This is the second in my series of conversations with artist friends where we get to dig a little bit deeper into our own work, reflect on our journeys, and hopefully share something useful. Find the first one here.

SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE is someone I’ve worked with for almost 20 years—sometimes directly via collaboration, and sometimes just “in orbit” with one another, focusing on separate projects while still being in conversation. An emcee, poet, producer, visual artist, filmmaker, educator, and more, they’re one of the most talented and inspiring people I know. Like many of our collaborations, this conversation took place over the course of literally years—but I think that ends up working in its favor, in that we get to touch on a number of really cool projects that may have flown under your radar. I’ll sprinkle bandcamp links throughout this.

One last note – our new collaborative endeavor is SECRET RIVERS, and we’ll be performing live on Wednesday, July 23 at Silverwood Park – 6:30pm, free, all-ages, outdoors! We’ll also be joined by yet another SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE project: their collaboration with Kat Parent, SkySpiders & the Imperceptible Web.

KYLE: To kick things off, I know people can just read your bio, but you’re one of those artists who does *so much* different stuff, and does it all really well—that’s always been inspiring to me. Could you introduce yourself to people who don’t already know?

SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE: For sure! And thanks for saying that. Side note: the quote people love to throw in your face about being “a Jack of all trades” is not only just the first part of the quote, it is not the point. Like so many of our clever adages, this comes from Shakespeare; “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” It’s always been important to me to recognize the plurality of being an artist. “Are you a musician or an artist?” – well, a musician is an artist. I think the idea of “mastering” something is a colonial, imperial construct. Life and art are vast, and we have the freedom to participate to whatever extent we can imagine. 

That’s my approach. I’m an artist, and I have such reverence for and and am in such awe of so much art, and so many types of art, and styles, and approaches, and… there is so much to communicate where mundane language fails. If you think of  yourself as an artist, it’s just healthy to understand that your creative skills, those ways of thinking about things, the way a mind absorbs so much and processes and responds; all of that can transfer or translate or apply to other crafts, circumstances, environments, issues. It’s what makes art so powerful. It’s why art is targeted the way it is by totalitarianism – it’s dangerous because it can be so many things, communicate so clearly and, as so many acts of creativity and imagination, threatens the single stories told about who and what we are as people. Think of this next time you hear  someone say something belittling – often as a joke, but also as an accepted matter of fact – about art or artists.

KYLE: For sure. In a media landscape where it can be hard to get attention when you don’t have a very specific, easily definable, soundbite-friendly brand, it sometimes feels like people who have more than one “thing” can get punished for it. When you don’t fit neatly into a box, that can be harder to consume, to commodify, to monetize, etc. You use the word “dangerous,” which I think is so on point; artists are threatening to the status quo not just because of the specific art we make and what messages it does or doesn’t convey, but because on a more fundamental level, that approach to being in the world is often at-odds with what the system wants us to be, how it wants us to operate: rejecting binaries, exploring counter-narratives, being loud and obnoxious (in a good way), centering what power wants us to de-center, and de-centering what power wants us to center. The list goes on.

SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE: Word. Like, if I love something, I want to know how it works, I want to participate, and ultimately, I want to be in conversation with all of these ideas and approaches. So at the heart of it, I’m an artist before anything; stories are important to me, and poetry and hip hop are foundational. These practices also apply to so many forms. So as I continue my journey into film, for instance, it may not explicitly be about hip hop per se, but hip hop—and poetry, and visual art for that matter—all inform and contribute to the skill set used to create cinema- or projection mapping installations.

There are more or less “quieter” artistic practices, that I may not be known for that I’m always developing, or focusing on in different ways at different times. A lot of people don’t know I did a bit of theater when I was in Chicago. And that’s something I’ve been missing since returning to the Twin Cities. I’m intuitive about finding my way back to those threads that gave me so much, and am so revitalized in making those connections. 

This past year or two, I worked with Teatro del Pueblo to flip Romeo and Juliet into a dystopian US/Mexico border story about artists, activists, political families. I wrote the part of Santi, a sort of timeless “cosmic stranger” in the form of this xolo who kicks the chorus off stage and claims ownership of this story. “Because I was there,” he says.

That theme of collaboration across time and culture also shows up in Seeds of Culture, a collaboration with conductor/violinist Marco Real d’Arbielles and the Bach Society of MN. That project cross-pollinates baroque and hip hop with a narrative told through spoken word. It’s the first iteration of ‘Time Travelers’ Prayer’, a larger story I’m putting into a script for film and/or theater production. I added beats and sound design to centuries old pieces we treated as a sort of DJ set; remixing and recontextualizing with the MPC and Loopstation along the way—with a chamber orchestra of really skilled musicians. The culmination of that iteration was like a live soundtrack to a suite of poems about time travelers who are returning to the past to collect “seeds of culture” so they can plant them in their own timeline, a cultural wasteland where so much has been lost to the machinations of fascism. I’m pleased to say this piece should keep growing and that we’ll be putting up its current form again soon with the Bach Society of Minnesota. at the Minneapolis Center for the Arts, and the Sacred Heart Music Center in Duluth.

