The music video for Kwame Brown was filmed during the Canada Day Weekend of 2017. At the time, we wanted to take advantage of the Summer holidays and some limited access to film equipment, so we chose the song Kwame Brown that I had initially made about six months prior in December 2016.

The video’s pre-production and filming was completed in the span of that week leading up to and during the long weekend, but some tedious editing requirements and the eventual prioritization of some other music videos and projects kept Kwame Brown on the bench (no disrespect) for the next few years. Thankfully, in these ensuing years, I finally started to cultivate a greater understanding of my artistic identity and how I want it to be depicted through the work I produce.

In 2018, I chose eight songs out of the collection of demos I had produced up until that point to mix and release as four sets of “A-Side/B-Side” singles, Kwame Brown among them. Those plans eventually morphed from the otherwise random set of singles into an EP named “Tropic”. After filming two music videos for two other songs, Make Me Move and Withdraw, and coming up with treatments for a couple other songs on the EP, I started retrospectively creating an overarching narrative supported by the order of the tracklist that originally had no thematic thought process.

Essentially, the EP reflects my personal journey as an artist from the time period of about 2015-2017. Each song embodies a different dichotomy that the protagonist must find the balance in. Make Me Move deals with the fine line between love and submission in a relationship, Withdraw looks at reality against a constructed social media identity, Fall In equates passion and purpose to embracing the wave-like movement of fortunes and trials in life, etc.

Each song is set against the backdrop of the Tropic, stylized through our visual work and lyrical references to where I was born and still live, at the edge of the Rouge Forest in Malvern - which plays host to a population comprised of 90% people of colour, mainly from South Asian and Caribbean diaspora. The intersections between urban and rural geography, Western and Tropical perspectives of yadda yadda yadda you're glossing over this stuff anyway, plus I was probably just going to copy and paste this part from one of my grant applications to save time. The point is, I can say a bunch of thesaurus.com words about my music and that's great, but either way you get to the Kwame Brown music video and you're like what could possibly be the deep philosophical meaning to this?

I'm pretty sure part of the point of making the song and video was to have no meaning. Me, Sampreeth (the director of the video), Jamyle (the producer), Brandon (the main actor), and the rest of the crew spent our elementary and high school time together making dumb videos and raps for school assignments just to exploit as many of the sparse creative opportunities as we were given.

There were many assignments where we lost marks for making a video ​ ​ that was too silly and irrelevant (including the Diet Pepsi video I linked), but it was worth it for us to have a creative outlet utilizing the language we grew up with. The first video we filmed - a grade 11 American History assignment where we had to make a small skit about Europeans' first contact with indigenous Central and South American civilizations - featured a scene where I was (technically) playing an Aztec offering the Europeans a "Bustaz" ​ ​ as a gift, claiming it is "de finest drink ah de earth" (if that doesn't make sense it's because it's as stupid as it sounds). Yet we still complained when we lost marks because the video didn't have enough relevant information. With the Kwame Brown video, we essentially used the creative and technical acumen we've developed over the years to capture the adolescent air of schupidity in our high school videos in the most visually and musically striking way that we were capable of. And central to our high school ethos is the language and lexicon we preserved and explored with those comedic videos.

My Aztec offering of the Busta Grape, Oct. 2009

The "Toronto" or "Scarborough Man" slang that features predominantly in the music video and the song, is first and foremost an expression of humour. Deriving most of the cadence and phrases from the diasporic immigrant populations of Toronto, especially the Jamaican and West Indian vocabulary, the language is inherently tied to the lands they echo from. Acknowledging the Caribbean roots of this communication I grew up with helped me to reconcile my own Trinidadian identity.

My Dad came to Toronto from Trinidad in the late 80s with a couple of sisters but remained the only one in Canada. My mom came solo dolo from India earlier in the decade as well. Without an array of family functions and reunions growing up, my cultural lessons were dependent on things like the food and music we consumed. It also helped to grow up in a neighborhood inhabited by so many South Asian and Caribbean families. While I seldom participated, I was able to observe certain traditions operate in homage to their tropical lands of origin.

Soca music, for example, was widely available in my childhood through radio programs on CIUT 89.5 and Flow 93.5 FM. On Sunday nights, as a pot of curry goat simmered on a low boil on my stove, Dr. Jay de Soca Prince hosted a program on Flow 93.5 called “Soca Therapy”. With childlike imagination, I followed the dim waft of curry goat smoke through the different Scarborough banquet halls like Twilight playing the same radio program, tables strewn with half-finished glasses of Captain Morgan and Coke - on through the suburban basements from Vaughan to Whitby hosting a birthday fete, the walls smeared with the war paint from an intense night of daggering.

