​

https://preview.redd.it/19hjpkyr5x961.png?width=220&format=png&auto=webp&s=f361050a8adb902765de0ee183d5bd3bca076046

Artist: Quelle Chris and Chris Keys

Album: Innocent Country 2

Released: April 24th 2020

Label: Mello Music Group

Listen:

Youtube

Spotify

Apple Music

Soundcloud

Innocent Country 2: Melody as Remedy and Identity

A Tale of Two Chrises: Quelle and Keys

Innocent Country 2 by underground rap extraordinaire Quelle Chris and Bay Area-based producer Chris Keys is the second installment in a hip hop saga concerning creative catharsis and the triumph of the personal spirit over the seeming hopelessness of the world at large. The first Innocent Country was released in 2015, as part of Quelle Chris’s 2Dirt4TV series. IC2 was created over the span of the past few years, comprising Quelle’s travels and friendships across this lost, blessed country God forgot.

In the modern day we’re inundated with information, and digital access feels like a double-edged sword, making our era one of perpetual existential anxiety about the climate, the future, ourselves, race and sex, money, and most of all, time. Though we’ve never been more comfortable or connected as a society at large, the problems are impossible to ignore. Wealth disparity persists amidst a resurgence of far-right hate groups and “politics” globally. The technological addiction of social media pervades our lives, as we scroll our way through the everyday, chained to our glowing boxes of electronic dopamine and superficial validation, all made by unseen workers in foreign countries paid in pennies and subject to inhumane conditions. Anything mass-produced is almost always made possible through exploitation, and so consumers are passively complicit in that exploitation. Anybody who’s paying attention likely feels a deep sense of hopelessness against the corporatist destruction of the earth as we know it.

As I edit this review, the American Capitol in DC has been stormed today by unabashedly fascist members of the Trump cult attempting to overthrow democratic institutions. These are the same people who fantasize and salivate all day online for a race war or “revolution” ie lynching Democrats and anyone else they don’t like. You have shirtless rednecks in pseudo-Nordic headdresses maniacally waving Confederate flags in the chambers of congressional buildings, sitting in the offices of Senators, and taking selfies with police, the same police who suit up in riot gear and indiscriminately beat and shoot people of color at the first sign of peaceful protest. Of course, once the police turned on the white terrorists in response to increased violence, the “party of law and order” subsequently dubbed law enforcement as traitors. I guess blue lives only matter when they’re killing black people.

Despite the insanity of these past few years and many more to come, IC2 is sprinkled with surprising optimism. It seems to demarcate art as catharsis at a time when we’re coming to grips with the fact our species is finite as our individual lives are. The album strives to provide a remedy in its light melodies, celebration of black identity, crafted lyricism, and fruitful collaborations. America is veritably glued together with the sweat and blood of the subjugated, so IC2 is a project that sees the country and the self within the country as complicated, to put it lightly.

But this album doesn’t deal with big topics in a heavy-handed way, like I just did, and it does focus extensively on the personal. It’s full of smooth rhythms driven by drum, flute, strings, and pellucid piano keys. It’s an album with real substance cloaked in sultry instrumentation and silky, funny, impactful flows, like when you have to wrap your dog’s tramadol in honey-baked ham; this album is all cure, no false nostrum. The album’s goal feels like it could be summed up in “Let’s make America think, feel, heal, and dance again, if that’s still possible”.

Quelle Chris tweeted recently,

To be honest this run has been so wild that at many points I forgot about IC2 due to stress and life and world and so on as well. We really hoped everyone’d hear this album cause there’s something very healing in there.

And that makes sense. There’s a sense of wistful triumph all over the album, and it’s a triumph in spite of mayhem and oppression. It’s a love letter for PoC who have been mentally, physically, socially, financially, and generationally oppressed for centuries. It’s an album that refuses spiritual oppression. It’s an album that makes it clear you can’t kill soul.

As mentioned in his interview with passionofweiss, Chris knows his music is timeless, and that’s what matters. He measures his music in emotional resonance instead of surface-level metrics like money or fame. The feature list is a veritable who’s who of the sometimes lofi, introspective, afrocentric underground rap wave, including Pink Siifu, billy woods, Cavalier, Homeboy Sandman, Earl Sweatshirt, Denmark Vessey and others.

