Canadian Musician - November/December 2018 | Page 36

As it turns out, the concept album model
fits Shad’s signature style quite well. After all,
his lyrics have always been laced with the
spirit of academia despite their wide accessi-
bility at the surface. This is an artist that’s built
a career on clever wordplay and double en-
tendre, all wrapped in a sleek aesthetic that
wouldn’t be out of place on Hot 97.
“The Fool Pt. 1” was a perfect taste of
what was to come. Sonically, it doesn’t stray
far from highlights of his back catalogue –
the bouncy, eclectic backing track that juxta-
poses some of the weighty ideas being lofted
through the mic. “They keep on killing us /
We just keep killing it / Mama said killin’ is not
where the healin’ is,” he raps in the first verse
with the big, buoyant swag that’s come to
define him. It’s a swirl of optimism, confusion,
love, oppression, and more in sonic form, and
ends with the question at the heart of the
entire effort: “What are you afraid of?”
“The concept comes out of tension that
I’ve been feeling,” Shad says. “I lived in Vancou-
ver, and the inequality is just palpable there;
it’s on the surface. And then traveling for
Hip-Hop Evolution and being in America, even
pre-Ferguson and things like that, you could
just feel the tension and underlying fear.”
Fear, he explains, was an emotion he’d
spent a lot of time thinking about as a
broadcaster in the years preceding the al-
bum’s composition, and ultimately came to
define the project.
“To me, the album is about fear, if I had
to put it into a word,” he offers, “and doing
so much interviewing of people in the last
three or four years, to me, was an almost
daily exercise in how I can put aside my fear
to let this stranger put aside theirs.”
One of his biggest challenges throughout
the process was framing these momentous –
and particularly timely – subjects in a way that
would encourage reflection and discourse.
“Before I set out to make this album, I
was thinking about songs in my catalogue,
like a song like “Fam Jam” that’s ostensibly
about immigration. At that point, it was
heard as a story from a human being, and
maybe not through so thick of a political
lens,” he reflects. “It felt more humble and
inviting – not just ideology put in a song
and weaponized or something.
“So just in this particular moment politi-
cally, because things are so fraught and di-
vided, it was like, ‘How can I say what I think
and share who I am in a way that won’t just
get reduced to, I don’t know, an ideology?
How can I still be heard like a human being,
and not just one side of a debate?’”
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SHAD
That’s not to say all of the raw emotion
it contains is dulled with clever wordplay or
blanketed under upbeat rhythms; on “The
Revolution/The Establishment,” for example,
he spits poison through a fiery flow. The
lyrics – “They make wars, create wars / They
have lots and they take more / From the
have-nots, they’ll take yours / They make
borders, they hate foreigners / They hate
life, they take life / They take rights and
they ain’t right” – are delivered with force,
like the bullets from the guns at the centre
of the story.
After all, he says, “I don’t think there’s
anything nuanced about Trump being pres-
ident, so I didn’t feel like everything had to
be approached delicately, but I also didn’t
want anything to come off like a hashtag.”
And so an artist with a career defined by
his lyricism found himself struggling with
where to take it this time around. He knew
what he wanted to say, but wasn’t totally
sure how to say it.
“It’s really a problem of good fortune,
though I’ve been able to say so much and
share so much about so many different
aspects of who I am and what I think, that
there is a challenge in considering what
more I have to offer, or what more I need
to say,” he opines. “And that’s content, but
then stylistically, there’s also the challenge
of what captures people. As a fan of the