Grinding dhal to make dhalpuri with pops and family, probably listening to soca/ on 89.5 judging by the Santa in the back, c. 1995

In my first, short-lived exploration into music production in grade 8, I installed Fruity Loops after being struck with inspiration to make a style song called "The Bloodclot Song", in reaction to a time Sampreeth's nose started bleeding (everyone obviously told him to tilt his head back and let the blood clot). After taking up music production a lot more seriously some years later, subsequent attempts at a Caribbean-influenced song were sadly as unsuccessful as The Bloodclot Song. Coming from a perspective where I a) was half Trini aka a Halfael Araujo and b) always felt like I observed the culture rather than actively engaged it, I was always hesitant to fully attempt a Soca or Dancehall song lest my accent be too inauthentic or I don't have enough of an understanding of the vocabulary. Kwame Brown was the first song I really completed all the way through with a Caribbean style, and I almost didn't finish it either. I made most of the beat and freestyled about half of the chorus in about August of 2016, and finally finished writing the rest of the hook and verse in December.

I think the TSN turning point to decide to finish the song was based on a couple of factors. First, the surge of Dancehall influencing Pop music began just around that time with the contributions of Drake, PartyNextDoor, Ramriddlz, 4Yall - OVO and Toronto acts were at the forefront of this movement. With the success of the music, they brought more attention to the Toronto slang culture. This same language, which allowed me to connect to the humour of my Caribbean origins by making dumb jokes for videos in high school, was part of the voice that I ought to lend to this half-finished endeavour into finally completing a Caribbean-influenced song. By focusing more on the melody, punchlines, and humour rather than the "authenticity" of my accent, I finished writing the song. I also realized that my affinity for experimental production and eclectic choice of synths and drums could yield a unique perspective of Caribbean musicality against my electronic-influenced lens. And then with the co-production of Gray and his synths, we took the song into a completely different musical space than originally imagined. Finally, I would occasionally find myself singing the melody of the hook in that three month period between the conception and completion of the lyrics, and if a song idea lingers with me for that long then I usually concede that it should be finished.

That being said, I probably wouldn't write a song like Kwame Brown today. The simple reason is because so much of the freestyled part of the chorus plays to the preexisting hypermasculine tropes of contemporary Caribbean music (to be fair, it exists to some extent in every musical genre's history). That's not to say that every line I write needs to have some grander historical or thematic significance, as I enjoy playing with the balance between structure and spontaneity in my songwriting and production, but there's a difference between freestyling a harmless line like "I'm leaning like a kickstand" and freestyling a line that has cultural pretense and implications. At the time, I didn't have enough of a historical context to really take ownership of what I was saying and why I was using certain phrases as though they were prescribed tropes integral to Caribbean lyricism.

About a year after making the beat for Kwame Brown, during one of those random Wikipedia rabbit holes, I was looking at the history of . The slaves brought from West Africa to Trinidad to work the sugar cane fields were deprived of their cultural ties and not allowed to speak to one another. They used their musical traditions of and Canboulay to sing songs that allowed them to mock their colonizers and communicate discreetly, eventually forming the basis of Calypso. The music began to grow alongside the other aspects of expression forming on the island, such as the Carnival tradition that the French brought over and the slaves soon adopted, creating their own celebrations such as calypso competitions and masquerade marches.

While the music and lyrics appeared light-hearted and humorous, the essence of disguising oppressed voices remained at the heart of Calypso into the 1900s. For instance, this song by Sir Lancelot ​ is a poignant and detailed explanation about the conception, supposed purpose, and inevitable chaos from the discovery of Atomic energy. Sir Lancelot says that “its great force should only ​ ​ be used for peace and democracy”, yet portending that “when they ​ drop it, you will see the place where this earth used to be” - he equates the propaganda of oppressive political regimes that justify their actions under a false peace to the inevitable atomic-like explosion of those power-consuming systems.”As ​ ​ used their music to express political contempt, they incurred the scrutiny of censorship from the British rule, as is often the case for all artistic movements that set out against a corrupted system. In response, Calypso began to rely heavily on double entendre and contemporary analogues as a way around the political censorship. Lord Invader’s song “Rum and Coca Cola” was ​ ​ one of the many songs and stories written as a commentary on the impact of the American military occupation in Trinidad during World War 2, particularly the systematic prostitution of the locals that the soldiers incited during the time (which Lord Invader explains thoughtfully in his own words in the link I provided). This American influence in Trinidad disrupted the entire culture of the locals, and the implications were detailed in great length in the music and literature of the time. As Lord Invader also prefaces in the hyperlinked video, the song was eventually brought over to America by Morey Amsterdam and became a number-one hit for the Andrews Sisters, while Amsterdam claimed to have never heard Lord Invader’s version of the song. While the Andrews Sisters version removed some of the more potent social lyrics, they still sang lines like "Both mother and ​ daughter/Working for the Yankee dollar," later admitting they didn’t put much thought into what the song meant. Essentially, Calypso got so good at masking their underlying commentary with humorous and playful lyricism that white folk didn't even care to read into the songs as they stole them.

