Photo courtesy of Sacred Geometry
Emcees Dagha and Mike P are original members of the five-man Boston crew Electric Company. The two men teamed up to form a duo called Sacred Geometry. Their debut album is a conscious and introspective piece of art called “142,857.”
142,857 is produced entirely by fellow Bostonian, 1st Official. The 16-track album features appearances by REKS, A+, and Moe Pope.
The Real Hip-Hop spoke to Sacred Geometry about making timeless music, working with producer 1st Official, and their new album, 142,857.
TRHH: Why did you two decide to do an album together now?
Dagha: Yo, it just had to happen, man. I’ve known Mike since we were in Electric Company back in like 02, like 20 years plus, man. The others grew up together, they were friends growing up. I always appreciated this dude and respected this dude as an emcee. We’ve always just done stuff, so, it was just time. He kind of had this connection with 1st Official on the beats. The timing was just right.
Mike P: I’ve always wanted to do a project with you, but then you dropped Blak Flowerz last year and I was kind of planning on releasing something myself. It was just kind of time to do something in general. I don’t know what it was that made me reach out to you specifically, but just in general we were probably just having contact with each other while I was thinking about the album. I just asked you and you naturally said you were down to do it. I think I sent you a couple of tracks and the rest is history. We did like 4 songs in a week.
Dagha: Big up 1st Official, man.
TRHH: What was 1st Official’s role in putting together the album?
Mike P: In the beginning we were like just kind of searching for beats in general, but we ended up picking out like probably like five or six beats from 1st Official. We also had a beat produced by Beyonder — he did Spitting Images. We were thinking about going in other directions but I think once we get up to like track 9 or 10 we we’re like, “You know what? We should just kind of do an album produced by 1st Official.” Which just kind of makes sense. We don’t have to search around for different producers — the search was over with. Once we got to track nine we found probably like six or seven more tracks to work with and I think it really cemented that album at that point.
Dagha: 1st Official just got a catalogue. We was just like dipping into his catalog pretty much.
Mike P: His catalog is ridiculous. He has like all different types of sounds. I think we just picked out some of his B-boy elements, but he has a wide variety of sounds. Other emcees or other producers or people that like to buy dope beats I would definitely suggest checking out his beats. 1stOfficial.com, I believe it is.
TRHH: How did you come up with the name Sacred Geometry?
Mike P: I think amongst all of us, the circle of friends that we have, we’re all kind of like little mini researchers. We’re like knowledge seekers or a junior Rhodes Scholar or something like that. Learning is an infinite thing. We’re always learning, we’re always finding new information, and I think once we came across the title of the album, 142,857, and the group name, it happened kind of around the same time. We stumbled upon the meaning behind 142,857 around the same time we decided to call ourselves Sacred Geometry. So, like the whole thing kind of made itself happen as we were creating the group. It’s kind of meant to be in a way.
TRHH: What is the meaning behind 142,857?
Mike P: So, if you take the number 142,857 and multiply it by 2-3-4-5 and 6 the numbers will maintain the same integrity, just in different orders. So, it’ll be like 412657 or something. Whatever it is there will be the same numbers until you get to 7. And you get to 7 it’s 142,857 x 7, the number is 999999. So, if you took like 7,000,000 x 142,857 that’s like the borderline of infinity it seems like. It was also found on the inside of Nefertiti’s tomb and that’s what kind of sparked the song title. But just learning that it was a number that went back and was understood as far back as the people who built the pyramids. So, just kind of recognizing something that’s probably been lost. I don’t know if it was common back then but it was definitely understood.
TRHH: Dagha, on the song “Nefertiti’s Tomb” you say, “our roots stem from Africa.” It made me think about how earlier this year Kevin Hart had a show cancelled in Egypt because he said, “We must teach our children the true history of Black Africans when they were kings in Egypt and not just the era of slavery that is cemented by education in America.” Egyptian Arabs were pissed and accused him of blackwashing Egyptian history. In reality, Egypt is in Africa and Arabs did not come to Egypt until they conquered it after the rise of Islam. What is your take on the Kevin Hart situation with Egypt and why so many people refuse to acknowledge Black African contributions to the country?