I did my best to highlight the features on this album, as a project that deals directly with human relationships. All of these features build a key theme of the album, through the highs and the lows, relationships are what make us, humans are social by instinct, it’s how our species came this far, despite the natural turmoil of human interaction and conflict. The album makes a statement that if we can heal ourselves through art, gratitude, love, relationships, and emotional awareness, maybe we can even heal this hemorrhaging, not-so-innocent country one day.

Scuffed Knees

Early in the tracklist, *Honest* is addressed to the world at large, carrying on hip hop’s personification tradition a la Common’s *I Used to Love Her,* except Quelle addresses civilization and the earth on a social and political level. As is tradition, Quelle’s writing style feels like equal parts sarcastic profundity and impassioned introspection. He laments how the world has been perverted and exploited by capitalistic imperialism while being bleached of the colorful expression and creativity that makes humanity special. He refers to Obama’s presidency before rapping about the subsequent Trump debacle built on hate,

You back hangin’ with them same lames

That had my great gran and grand croppin’ like the slave days

You in denial and ya friends fickle and fake

You was Kim K’in, flauntin’ your new black friends

And they two black kids, for like eight straight years

Then you switched up like, “bitch, I don’t know them n*****

The track is bookended by an angry voicemail from a spurned lover, voiced by comedian and Desus and Mero writer Marcella Arguello, embodying a fiery rage. She’s angry about the fact that her phone call has been ignored yet her man is still tweeting, almost like Mother Earth herself, exasperated that we have the time to tweet self-righteously about our important opinions yet can’t bring ourselves to many concrete solutions. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Next up, *Living Happy* manages to be fun and melancholy, its hook made of different dance moves from past decades, composing a catchy chorus celebrating the nostalgia of yesteryear’s dance floors, as well as black contributions to music and culture.

Bust the juke, hit the jit

Cabbage patch, Bankhead

Butterfly, Tootsie Roll

Lean wit’ it, rock wit’ it

Do the jerk, hit the whoa

Pee-wee Herman, Charlie Brown, Raise the roof

Running man, Roger Rabbit, Dougie, Thizz

Stanky leg, Cat daddy, Ambulance!

There’s also a great feature from Joseph Chilliams, cataloguing a young, wild summer day, starting in a shower after being in the sun for hours, then to a party, until gunshots break out, the narrator then sprints from the mayhem, and ends in bed getting laid. The verse strikes a tenuous balance between nostalgia, senseless violence and the newfound excitement of sex, stretching the capacity of what a day can contain, as well as what a person of color can face when leaving their own home.

A standout bar references the feet of slaves, both in how much those feet had to bear in work or escape, as well as referencing the practice of cutting fingers and limbs from runaway slaves who were captured. The image could be taken literally or metaphorically, where slaves lost their free will and autonomy due to heinous subjugation. And so, Chilliams is going to live his best life and make art for them, so their suffering wasn’t for nothing. The verse holds some lurid wordplay in the line “showing love to everyone I come across like glory holes”, and has a great, galloping rhythm on the “Runnin’ up the block like those camera men on the Maury show” line, whose syllabic meter almost sounds like feet running on pavement. He goes on to say,

Happy that we made it home, can’t believe I’m still alive

Life or death decision when I simply plan to step outside

Move my feet for all the slaves that got theirs taken

Face down, ass up, watchin’ Netflix naked

Clouds swayin’, I can clearly hear God sayin’

Sacred Safe is a standout song and fan favorite from the record, with a beat of blissful bass lines, vocal riffs, choral harmonies, and a hypnotic drumbreak, with spatterings of patois-tinged lyrics to complete the reggae tribute. It’s the kind of beat where I imagine myself spinning in circles on a sunny beach, hands held to the sky.

Rap often incorporates Jamaican Patois, so it only makes sense to include on a record celebrating Black art. Jamaican Patois is a Caribbean dialect, first created by colonized slaves exposed to English, the dialect itself is often a source of pride symbolizing the struggle of slaves stolen from their homelands. This carries on the tradition of Golden Era rappers who were often first generation Caribbean immigrants that threw patois in their rhymes.

Cavalier comes through with a melodic verse that still holds substance. He describes the plight of many who come from generations of hardship. It’s a common sentiment, how we hand down and inherit trauma in our families.