By the 1970s, Calypso had waned from its peak of mainstream popularity, and Reggae had become the predominant musical form from the Caribbean. Trinidad's demographics had also changed vastly since the time when Calypso had just begun to take shape. 36% of the Trinidadian population was now of East Indian descent - coming over by the British as indentured servants to work the sugar cane fields after slavery was abolished (like my dad's great grandparents) - and there was a need for a unifying voice for this disconnected Trinidadian population. A by the name of Ras Shorty I, originally known for his particular brand of ​ sexually explicit Calypso as Lord Shorty, switched up and released a song called Indrani in 1973. The song implemented Indian drums ​ ​ and strings infused with the core of Calypsonian storytelling and wit. This song and mentality of unifying the population through a single music became the basis for Soca, which continues to lead the Caribbean music hegemony alongside Dancehall and Reggae to this day.

It was very surreal to read about how Calypso has a deep tradition in double entendre and wordplay, as that has been my bread and butter since we were rapping in grade 8. I know that "twist it in a spiral like she Fibonacci/all me yute dem in yuh nani make yuh feel like nanny/give her number one bust me name is Kwame" isn't making a poignant political statement, but there's still double entendre up the wahoo...or wazoo?. I dunno why I wasted my time, there's bare double entendre is what I mean to say. So much of how I was able to connect to my Trinidadian culture in the first place was the comedy, and understanding how and why humour breathes in the cadence of the language and music - whether to mask the scent of more potent social commentaries or to simply lighten the mood - makes it all the more inspiring to explore and showcase in my work.

And learning about Soca, which came about as an attempt at harmonizing the Black and Indian population of Trinidad, shed insight into the harmony of my own identity by offering a way to connect to my culture through the music I listened to as a kid and the music I now make. Understanding how Soca sought to heal a social disconnect through a musical polymerization is a sentiment that I can use to contextualize my own music as a reconciliation of the disparate immigrant populations that I grew up amongst in Malvern. In the most literal sense, making a song like Kwame Brown offered me the opportunity to discover how my personal musical endeavours echo the lyrical and social traditions of my musical forebears. I was able to use the writing process to explore mixing ​ Western and Eastern references, honing in on my disparate influences from mathematics to the NBA to local vernacular. This exploration allowed for different intersections of my identity to co-exist on one song, calling to the very foundations of Soca coming about as a means of social unification. Through the ​ ​ universal language of music I found the place of my link in the chain of my lineage. That chain link is a combination of the acknowledgment of my history, along with emphasizing the positive aspects of those histories that resonate with my own work and the identity that I want to personify moving forward.

People can watch the Kwame Brown music video and listen to the song and surmise the parodic commentary on the misogynistic repercussions of upholding "Toronto Man" characterizations that permeate our language and music based on the Caribbean traditions they derive from. Or they can understand that we just like to make ourselves laugh with dumb jokes because we try to never take ourselves too seriously. I'm really fine with either one, or with somebody not liking it or getting it altogether. I think if I'd want anybody to gain anything out of any of this - beyond the video and my whole spiel - it would be to connect with the cultures and experiences that make you who you are, as they often provide insight into a lineage and context that brings all of our unique stories a lot closer together than further apart. And also, I didn’t intend to drag Kwame Brown’s name - I think NBA careers can be quite extremely capricious and dependent on certain environments, but to make the league as the highest scouted prospect, drafted by the goat, and traded to play with the other goat RIP?

Anyways, I use this website https://www.radiooooo.com quite often ​ ​ (shoutout Gray) - it allows you to listen to music based on decade and country. I've found soul songs from Trinidad, songs from ​ ​ ​ Guinea-Bisseau and West Africa that remind me of the parang music ​ ​ I listen to every Christmas, and a 70’s Czech album that shares the name and spirit of my EP, Tropic. I go on those same Wikipedia ​ ​ rabbit holes about the countries and artists I'm listening to everytime I find music from this website, YouTube, Spotify, a Value Village bin - and understand how a lot of the music I'm listening to is speaking out against one of the many-faced iterations of political and social oppression. I continue to recontextualize my understanding of an artist’s capability to shape identity and stories in a conscientious way. While the newer context I now live in would deter me from writing some of the lyrics in Kwame Brown, I'm glad it allowed me to set a foundation to reformulate the identity of where I come from and will continue to explore through my music, videos, writing, community art program, or just thoughts I have - like this assemblage of reflections I've pondered from time to time since they were first brought together in a conversation I had with Sampreeth last year when we were working on the Kwame Brown video, trying to figure out what the hell the point of it was.

You don't have to listen to random world music though - I know it's a little niche - but I dunno open up Uber Eats and close your eyes and scroll and stop on something random - if it's 4.5 and over it's probably hot. It's those little things that allow us to connect to the world in a way never more possible than this time, and that connection has quite possibly never been more needed than this time.

If you were actually interested in where I was going about the themes of my EP, here's a doc with a rough write up of all the ​ ​ themes and inspirations of Tropic.