Cavalier wrote "Private Stock" a love letter to Black people displaced by high rent

Cavalier makes rich, challenging raps about Black life. His writing enfolds rude Caribbean rhythms and American race arcs for a soupy thick social commentary heated with lava rock bars. He lays out lyrics simply ('the last weed man in the Apocalypse' on "Holla Kid") or braids them, collapsing syllables into sung notes ('they tried to put Harriet Tub/on the front of a dub/hi-LARI-OUS').

But I've known Cav and his work for years, so as he grows artistically, and our friendship deepens, I've found the best (and maybe only) way to describe his music is to ask him about it directly.

Like any careful writer, he portrays the familiar in his art and blends truths from significant stories, and life-altering moments...into metaphors. He wraps the months of turmoil after an untimely death into a chorus. Gory headlines of a friend's murder confined to couplets.

Just to back up, Cavalier's 2015 effort Lemonade — its title and release pre-dated Beyonce's work by a season — saved my life. By that I mean, it revamped my broken heart.

In August that year, I found my grandmother, prone and jaundiced on the floor, in my mom's house. She'd been there a day, passed out and pawing away at death, when I walked in. Rushed to call my auntie and 911 at the same time practically. Four days in the ICU. Big machines with long names surrounded her opera. She survived. I swear I wouldn't be here if she didn't.

Around the same time, or maybe 2 weeks prior, I'd committed to playing Lemonade like a morning alarm. Iman Omari pounds this signature heartbeat drum, an offbeat tic, that I listened to while I trained my ears to granny's EKG pulse.

"His beats sound like her heart," I thought.

Iman patterns his drums after life's essential signal. It's the soul flourish that Cavalier's robust histories need too. The calming effect to help you palate Black rage. 

If Iman's beat is the natural thump of trotting footsteps, Cav's words are the chipped bones, hardened muscle and aged organs that certify the body miraculous and full. 

Safe to say that, for Private Stock, I held high expectations. Early on, Cav described it as a specialty album of collab cuts he'd penned with Iman, Quelle Chris, Moruf, Blvck Spade at multiple moments. But even if the shells of "Private Stock" were cracked in those unions, Iman sealed this project anew. 

Private Stock broadens Cavalier's social influence, especially his emphasis on Black love, by narrowing in on the ills that attack bodies of color. He puts the biases, traumas and mechanisms of Black survival on the masthead, and asks you to consume with not just open, but honest ears. His own Black struggle is a universal one, and this is the album of his that solidly draws the connecting line. Here's my full interview with Cav.

AR: Was it Open Season on Stephon Clark when he got shot? You said..."they hunt us out in the open"...does the open season on Black bodies ever end? Is there relief?

CAV: That's probably the realest question I have been asked in connection to this project thus far...

First. With respect to the family of Stephon Clark and the numerous others I am wary about not using them as symbols in a way that may inadvertently dilute the scenarios in which they were murdered.

The fact that they are indeed all murders...is what makes it 'Open Season.'

None of them were murderers. So even in the most archaic concepts of justice there is no way to make sense and logic to how so many young Black and Brown men and women are being abused or murdered on camera.

For the American public to view without a full moral conflict, particularly as we label ourselves 'One nation under God,' I am uncertain of what God in any pantheon allows this.

So, it is "Open Season" by demonstration alone and has been.

AR: The song "Veritas" centers on a moment in your adolescence that some of us close to you know well. What are some feelings that come up for you when you re-tell that story in your music though and to put it out there as a public message?

CAV: I feel like these days are allowing men to look back more honestly at their trauma and how they have internalized it. For me, it's been accepting that many things myself and my family normalized were indeed unhealthy, whether environmental or otherwise.

The key moment regarding that incident for me was the Trayvon Martin verdict.

Shaka King is like a big brother to me and has been since I was entering high school. Shortly after he released his film Newlyweeds, he was asked to be on the Chris Matthews show on MSNBC.

The night he was scheduled he was bumped by the news of Zimmerman verdict I was with Quelle Chris in Detroit at the time.

We were in a seedy, middle American, predominantly White, hole-in-the-wall strip club. It was awful and would've been hilarious.

But on our way there the verdict broke and by the time we arrived, old soccer mom strippers danced as a mirrored wall behind them reflected all the bars televisions, plastered with Trayvon's image and the recent news.

I called Shaka that night and unloaded that this 'particular one' was getting to me.  Something about the news coverage, and that ubiquitous feeling that your life is in danger if you are Black..but somehow from the police.

I revisited that moment from our youth when we were abducted by undercover NY police detectives and pressured into being in multiple police lineups while in custody all without our parents' permission.

"What if that played out differently?!" I asked him.  He's always been someone I could call when I needed a real ear. We built on it for a while. I was proud when he brought it up the next day when he was able to air on Chris Matthews. It was relevant because he was asked his thoughts on incarceration rates, stop-and-frisk and police relations etc.