I’m also working on a new series of music videos this year that I’ll premiere at Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis; that will include a piece from Seeds of Culture, another live performance of a huge projection mapping installation I did outdoors to my own live music at Rice Park / Downtown Saint Paul Library, a Star Wars toy story video, and the first video from Kat Parent’s Swampling. We’re currently recording that album as well as costuming and planning the last shots we need for the album-as-film experience  we’re working yp to. And of course, I’m always producing and writing for stuff that should be rolling out over the next, forever, I guess- lol.

I’m wondering how your own experience in multiple disciplines informed the work, flow, and scope of “Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing but Enough.” How did all of that (teaching, performance, hip hop culture, spoken word community messiness, all of it and more) funnel into this world and overarching story?

KYLE: That’s all so cool to hear, and is also very relatable, especially your framing of the kind of boundlessness tied up in an artistic practice and how that can be a powerful thing on a personal level (freedom to play, to experiment, to grapple with ideas without having all the answers), but also on a political level (since all that stuff is a threat to the status quo, to fascism, and on and on).

I know we’re writing this in 2023 (and finishing it in 2025, haha), but I’m thinking about how even ten or fifteen years ago, the phrase “genre-bending” was kind of cliche; like, just about every single artist would have it in their bio, talking about how “beyond” the confines of genre they are, and how new and original their approach is. And yeah, that can very easily become PR-talk word salad, but I *also* think that the general concept of drawing from multiple influences, rejecting genre-oriented notions of purity and perfectionism, and allowing the content to move the form, so to speak, are all impulses that are very present in your work, and that I’ve also tried to inform my own.

With Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough, a few reference points or “guiding stars” come to mind. I very distinctly remember reading Jean Toomer’s Cane in college and being blown away by how elegantly it brought together poetry, prose, and dialogue elements. I’m also thinking about how Watchmen breaks up its primary graphic narrative with weird little bits of prose, and you can just *feel* how much fun Moore was having with those. And then another reference point was definitely the idea of the concept album, specifically in a Hip Hop sense, and how rhyme, sequencing, and tension-and-release songwriting techniques can contribute to a single narrative. So all that was swirling around during the process.

And like you allude to in your question, the book is the product not just of artistic influences, but community ones too. My personal thing (that I’m careful not to project onto others but that really drives my own work) is that I’m way less interested in whether or not a piece of art is “good” and way more interested in whether or not it’s “useful.” Of course, those aren’t mutually exclusive; they can definitely overlap. But they don’t always, so in my own work, that’s the path I try to walk down: how can this poem, or this series of poems, or this essay, do some kind of “work” in the world, in the context of my community, what I do, and what I care about?

So a lot of the specific pieces were created with that question of “how will I use these in my actual work?” (as a facilitator, educator, narrative-shaper, etc.) in mind. Which is definitely not to say that there aren’t also moments in the book where I’m just having fun, or being weird, or experimenting—those are present too. But I think of that usefulness question as a deeper impulse, something that guides the general flow of the project, not every single individual bit of it.

To throw it back to you, I wanted to zoom in a bit on your Edgar Allen Poe Dameron album, especially since it seems to share some impulses and approaches with my book; I’m thinking about how this album captures something really intrinsic/elemental about your work in general: that very specific mix of humor and substance, sci fi weirdness and down-to-earth realness, a deep appreciation for Hip Hop’s roots and an allegiance to the culture’s call to keep pushing and be adventurous—if all that makes sense. Two related questions: 

First, why Star Wars? Please feel free to share any notes about the origin story of the project, and/or any info or stories you felt like sharing from its process. And second, to draw out that sci fi thread a little bit, what opportunities (or challenges) did you discover as you were working on this project, in terms of what we can *do* when we embrace science fiction, especially coming from forms (Hip Hop, spoken word, performance art, “political” art, etc.) that most people don’t naturally think of as aligned or connected to sci-fi (even if we both know they are, haha)?

SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE: “I am one with the force, the force is with me.” The origins of Edgar Allen Poe Dameron started with a bunch of verses and/or songs that never really went anywhere but that I thought were fun and interesting. So, I had all of these odds and ends, a handful of songs, and I just sent Dave (aka the phenomenal DJ/producer Rube) the acapellas to have fun with them and to see what would happen. You know, trusting in the Force, as it were. That eventually became this Star Wars themed tapestry of beats and rhymes, and a lot of that came mostly just from who Dave is and who I am.

