Photo courtesy of Thought Provokah
New York emcee Thought Provokah lived up to his name by creating a concept album about a planet that acts as a sanctuary for black people called “Elysenya” [el-e-jun-uh]. Elysenya tells the story of a man named Knapp Jones who ascends from Earth to Elysenya in the pursuit of peace. Along the way he reflects on his life and receives guidance from the elder, Tzari, the Pulse, throughout his journey.
Elysenya is a 12-track album co-piloted by actress Samantha Inniss (Tzari, the Pulse). The project is produced by Talen Ted, Numbz, duMB-o, and Magnum Beats.
The Real Hip-Hop chatted with Thought Provokah about the idea of a black utopia, breaking out of the underground artist mold, and his new album, Elysenya.
TRHH: How’d you come up with the concept for Elysenya?
Thought Provokah: In the climate and the times we’re in and the attacks on black love, on black life, just on black existence, first of all, there is a need to escape America, but there’s also at times when you see how we’re treated internationally, a need to just escape and create our own. I thought to myself “What if there was a place where in our afterlife or even during our prayers or meditations that we can escape to?” I’m a fervent reader — voracious reader, so I started looking into different spiritual things, like even before Sinners. Into Hoodoo, Rootwork, Vodun, Yoruba and everything else. I started to come up with a concept where we would have our own place where our ancestors are honored, where our sacred geometry, our sacred math, our radical forgiveness is honored.
Free from all the Eurocentric ideals of justice, and men and women relationships, I don’t even deal in the gender war content and all of that. Where could we go to? So, Elysenya became the place. Elysium is a place or ideal of happiness and Senya being “destiny knows.” So, destiny knowing the ideal place of happiness. So, when we leave this flesh puppet, as you will, this physical vessel, we’ll know an afterlife. Because this life is sometimes on this planet way too much for us to bear sometimes in our ancestral skin. We know at the end of it there is a place for us to be. There is a place for us collectively to love and just be without having to feel performative, without having to put a mask on, without having to just exist in white supremacy and systemic racism.
TRHH: That’s deep, man. It’s the time we live in and really the last, I don’t know, less than 1000 years where this has even been an issue. I saw a video today of a guy who was trying to debunk the idea of “white” being a culture. He said there is no white culture — there is Greek, there is Italian, there is all this stuff, so why all of a sudden is everything white this or that? That whole ideology has brought so much horror to the world and for what? It’s mind boggling.
Thought Provokah: Colonialism.
TRHH: Imperialism. I see people all the time in little videos and clips telling other people to speak English. Bro, this ain’t England, this ain’t Spain either.
Thought Provokah: Or Portugal [laughs].
TRHH: Or France! All these languages they put on other people, these ways of life that they put on other peoplem I don’t know how they could puff their chest out in any way. It’s like, yo, you have fucked the world!
Thought Provokah: Definitely, man and as I just watch the world crumble and I think about the condition of us while we’re fighting amongst each other to see if either of us deserve common decency. Whether that be a black man or a black woman. It’s so inane and it’s so idiotic. I wanted to create a space where we got basically back to basics. So, basically, I astral project as I’m at my altar, as I’m praying I get back to this space and we debunk toxic masculinity, we deconstruct gender roles, and feeling as if you’re just put here just to work and to be a source of income as if your just being isn’t validated. We can get back to a space where our unions are sacred again, and we honor autonomy, and we honor philosophical anarchy.
There’s no police, there’s no quote UN quote “arm of law.” It’s more so like peace circles and ancestral counseling where we figure out the root of the hurt, as opposed to taking whatever crime, whatever malady is messing with us and we jail them. Restorative justice. I’m going to write a book on it. I was literally just talking to my wife about this; I’m gonna write a book on this. It’s going to be a fiction book, so this is just one pillar of a bigger idea and I wanted it to be represented and known throughout that this project is 1000% black. I know I’ve gotten some reviews where people have said, “Well, I don’t understand it,” well, it isn’t for you. I made it specifically for black people, specifically. It’s unapologetically black in the way I created it, the music.