Shaka's mother is heard on that song. We testified as youth against the NYPD, Mayor's office, and Board Of Education and now as adults we are observing the same grievances.. worse even, and even less apology.

AR: Was that the first time you felt displaced? Or out of place, as a boy? 

CAV: Funny, you know what's odd about that? I didn't feel displaced per se. I expected it, even then. The displacement or disorientation came when I had to confront that realization.

My mother testified also.  She is generally a stoic woman so I was surprised to see her tear up as she spoke.  The part that rang out to me was that she commented specifically on how disturbing it was that I told her 'I didn't expect this to happen to me until college.'

Only when she read it aloud in her testimony did I realize the point she was making, I had an epiphany then that even though I was a 'smart kid' with 'college expectations,' I still expected to be accosted or have bad encounters with the police.

I was being shown everywhere this kind of rites of passage seemingly reserved for Black and Brown men. it even happened to Theo Huxtable and Eddie Winslow...so how could it not happen to me?

AR: You rapped that it's "sad the paths to manhood laid for Black men" and I was really taken by the truth in those lines. What was your path to Black manhood like? 

CAV: My path is relatable to many I feel.

I chose school over street more times than most. I come from an immigrant household with both parents present. But once all of that came into America's pathways that are already carved out, some of it did not matter. It doesn't mean that I am defined by these struggles. However, I think that is one of the most obvious points to be shown about racial disparity in America. At any instant your culture, life, or livelihood can be in tested or in jeopardy simply because of America's unresolved issue with its own Blackness.

My path is still unfolding but will continue to confront these issues the same way America continues to.

I think I just hit a point really early in life where these paradoxes were too obvious for me to ignore.

AR: You go from that line to "my #BlackBoyJoy got no soy content" in kind of a humorous turn. How do you find Black boy joy and what the fuck does that soy shade even mean? Lay that out for us.

CAV: Ha! Cuz they will gas you to be Soy George out here like everything sweet.

Like, they will present something for you like it's healthy and an alternative to the poisonous ills of the world and meanwhile even that may be not working to heal you.

My Black boy joy is free of that because I am mindful to not let too much marketed 'this kind of Blackness is okay and popular now' cloud what else is at play.

And also conversely, I am saying that to myself to be grounded. Our liberation or happiness only becomes lofty in concept when we can't see the implication of small and everyday choices.

Like we are so reactionary. So it is easy to get us to believe we are even thinking about our betterment when many times it's just been a re-routing of our energy to something superfluous.

So yeah. My black boy joy got no soy content because it's real food. It's not processed...and not preachin' it's good for you automatically like processed vegetarian food.

AR: Who are the principal contributors to this album and what did they each bring to the overall piece? In terms of "place," where do these contributors fit in your space in the world? Iman? Quelle? Moruf? Blvck Spade? 

CAV: The principal contributors to this album are not just the individuals you hear performing. Of course Iman and I are at a point of fine tuning the product of our collaborations. But it is important to me to create or co-create a world that I do not exist in singularly.  

Quelle is one of my favorite emcees in general, and definitely a partner in rhyme for years now. I love that we can create and have conversations in our music that are beyond typical subject matter, especially for Black men in Hip-Hop.

Blvck Spvde and Moruf come together on a song where you hear brothers really reflecting on the choices they have and need to make.

Lemonade was a very personal project.  I think Private Stock allowed me to take some of that reflection and dialogue outside of myself a bit.
 
Billzegypt and Georgia Anne Muldrow particularly balance out moments in the project that may have me at my most vulnerable.

I want these moments and moods to evoke and stir people, hopefully enough to make them have conversations as well, with themselves and others.

AR: You relocated to New Orleans. We sometimes riff on the fact that we keep moving to cities that White people are pushing us out of. Like, at the exact time these artist movements get popping, White people buy up the region and all the amazing Black art that made it gets displaced. How has that affected your art?

CAV: I did move to New Orleans but also had to recognize that being Black did not exclude me from being privileged in the situation.  

I think that observation allowed me to create more mindfully and be an active participant, creatively in the city that was inspiring me.

I did not want to be a transient who came here to use New Orleans to get over my break up with Brooklyn, then leave her hanging after I got it together.

(AKA fuck boi shit.)

But through that, I realized more about this endemic becoming pandemic...in not just our cities and homes, but in our memory and identity.  Gentrification was becoming culture
cleansing.

AR: Bring me from the Cavalier on "Breaking: Intro" to the Cavalier on the song "My All"? How do you know you're giving your all?

CAV: The Breaking Intro... I don't know man.  I have not even listened to that in years. But anyone who knows me for real may recall how I was living at that time. That starving unsure artist shit can either create breakthrough or breakdown and that intro may have been my attempt at the former.

'My All'... initially started, I think, to the scenario mentioned in the intro adlibs to the track. "It's like you give your all and you pour your heart out and they be like 'that's alright'."

We've become so fast to critique with no real discernment and as an artist that shit can be real tough when your works are a product of the same wild world you are then trying to share it with.

Like, I can literally talk about Black men who died on this album, some who they tried to kill, my deepest moments and at the end of the day, if that doesn't resonate on some folks basic check-points...then it's a mute point.

And that's the gamble with music or any art for that matter. It's subjective. But things are so disposable now and we are so detached from one another personally, my hope is to stir things up a bit.

Even if I have to trigger you from my own vulnerabilities.

AR: What are those horns doing on "Holla Kid"? What feeling do they represent and how did you feel when you first heard this song with its horn section?

CAV: The horns center what might be misled as a Nas reprise to something that can only exist in New Orleans.

Tutty Amin, a New Orleans native now based in Brooklyn, did me the honors of his sax work. I'm real big on mood and I feel like he understood that when he got the track with just the original beat and my vocals.

A lot of my songwriting occurs for me visually first. The horns add to my sense of cinema in how I perceive a track.

AR: "Whoa/It's dope -- in the house like Jerome/I'm repping for those dressing like they just getting home"... who are some characters just getting home that you would want to hear that line? Is that a personal shout-out and a value statement?

CAV: It is both. In my brief returns coming to New York there has been one thing I have noticed as much as the changes in the buildings being spawned and the dollar stores becoming hipster bars...and that is men being released from prison.

Remember when you were a kid and would overhear a news broadcast about a case or someone convicted and they'd be like: "He won't be released until 2016" or some shit and you would think 'daaaaaamn thats crazy'?

Well guess the fuck what. It's two thousand and late teen whateva and heads is out here.
And you can tell sometimes by the way they are dressed

It's just really a symbol for how we do people out here. We quick to cast to the lions, not so quick to put the bandages back on when the lions did they part.

So yes, I have run into brothers on multiple occasions, some I know personally, some that were strangers. But brothers, just kinda out here and many times you can tell they only have been shown a lot of closed doors.

AR: What do you think is the hardest part of being the medicine man/healer figure in a community? Does a healer have to displace personal goals to tend to the well-being of others?

CAV: Many healers are survivors of something traumatic or in some instances life-threatening.
Perhaps that shapes perspective on how to deal with pain, and transmute it because they are a personification of that kind of metamorphosis.

But that is not always practical and many of these seemingly New Age concepts are presented in an very escapist way so they are always just out of reach in terms of real daily application.

So yes, healers do sacrifice in the same ways that devotees and other initiates do.

But I hope that the conversations in my work help to speak to something a little more immediately familiar for our landscape and present healing as a process that comes from one confronting themselves honestly so that they can even approach being healed.

'Mental health,' 'unpacking' all these buzzwords that are a hot topic.  How does that translate to 'those just gettin home' or those I grew up with what's an effective healing space for that outside of the penitentiary?

AR: "Can't wash the blood off our hands with Flint water/but you could take the life of a man in Florida/simply if you could stand..." You keep reminding America of itself. Historically, what happens to people who've done that?

CAV: They get popped of course!

AR: We need to bring back weed spots? Explain. What's replacing weed spots now?

CAV: Ahh man...Starbucks, ha!

You know what it is? It's like Bamboozled, that film by Spike Lee. Where the satire became the reality. This does not have to be a generational phenomenon. ESPECIALLY now.

Buss it, I went to Seattle right? For a show with Stas Thee Boss. While out there, I'm takin' in the vibes, feeling out Seattle, which is CHOCK full of Black art that I admire.

But I go on my lil 'Cav sploration' and nose out some weed spot that was, of course, all out in the open because recreational marijuana had passed a couple years prior.

So I walk in and it's like a FUCKIN' STARBUCKS!

But mind you, with all the weed I done smoked, and all the ways I have had to obtain it, I'm a bon vivant...I'm a Man Of The Times and shit, so it wasn't that it was so available that blew me away.

It was that it WAS DEAD ASS LIKE A FUCKIN STARBUCKS, B!

But even worse.

It was MORE like the coffee shops that are clear indication that your neighborhood is grasping its heart for the big one.

Like hipster tellers, reading me menus of exotic names, a friendly smiling White girl to greet me and walk me to the right line and shit.

And all I could think was...'if niggas on Van Buren could see me now.' BRO! Like niggas is IN JAIL.

Oh man...I feel like cueing up Jermaine Jackson singing at Michael's funeral 'Smile though my eyes are crying' type shit.

Insult to injury though?

The satire so real...that the spot I went to is ACTUALLY built on a spot in Seattle where they USED TO ARREST NIGGAS for sellin weed! In an area being gentrified you can't script the devil's lines any better than this right here.

*This interview was conducted digitally and some parts have been edited for clarity and consistency.