Dagha: Yo, I can first acknowledge that you’re schooling me so this whole Kevin Hart thing. I’m kind of off the grid. I don’t have cable, man. I’m not online like that. I’m even lacking with my social media stuff, so, when I hear this stuff I appreciate it for sure. I don’t know. I don’t know what to say, man. I can’t speak on Kevin Hart and that situation and all that.
Mike P: I can jump in on that one. It’s kind of off the back of what happened with Kyrie, it’s kind of off the back of what happened with Kanye. Kyrie with the movie reference and Kanye with the blacks are the original Jews, it was all kind of a wave of push-back that they all got for trying to say that blacks are somehow the original Jews. It’s happening all over the place. I feel like to a certain extent black people are kind of written out of history and I wonder if it has to do with us calling ourselves black. Because this being black America and America only existing for less than 500 years, referring to ourselves as “black” probably less than 100 years. It wasn’t a black man that built the pyramids, I mean technically we understand it was a man of color, it was a black man, but he didn’t refer to himself as black. It’s kind of like the thing that we’ve been disconnected from.
There’s still a debate where they don’t even want to acknowledge that the people that built the pyramids were of color or what would be considered black, African-American, the people that were taken and brought it to America or taken and elsewhere as slaves. I just kind of feel like they’re trying to write us out in general. If we go back, science tells you that the original man or the earliest people were black. They created societies, they created worlds, they had things that existed, they completely functioned. I don’t know if science has an exact date in regards to when the racial diversity really started, I don’t think we have those answers. I think a lot of the things that we take as common place in society were created by a black infrastructure that we got disconnected from along the way.
Dagha: I agree with that. I also feel like they just use the black face as that example in society. Like Mike was saying, that’s an example, so whether it’s Kyrie, they’re just like a scapegoat, like a pawn in the game. These are just like players in the game, so they have the highest profile. Whether it’s Kyrie, whether it’s whoever, they’re gonna make the headlines and that’s what people are gonna talk about.
Mike P: And then you have people that are financially invested in them, so they don’t want them speaking in a way that they don’t agree with because they’re fully financially invested in them. So, in a way people call that slavery or people call it selling your soul, but in reality, it’s just having an employer or someone that signs your checks. You can’t go into work tomorrow drunk and acting crazy, and going back and forth. Your boss is going to pull you to the side and ask what’s going on. You can’t just say anything you want when you’re employed and somebody is signing your checks. That’s kind of where black people are right now.
The only people that have that kind of stage are entertainers and those entertainers have people that are able to quote unquote “put them in check” or reel them back in from what they’re saying and make them deliver an apology. Kanye was kind of boasting that he was independent, but at the end of the day we saw he’s not really independent, even though he got some of his money back quietly with Adidas. He still took a large hit and showed what anybody else dared do what he did in the future would stand to lose and could lose. I guess the message there was he was a quote unquote “billionaire” and he lost that much. If you’re not a billionaire how would you last if you went through something similar?
TRHH: I don’t want to get on Kanye.
Mike P: Yeah, that’s a long story [laughs].
Dagha: [Laughs] We’ll be here all night.
TRHH: I couldn’t put him in the same breath with Kyrie. He said a lot of things that were to me disrespectful to the ancestors. I’m from Chicago and you couldn’t find a bigger Kanye fan in the world than me. When he was coming up I was like, “Finally somebody’s putting my city on the map!” Common and Twista had fans, but it wasn’t like Kanye. He blew up! I loved Kanye. So, for him to say Harriet Tubman didn’t free anybody and slavery was a choice, you lost me forever, man. You don’t disrespect the ancestors, for me, that’s my thing. The Trump stuff, too, it’s just too much.
Mike P: The slavery was a choice stuff, you can’t defend that, but I think the Trump stuff was just him trying to follow up with Jay-Z having that connection with Obama and Obama rejecting him. He was like, let me try to get in with this President. He just wanted that presidential aura. He just seems like that kind of guy that wants to graduate from Hip-Hop to go into politics and be a presidential candidate. He’s off the wall a little bit, I’m not saying he would be a good candidate or anything like that, but I think he would have got a lot of people to vote for him.
TRHH: I think so, too, sadly. I mean, if Trump got people to vote for him why couldn’t Kanye?
Mike P: Yeah, that’s the world we live in right now. It kind of started off with Ronald Reagan to a degree. He was famous for lot of the elderly and middle-aged people that were voting. Now in the world that we live in with social media we don’t know what the future holds. I mean Arnold Schwarzenegger did it, he could barely speak English, no offense to him. He’s probably a very smart man.