In my writing, there were already some Star Wars references, sci-fi tinged songs, and so much of it was already resistance themed – so it just made sense as Dave started putting it together and thinking, “this could be a Star Wars thing.” Then it came to me: Edgar Allen Poe Dameron. And we took it home from there.

To me, so many things can be contextualized into larger concepts and again, because of the nature of my art and where I’m coming from as a thinker and writer, much of it fits into a sci-fi framework. Some of it more specifically, and others more in how they fit next to other pieces in an overarching context. So in a way, Star Wars was the glue that made it all make sense by giving this odd collection of raps a world to inhabit. Which is what’s so cool about world building.

The way Star Wars has framed resistance culturally, how open-ended it is in terms of playing with characters, worlds (literally and figuratively), and narrative; as well as the themes of trauma, cycles of oppression, and how family dynamics play into it all—it speaks to how so many people find their way into its storytelling and world building. For my part, the way of the Jedi, the allure of the rebellion, these things informed who I am in the world and how I aim to participate. That can sound kind of silly, but it’s true. I was inspired by these values from a very young age. I was shown that I could be someone different from my father, that I could still love him through those extreme differences (while challenging him or going down my own path altogether). I was shown that I could stand up for what’s right, against bullies, and be in community with people who were doing the same, and we could be stronger together.

When it comes to that cultural, almost moral context, Rogue One seemed to understand Star Wars in a way that I identify with. Then, more recently: Andor (then season two as we came to the end of this years-long conversation). So that kind of crystallized these connections between my work and the Star Wars universe.

KYLE: In a previous conversation, you had mentioned something really profound about the idea of specificity in art that has some stake in politics, resistance, movement-building, etc. I think a lot about this: how being more or less specific in our writing opens up some doors, and closes other doors. I think a big pop-culture example of this, beyond our own work, is actually Andor. People ask questions like what does it mean to have a show that is so clearly anti-fascist, anti-prison-industrial complex, etc. on a network like Disney, ingested by a mass audience? To compare two metaphors, is art like that a “gateway drug” into radical politics related to real-life imperialism, OR is it a “release valve” for people to *feel* rebellious, to see revolutionaries and say “they’re cool,” but then, because of the distance created through the sci fi storytelling, not make that extra step into real-world application? Or maybe it’s both?

I think we can grapple with those Andor questions, if you’re interested in them, but I’d also like to connect all that to our work. When you’re writing, what do you see are the advantages or disadvantages (or maybe a better framing is “challenges and opportunities”) to being specific (in our critiques, in our explorations of issues, etc.)? For example, to write about colonialism, or environmental justice, or abolition, through metaphors and imaginative storytelling, vs. just saying what we want to say and writing about them directly?

SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE: I think this is all so tangled together that my response is, yes, haha. It’s a similar question; to explicitly say something or get something rad under the radar of empire. The good news is that so much is under that radar. Say it explicitly, early and often. You can get more or less – maybe not comfortable, but – used to it. You’ll get better at using the tools and resources you have to accurately express yourself and your values, your politics. Art and Info fuel us and stick to our brains and hearts in different ways, and I think we, the human population of the earth, are kind of in need of all of the rad, honest messaging that we can get, when/how ever we can get it.

Some of us are storytellers, some of us are documentarians. Sometimes the line between these things isn’t super clear. Documentary film is still cinema, which is art. It’s not less of an art when a work is showing you the literal truth; and a work is not less capable of telling the truth when painted in fiction, or metaphor. That’s storytelling. That’s how the word gets around. Get the word out. Pamphlets, zines, essays, dialog, drawing, painting, cinema, poetry, historical non-fiction, historical fiction, music, photography, experimental guerrilla tortilla art…

What i like about Andor is that: the vision, the writing, the performances, and the messaging—it all feels like the execution of an elaborate art heist. That’s how I think of it, anyway. Like, it may not be realistic for me to aspire to tell some 650 million dollar franchise story; or to spend my days figuring out how I’m going to get into a position to even think about making that happen – but if I’m, say, really drawn-to and moved-by science fiction, fantasy,  horror, or whatever, and it gives me joy? Feeds my spirit to go on? And could create an opportunity to contribute to an ethic or politic that could possibly help the world out of the shit? Then that’s how I’ll tell the truth. The more joy and magic we make in the world while we sing our songs, tell our stories, speak our truths – the more full of a future we can comprehend as we collectively lend our efforts to building that future.

Find more of SEEMORE’s music via bandcamp, a few related IG accounts, and here. And catch us performing live on Wednesday, July 23 at Silverwood Park – 6:30pm, free, all-ages, outdoors!