He ponders the possibility of rising from the ashes, while confronting the hard truth he might not make it despite how much he goes through. Cav doesn’t let himself escape personal blame for his “fuckups” and even spits some light karmic philosophy, as if he has to keep coming back lifetime after lifetime until he figures it out and stops shooting himself in the foot (or soul) so much. His verse conveys the idea that we’re as much a sum of our mistakes as we are a sum of our victories. He shows the trappings of the “suck it up” attitude meant to toughen people who have to deal with a tough world, and who can fall victim to self-sabotage. He channels a bit of Buju Banton on the inflection, rapping:

Born of a sufferer, might die a sufferer

Fight like a sufferer, might rise as a sufferer

Took me a couple of lifetimes to toughen up

Each life like one hell of ride, buckle up

Keep on truckin’, we Einsteins of fuckin’ up

These are the breaks, just shake it off or suck it up

Or sabotage through self-destruct

We camouflage with healthy blunts

I’m findin’ comfort in my personal space of pain

I’m just a sculpture getting shaped by mistakes I’ve made

This is a theme that comes up again and again on the album, the cleansing, comforting, even sanctifying nature of pain and how we can rise stronger from struggle. It inspires a hope that maybe this year is an exorcism, and we’ll come out of it for the better.

Homeboy Sandman comes in with the second guest verse, lamenting his psoriasis and how it affects his self-esteem, hindering his dating prowess. This theme also comes up on Sandman’s newest record, Don’t Feed the Monster, produced entirely by Quelle.

Quelle then gives an image-thick verse echoing similar sentiments, once again managing to make a sing-songy verse that stills mean something beyond surface-level preoccupations, ending with some reggae-inspired singing.

Horizon is a short, potent song soon after. Beginning with a Pharcyde *Passin’ Me By* reference in the lyrics, Quelle ponders how he always felt like an outsider as a child. He ends the first verse with sentiments of wanting to make his ancestors proud. He wants to thrive and be his best self for the people who aren’t here, who are the reason he is here. This is a theme that gets echoed a lot on the album, ethereal dialogues, referencing ancestors, feeling as though you can communicate with ghosts via despair or celebration. These images always circle around to an emphasis on knowing oneself and where you came from, so you can better navigate and fulfill your ambitions.

Pressing Blood from a Scab

A lot of this project straddles the line between sentence and seance, as Quelle says in the flute-powered *Graphic Bleedouts*. This song has some of the most haunting, powerful imagery on the album, provided by Bay Area artist Merrill Garbus, with saturnine lines like:

You know me the best and so you hurt me the worst,

you stab a knife inside my lungs until it bursts,

you cut me like a knife, cut me like a knife,

oh what happened to us, oh my love,

what will happen to us, oh my love

what a cut what a cut what a cut, oh my love

what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck

Garbus emphasizes the inherent vulnerability behind intimacy, and the exasperation of a waning relationship, the low after the high, the drug-like withdrawal.

Quelle’s verse feels like a reminiscent diary entry, lamenting a previous relationship while not letting himself be blind to the hurt and dysfunction, a mix of wistful but resolute. Chris raps “Wounds heal but scars, arms grow” flipping the dictum “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” making the point that we carry our pain with us for good and bad. He catalogues the cycles of relationships, “friends turn to villains, feelings turn into drinks” and “the wrong words heard by a heart can weather your skin folds”. He goes on,

Don’t let em sell your soul and stay faithful, loving and grief

Let it out and if need be let it be

Don’t blow with the when’s wherevers and what’s

Some openings never shut once one delivers the cut

He makes a point that life does go on even when it feels like it wont, pain can be a positive catharsis. It’s possible to live past personal turmoil, it does change you, yet you can learn from it if you let yourself.

On the lighter side, Make It Better has a beautiful chorus and verse by Starr Busby, with hints of Badu-esque neosoul, expounding the power of confidence and positive thinking, repeating “If I am can imagine it better than it will be better” in an uplifting, lilting voice against the wilting abyss of outer hopelessness.

Starr has one of the best verses on the album, with a confident introspection asserting herself as a black woman who’s been through it, letting the listener know just how much she’s rightfully feeling herself, after all, nobody deals with more discrimination and bullshit than black women and so nobody has to be stronger. The song celebrates hard work, acknowledging that there is pain in work but there’s also growth, as much as there’s the cuts and scratches, there’s the callouses and strength. Starr wants to “learn the ways of work, uncover the treasure…there’s no use in crying over what is, it’s not forever.” We can get so wrapped up in our disappointments and failures we can get stuck, when the key is to keep moving forward, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, you won’t get anywhere dwelling on the past.

These confident reveries extrapolate to the point of dreamy fantasy, as Starr hypes herself up, asserting that she can improve her station in life through her own mental fortitude and action. If she can imagine it better, then it’s possible to manifest that materially.

Never been a reason to think that I’m less than a god

Brown skin bright eyes pure gold between my thighs

Shining diamonds between my ears

Singing loud for you to hear

What you thinking bout me ain’t got no say in how I win

No. I set my sights on higher things like driving a Mercedes Benz

Scratch that. I’d rather jet to an island

Do my own thing. I own it like Oprah showing up in my dreams

Saying what up cousin? When we gone kick it? When’s the next party?

Limitless Black Canvas of Space

The album continues with an excellent run of songs, continuing to cement its celebration of Black art. Black Twitter, one of the prettiest sounding songs on the album, is a reference to the cultural lodestone that is actual Black Twitter, where so much humor, slang, memes, and cultural artifacts and trends are stolen from. It’s like the internet itself can’t help but take from black culture, even in the age of social awareness, however performative for some people that may be. The beat’s infectious organ melodies sit somewhere between bouncy 70’s black sitcom and bright gospel keys, and it’s impossible to not hum along.

The song title is a wink like, don’t forget where you got all that cool art from, don’t forget where you got that dope slang or dance move from. It flips the colorist concept of black’s traditionally negative connotation, especially in its hook “Good luck from black kitty cats, favorite color, favorite word”. Mosel addresses the black youth, comparing their skin and blackness to the dark backdrop of deep space, a canvas for constellations made of limitless beauty and potential. It also makes the pertinent point that we are all human, and oppressed peoples refuse to be erased.

Beautiful black baby boy, the world is ours

Beautiful black baby girl, like twinklin’ stars

Balcony of your bounty read the black man’s God

Simply a positive affirmation, ’cause we all got hearts

All bleed out red, brain in my head

Grey matter in every crevice, can’t fake blackness

No amount of consumption can erase our skin

Mosel goes on to echo the existential, apocalyptic backdrop of the album, mixing in black power sentiments and humorously implying we’re in the end times. He also makes a good point, saying you have to be privileged to say “color doesn’t matter” because it does matter socially, and it affects how you’re treated in your life, good or bad.

But Mosel works against the idea that anyone born black is destined to fail in this wonderfully “egalitarian” country of America, all while simultaneously discussing the nutritionally desolate food deserts of underprivileged neighborhoods. He plays on the black twitter slang of “king” and “queen” while making a point that many who created the slang don’t comparatively own much or have access to the same opportunities as white people.

Shouts out to all my black folks in the rapture

I promise to behave after, I’ll be right black at ya

Holla black, I got your back, says the black pastor

Love’s the next chapter and color don’t matter

For now, that’s just privileged chatter

Sure, you’re right

Across the states, what I seen, are neighborhoods’ food deserts

Tumbleweeds be a black women’s weave

Said the black woman’s queen, but that’s old news

And if her counterpart is king, then what do we rule?

Nelson Bandela’s guest verse (great stage name) echoes these themes, showing black to be the root or refraction of every color, reflecting the omnipresent contributions of black culture with his “The infinite hue, poetry shiny and matte, every other color, just the refraction of that.” It’s a brief, sing-songy verse that fits the song like a key, while his playful tone contributes to the sitcom theme song feel.

Another song that fights against the colorism associated with black is Ritual. Art, especially Black art, means using creativity as a way out, as a medicine, as a way of surviving struggle. Here, art is shown as medication and meditation. This whole album feels like a form of musical, healing prayer. This is especially exemplified in the ancestral eulogy by Dr. Tennille, embarking on a role call of long-gone family, artists, revolutionary civil rights figures, and others who live through his words, voice, and refusal to be silenced,

Black is more than a color

It is a feeling, an emotion

It is what my children claim to be proud of

In the same intonation used by James Brown

It’s a fist raised by Fred Hampton before his demise

It is what I experience 10 minutes into meditation as I search for peace

Black is the Earth, under the dirt, where my ancestors dwell

It is the distance between past, present and future

It is a gap in space where the moon and stars reside

Black is love, Black is you, Black is me, Black is we

I call forth my positive ancestors and angels to this space

I thank you for working on behalf of myself and my family in the spirit world.

Next, Sudden Death is one of my favorite cuts, it’s some dancing in your kitchen drunk at 4 AM music. The sultry bass line, the spastic-jazzy, scatterbrained but perfectly laid piano lines, the humming choruses and adlibs. It paints life as cruel, random, beautiful, confusing, and genius all in a few simple lines. The reticent singing echoes the death-anxiety we all know too well, but it makes a case for the importance of perseverance.

Quelle even cleverly flips a line from “it ain’t certain, cause life aint perfect” to “you’ll find it’s worth it, cause life aint perfect”, practically switching the emotion of the song from a negative, confusing portrait of life to the acceptance of life and death. He shows life and death as inevitable, special, and liberating.

The song has some big ideas crammed in short lines, and the overarching message seems to be we need to accept our lives as imperfect and temporary, because expectation can only build us up to break us down. The sooner we accept life’s imperfections, the happier we’ll be, because there’s no point in exhausting time on something you can’t control. You bought the ticket, might as well enjoy the ride in whatever way you can.

Mirage is another track with a loaded feature list, the beat sounding like a half-broken piano played by a blind bluesman in a dusty church basement where they usually let the addicts do their AA meetings. Cav has a great line that really sums the album up with “melanated, melancholy styles” painting this album as a uniquely black expression. It sounds like a gospel underground rap song, but more in awe of personal strength, creativity, and growth as opposed to a deity or belief system.

Quelle’s chorus sounds like a happy dirge, a kind of requiem for the current era, accompanied by a pitched-down voice exclaiming “mirage”. It has a great Earl verse, in his now customary world-weary tone, though it isn’t the tone of someone who’s given up, but someone who made it through personal turmoil to the other side.

Quelle’s first verse ponders concepts about life and its meaning, whether predetermined destiny or religious journey. By the end he shares his own view, this whole big life thing is a mirage or a joke, who knows what it is, if it’s real, if we’re even here. He ends with a laugh, the best medicine, chuckling at the immensity and liberating meaninglessness of it all. At various parts of the verse, he considers the present in the context of the past while going over his career, from humble beginnings in Detroit to underground figurehead.

We carried the state on our back like new quarter change

Rats was at ‘em like Elmira to Maximillian

I was focused on the craft, I knew racks was in the cards (*I knew it*)

Sorta mutant, I seemed to see through the ceilings

Some homeys hid under tables

My head was up in the stars

That’s real bars

I know niggas that caved in but still gods

Some said it’s pre programmed, some state it’s up to Allah

You ask me, it’s all part the mirage, ah-ha-ha!

Earl comes in second, mixing in similar nostalgia bars with drug imagery and wordplay, like “on the up n up, countin downers” or “we hit the tavern for some gin n rye, whiskey gingerly applied.” He even begins the verse “I thought I saw a fountain” with a possible Nabakov reference, from Genius:

I think that this line might be an allusion to Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’. In the novel, a poet named John Shade envisions a white fountain while he is on the verge of death. He later reads about a woman who had a similar experience. Shade thus believes that this white fountain is a universal symbol that explains or represents what is beyond death.Shade later learns that the woman had not seen a fountain but rather a mountain; there was a printing error in the magazine that he had read. Shade had conjured up this image of a white fountain and had imbued it with universal meaning, only to learn that its significance arose out of coincidence. As such, the poet had experienced a mirage in a way, believing a vision to be representative of something greater when it was not.

Denmark Vessey also has an intensely personal verse. He begins with a description of his artform, then expresses personal gratitude, knowing he could just as easily not be alive, but he fought to exist.

Oh yeah, hit me in the heart one day, it’s just words

A string of letters I smashed together

Some random sequence calls to cast the weather

InSh’Allah could last forever

I don’t have to be here, but I made it through”

Then he addresses his daughter and familial hardship.

“That’s where the melanated, melancholy style’s from

Fly, birdie, fly, be as wise as the owl

Keep the eye of the falcon, that’s eyein’ the sparrow

I know my daughter’s watching, I know you watch me

I know the times rocky

I know it’s hard to remember, it blurred

December was brrr

Vessey goes on, contrasting his actual age with his emotional age, as if he’s perpetually looking for someone to look up to, despite knowing he has to do it himself, ultimately depicting himself as having gotten the last laugh against the doubters. He’s found a way to use art to assert his sense of self, while reminding himself to not be so morosely serious.