TRHH: Jesse Ventura.
Dagha: Yep, that’s right.
Mike P: Jesse Ventura did it, Shyne is doing it. People are making the transition.
TRHH: Mike, on the song “Originators” you say, “No high esteem when your destiny crush your dreams.” Explain what you mean by that line.
Mike P: Just saying life can humble you or temper your expectations for things if you’ve ever been through something and you didn’t attain your full dream. This is like our second wind as musicians, too, so as a kid I remember my first time I was like, “Oh, man I’m gonna put out an album, somebody’s gonna hear it.” Everybody wanted that story like Nas had or something. Everybody wanted that story like, “I just let somebody hear it and then they they brought us here.” Like Run-DMC — the Cadillac and he never came back. So, as a kid I wanted to be attached to something like that and that was like the first wave of Hip-Hop. Not saying we didn’t do anything, but just saying that I didn’t attain what I wanted for myself. Coming back around this time I just wanna make good music at the end of day.
I wanna make good music for when there’s not million-dollar promotions attached to music. This is gonna be looked at as a particular era, whether we know it or not. This is going to be looked at as a particular era and people are going to go back and look for all the music in this digital archive and they’re gonna come across our stuff. They could come across our music 100 years from now and it could be played right next to Kendrick, or J. Cole, or whoever is that the million-dollar person right now. There will be no $1,000,000 market and luster next to their name. So, it’s just like thinking about the future and thinking about making music. That’s kind of why I make music. I would like my music to live longer than me. It’s not a statue, it’s not like a painting, it’s like living speaking art. We can document something that’s going to live potentially well beyond our physical form.
TRHH: “Oracle” might be my favorite song on the album. I feel like sadly poverty bonds us, regardless of where we’re from. In that song Dagha says “desensitized to the trauma and the gun shots.” How sad is it that horrifying things become normal to us and how can we break that cycle?
Dagha: It’s sad, man. It is sad, but it’s the reality, man. We’re going on fifty years on this planet, at least I am, and just going through the different eras and stuff, it’s just the reality of blacks in America, where we’ve grown up, and the situations that we’ve been put in. We make the most out of it. That’s what we’ve always done as a people regardless of where we’re at or what the era was. As far as what that means, I don’t know, I guess it means we’re in the woke moment. Like everyone’s “woke” now. Even white people are woke now, right?
I think now’s our opportunity to really just say what we need to say. Let’s put it out there. We’re not gonna get lynched for it, we’re not gonna get arrested for it. Let’s speak on it, let’s speak the truth. Let’s speak the truth if not for us, for the next generation, for our kids, and for the youth that’s coming up. I feel like that’s really what it’s all about. That’s what we make the music for. It’s for the head bob, but it’s also for the next generation. We’re trying to do something different and awaken a generation for them to realize they have the power. It’s power in the numbers and it’s the power in the movement.
Mike P: I agree it’s a powerful line and I think we’ve gotten that feedback from a few people that we let hear the album. They felt like that that song allows you to see every line. I mean it gave you a visual for every line that we said piece by piece and it told a story in itself. So, we definitely plan on doing a video for it very soon.
Dagha: There are countries where they’re burning books, man. We can’t talk like this in every country. We’ve got to take these liberties for what they are and a lot of cats don’t see that. We’re just utilizing this voice, man. We’re putting it over some Hip-Hop beats and we tagging it culture, we’re tagging it Hip-Hop. This is something that’s gonna live on forever. Mike said it before — this is bigger than just our voice and me and him. This is a message that will live on forever. It’s kind of like a scroll or like a message in a bottle that you find in the ocean or some shit [laughs].
Mike P: Pretty much, yeah. Or like a good movie you find at 3:00 at night. You’re like, “Damn, I know I’m supposed to go to sleep right now, but this movie is so good.” That’s what we want. That’s pretty much how you’re going to stumble across us. You’re probably gonna either see somebody share it someplace or somebody might be playing it. It’s going to be accidental not coincidental or random. You’re not gonna see us on MTV or on Sirius Radio being highlighted or anything like that. So, if you do hear this or hear about us it’s gonna be some random coincidence. It’s probably gonna be a story attached to it and hopefully you end up liking what you hear.
Purchase: Sacred Geometry – 142,857