beat machines, and there was yeah that that those both of those tracks,

those are the first takes we ever did. Like those were like supposed to just be sketches, but the energy behind it, we were so pumped up loving when that happens, it's a beautiful, right, you know how it goes, and you're like, oh, you do like twelve other takes and

you're like, keep the sketch. Yah, We're gonna have to get you all back because I'm real curious and like how y'all worked together to put you know what I mean to Actually, yeah, I hate that I have to leave by uh an appointment, but you know, let's do a part too to it, because I want to have more.

Like we answered a lot of questions here, but there's a lot more that I'd like to know about you guys as well, and what it is you're doing, and how we can work together and how we can create conversations. And when I say create conversations, I don't even care if we have different opinions or understandings or perspectives, just the fact that we can sit and talk about things and learn from one another and create an understanding and camaraderie.

When you can create comaraderie with people that maybe aren't exactly like you, you start building a really strong community. I mean, and we're probably very similar, Like looking even at me and right right now, I'm like, yeah, it's probably I think we're here and looking at you and

Samaria right here. Yeah, It's like I want to have these kind of conversations where in the conversation intelligence is present activism, politics, music, but also joy, right and understanding and and and creating opportunities for changing good this and growth in these kinds of relationships. And that's really you know why we were excited when you have this to do this, because when I heard you speak and I had to like mute myself because I was like, you know,

and I didn't even know. I mean, I knew of your activism, but um, I never got in to hear you speak to very pointed questions about like the relationship with hip hop and music, which is what we I knew with hip hop and faltics is what we are always getting asked about. So my sister, my brother, yeah, go back. Yeah, we're doing part two. Let us know when when we come to Georgia. We'll get you up. Oh you got it, Yeah, you got I'm dope, Knife Frank,

and we are waiting on Reparations. Peace. Winning on Reparations is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts,