Primordial and poetic: Hip hop according to Baraka Blue

As the state ponders the release of its prisoners, some community groups are calling for a more rehabilitative approach to incarceration. Prison can be a transforming experience for many. It can also be enlightening, with prisoners finding solace and guidance in spirituality.

While African American civil rights leader Malcolm X was in prison after a young life of crime, he made a transformation. He found spirituality in the form of the Muslim faith. Muslims are now in the midst of Ramadan, the holy month where they fast from dawn to dusk. And Islam has been a part of the black community for some time. That comes through in the culture, and in the art.

Artists like Mos Def are open about their Muslim faith, and how it influences their music. and there are many others – Big Daddy Kane, Lupe Fiasco, and members of the iconic 90s hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest.

Local hip hop artist and poet Ahmad James draws inspiration for his music from Sufi Islam. But he’s not African American – he’s white – and has been in the West Coast hip hop scene since he was 13, writing poetry, freestyling with this friends in ciphers, performing at clubs … but also getting high, stealing, and getting in trouble.

Then, he came across the poetry of Jalal-uldeen Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet, Muslim theologian, and mystic. And, he was inspired to change himself, his outlook on life, and his music. I sat down with Ahmad James, known in hip hop circles as Baraka Blue about how he discovered his art.

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BARAKA BLUE: I started when I was really like in fifth grade, sixth grade writing lyrics to songs that were on the radio, doing our own kind of renditions, and doing our own dances to it and stuff. At first it was just imitation you know? It was just hearing what we hear on the radio.

But as I got older I started to get exposed to the local scene and started going to the local hip-hop shows, and then it became more than just about imitating; I realized there was kind of actually a consciousness behind it and there was actually a movement and there was all kinds of different currents and people of different backgrounds, all these different types of art forms, influences of jazz, influences of blues, and then also free-styling, which is jazz but it’s with meaning because it’s with words.

HANA BABA:  You are white, blonde, blue-eyed; did you find yourself a minority in hip hop? And was that of concern to you? Were you worried, “Would they accept me?”

BLUE: On some level. I mean, if you are white you know, you don’t have to think about race as much because you’re just the majority, unless you’re put in a place where you are the minority, and then your whiteness starts to have implications in a different kind of manner in those relationships. And that’s what kind of happened to me as a young person in kind of crowds where I was maybe the minority all of a sudden. But you know if there’s any kind of mantra in hip hop it’s, “Keep it real.” I found out very early as long as you be you and you keep it real and you’re honest and you’re sincere, then you’ll be respected.

BABA: Now you and your friends in Seattle started off as a group called the Soul Merchants. What was that like? Did you perform around just town? Remember those days for me.

BLUE: That was a beautiful time because we just loved it you know? It was a beautiful time because we really did it for the art; we loved the art form – that was our whole world. Writing became the thing that I wanted to do, when I woke up in the morning I wrote, when I went to school in high school I sat in the back of class, didn’t really listen much I just wrote. And when I got off class, took the bus to my friend’s house wrote, shared what I wrote; let’s record it. That was a huge period of growth.

BABA: But then a tragedy struck your group, what happened?

BLUE: There was five of us in our group, The Soul Merchants, and when we were about like 17, you know, one of the members of our group – his name was Aaron Roberts, Aaron Deshay Roberts – his father was actually killed by SPD, Seattle Police Department. A white police officer killing a black man.

It really struck all of us, but especially Aaron, it really took a toll on his soul and on the anniversary of his father’s death, Aaron took his own life. So, you know, that really affected us and it caused us to I think grow up a lot in many ways, but it also exposed us to kind of a gross injustice, you know on a face to face level. And so it caused us to become kind of more politicized in a way, you know, kind of rage against the machine. We started to read a lot, we started to be interested in reading about history and reading about different social movements, both nationally and internationally as far as politics and globalization and history and how we all kind of fit into this, and so that was a transformative period.

BABA: You not only kind of grew or changed politically; you also had a spiritual change in your life.

BLUE: I was 20 years old, and I was really looking – “Who I am?” And I couldn’t really answer that. I was more trying to answer who I’m not – “I’m not that, I know I don’t want to be that, I know I don’t want to be associated with that.”

At one point I realized I was talking about changing the world, but at the same time I felt a big contradiction within myself, you know. I was still high all the time, and drinking a lot, and kind of doing various crimes to pay the rent, and I was having less than healthy relationships with women and things like that. And I just realized I want to change the world but I need to change myself.

I kind of hit a moment where I said you know, I need something more, there’s something that’s missing. And I always believed in God, and I always believed in a creator and a source, and I always believed there was a path, so I decided to become Muslim when I was 20 years old.

BABA: Twenty’s pretty young.

BLUE: It is but I feel like I lived a lot in the years prior to that, I had a lot of life experiences that people, you know, twice that age maybe haven’t had.

BABA: So you become a Muslim at age 20. What about musically, how did it change you in that way, if at all?

BLUE: One thing that really drew me to Islam was the mystical poets, the Sufi poets, like Rumi and Hafiz and others. I mean just the idea of articulating pure spiritual truth through poetry. Because for me poetry was my whole world, you know, and I loved poetry, and just expressing myself.

For three years after I became Muslim, I pretty much stepped back from the scene, but in that period I wrote all the time. You know, drawing from the well of inspiration of the Muslim poets, and the Koran, which is poetic language, made my writing more potent, and so when I did come back to actually recording songs, it was a rebirth.

BABA: What was your first song after the comeback and after the conversion?

BLUE: The first one was called “Splash.” It was called “Splash” and it was all about be in the world and be light; you’re a spirit, don’t just be a zombie. Splash, like be here, make a splash, you know, make a positive impact, and be like light, be like liquid, be like water, like walking on water.

Music is from the unseen, and when you’re a musician, and you’re really tapped into your instrument, you tap into something, and you might not know what to call it, but you’re tapped into something greater than just yourself. It is just necessary and it grows out of our natural need as human beings to express ourselves. In the beginning there was the word; in the Koran it says that Allah said “Be” and it was. “Be” and it was. It’s like an art of speaking, and of course the drum beat, the drum was the first instrument, can be likened to the heart. The heart beat, “Dun dun dun dun dun dun.” And that’s deep because hip hop it’s kind of, though it’s a new art form it’s kind of primordial in a way, kind of that original essential art form.

BABA: Talk to me about the song “Mist” which speaks of this longing for Layla. What’s it about?

BLUE: The Sufi poets took the poem of “Layla and Majnun,” which is a pre-Islamic poem, and it was about a man who … “Majnun” means literally insane, so he was so in love with this woman that he lost his mind and he couldn’t think of anything else but her. And it’s a beautiful love story.

And they said it’s a metaphor, that Majnun is a human being who is lost in his love of the divine. “Layla” also means night in Arabic, and has implications that the night envelopes, the days multiplicity you see the world of forms but in night, in darkness everything is one, the divine one. Layla became a metaphor for that. And so expressing the love of Layla is very common throughout Muslim poetry especially Sufi poetry and music, as expressing this desire for the divine beloved.

To me I see the whole world as poetry, and there’s nothing that isn’t a poem.