When reality bit, it pierced my heart

But lifted hardships, my soul carried

A voice, close, near me, said, “Don’t be so scary”

“Enjoy your thirties”

Listen, I’m still looking for father figures

Around me, in even niggas who clowned me

The last laugh is a nectar

King Sen later breaks it all down at the end in a gripping, prescient monologue, promising:

…What’s gon’ come to pass is what’s gon’ come to pass. All that voting and all that shit—you can do that, that’s cool, but that ain’t gon’ stop it. It’s—It’s already on the way, you know what I’m saying? Just buckle up. Have a good time, you know? Security is largely a superstition. It does not exist in nature. Life is either a grand adventure or nothing, baby. Go have your adventure, ’cause I’m having mine.

This unsettling omen, proselytized six months before a global pandemic began in the midst of the most contentious election year in recent memory, is hard to ignore or downplay. Has Big Sen’s homegrown weed enlightened him with Nostradamus-level clairvoyance? I’m not counting out the possibility.

*When You Fall* is another impeccable posse cut, showcasing amazing yet lesser known artists in the same scene. Quelle spits one of the best lines on the album, “We OG like airbrushed backdrops and group photos” then makes a point at the end of the verse that he and his collaborators don’t want to be idolized, they just want their roses and due respect, whether that’s while they’re here or when the proverbial curtain closes on their earthly lives.

Nappy Nina starts the guest verses, an Oakland-Brooklyn rapper with critically acclaimed projects like The Tree Act that investigated the racial prejudices of the legal cannabis industry. She starts by describing a restlessness she transfigures to art, mining her solitude with a pick for creative gems.

Second day drawers, all for the cause

I ain’t funky, I’m just workin’ it out

Climbin’ the walls, put a pick to this shit

‘Cause, I’m minin’ them all

Fuck a fortress, got a forest this tall

Fresh Daily, a rapper I’ve never heard of before who had one of my favorite verses on the album, shows that real self-enrichment is hard because it’s work. It’s different from passive forms of transient, materialistic, vice-driven satisfaction. It’s work, but it’s worth it, again describing the powerful catharsis and satisfaction of creative work. Self-fulfillment isn’t found in expensive shoes or Instagram models, but in making something you’re proud of.

I got somethin’ I been workin’ on

When I’m feelin’ dark in my apartment with the curtains drawn

In my bag like Birkin, on hermit mode, gettin’ verses out

If ever I’m hurtin’ or I’m nervous or I’m kirkin’ out

One thing is for certain, this helps a nigga just work it out

Better than jerkin off or lurkin’ on a third account on Instagram

Just listenin’, I’m hopin’ that y’all heard me out

The self care is important as a person, I’m just learnin’ how

It aint sneaker purchases or puffin’ purple burning clouds

Or pervin’ curvy models, flirting on every twerk account

I stop and breath, close my eyes, I count to three

I count my blessings not my curses, lay my burdens down

5ILL has yet another great guest verse, cataloguing his travels spurned forward by his own creative talent, imparting that he misses his home and still has love for the hometown homies, but he’s also found peace in pursuing his passions, and feels content with where he is.

And now I’m three thousand miles from home

Wish I could hop a flight to kick it, I’ll just pick up the phone

You know me, homie, I’m the same, I’m just a little more grown

Remainin’ patient, makin tracks and tryin’ to stay in the zone

Prayin’ you won’t fall victim to the negativity that surrounds

And if you ever need to vent, just know I’m always around

This verse is a great example of this album’s ethic, values, and its celebration of being healthily in tune with your emotions and identity. And it’s even a bit meta, as 5ILL writes about exploring those things on a rap record, on a rap record. Evidently, Quelle isn’t afraid to share the spotlight with his musician friends, and the verse ends up being the perfect bow on a phenomenal, sprawling project deeply concerned with mental wellness, creative catharsis, and Black identity. And that subject matter is a great thing, I think we can all use some healing at this point, or at least a stiff drink and some good music.

Discussion Questions

1. This album can feel sprawling. What would you say the main themes are? What does the title mean?
2. Did you feel healed by the end of your listen?
3. Where does this rank in Quelle’s discography and where do you think he’ll go from here?
4. What was your favorite bar and why? Favorite beat?
5. How are you feeling about the future? How do you think this album feels about the future?
6. What do you make of the album cover? To me it looks like an anime show opening screen with a cigarette shoved in a citrus moon.