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The Music Video for Kwame Brown Was Filmed During the Canada Day Weekend of 2017

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The Music Video for Kwame Brown Was Filmed During the Canada Day Weekend of 2017 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/parang 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 Reggae 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.
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