Shout out to Samantha Inniss who was the poet and the narrator. She is a local actor out of Queens. We’ve done work before, so she was there to play somebody called Tzari, the Pulse who is a part of a circle of ancestral midwives. She is basically the spirit of music and when you hear the music she is like Ebenezer Scrooge taking you back and showing you in rhythm, through song what the memories of your life was and how it has shaped how you think. This is a huge idea. It’s robust, it’s expansive, it’s layered, and it’s not going to be understood by just the passive listener. It’s a bigger philosophical idea than just the album. The album was just to introduce the world, the book is the further explanation of the narrative of Elysenya.
TRHH: “The World Lied to You Black Man” is a powerful track. I have a friend that met with Barack Obama’s grandmother years ago in Kenya. He asked her what black people in America needed to do and she said “stop following white people’s ways.” This song reminded me of that. Are we too far gone to realize that many of our negative behaviors are taken from European culture and aren’t innately us?
Thought Provokah: No. I think that’s what I was trying to express. We have become very indoctrinated and inculcated with the idea of masculinity, femininity, ritualistic, Eurocentric, Euro-oriented ideas of relationships, of customs of punishment, of customs of eating. We have become so indoctrinated and inculcated, but that doesn’t mean we’re too far gone. Today I was invited to teach along with a good friend of mine, Millie, who hosts this poetry night in Jersey City called Mocha Mic with Millie. I go there sometimes and do open mics. I got the opportunity to teach how poetry and Hip-Hop are intertwined. I think it’s those little sectors and pockets in the community, I think we have to get back to tribal understanding and communal teaching. I think that is overlooked and undervalued, especially in this time where they’re taking away books, where they’re trying to erase history, where they’re taking funding away from museums.
I’m not saying like we’re getting back to W.E.B. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth, but it is up to a lot of us in our music and just in our way of life to pass on another idea of living to the generation that is going to come after us. I think a lot of the disconnect is that we’re not teaching, we want to be like them. We want some of the spotlight that they obtained, but we’re not comfortable being teachers, we’re not comfortable being elders. We want to be in the club too, we wanted to sit in the section too, we want a bottle too, we want a model too. We want the model but we don’t want to be role models — none of us do. A lot of us don’t. The more we are excusatory of the behavior the more we become responsible for the undoing of it. I don’t think we’re too far gone, I think a lot of us just practice this cowardice idea that “I don’t have to teach” so we kind of abandon our collective responsibility to the ones that are coming after us.
TRHH: “The Tale of Two Freemans” is a dope song. Did the producer come to you with the beat or did you have the idea and ask them to cook up the theme song?
Thought Provokah: I had the idea. At first it was like “let’s flip this Boondocks song” but then there was a third verse associated with it where I wanted to switch the cadence and switch the flow, A, but also, I wanted to put it in proportion to my album. I had this song for a long time but I was trying to figure out where did it fit. I had the track for like two years. I had it written but I was just like, “Where does this fit and what album would it fit?” This fit perfectly because we’re talking about the duality and the maturation of two sides. We’re talking about Malcolm Little and Malcolm X, we’re talking about Fred Hampton, and we’re talking about Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. We’re talking about someone as notable as Nas going from little Nasir to Nas and coming to his knowledge of self as well. So, it’s a tale of young black men going through this wilderness we call North America, trying to figure out who we are, but having to go through that experience.
Especially if you’re living in squalid conditions and you’re living in the projects. Having to go through that and then maturing and being like, “Oh, this is all a game. The projects are projects, I’ve been redlined, I’ve been put in here like a rat in a lab experiment. And I’ve been taught that the person who lives next door and lives in the same neighborhood is my enemy and we must fight for territory within our own neighborhoods, and then they’re gonna blame us for the aftermath of it, but they put us in the condition to fight like gladiators anyway.” They basically put us in the hospital and told us that we didn’t take the medicine. So, that’s what Huey and Riley is about — that duality that I’ve experienced personally. I know a lot of black men going from adolescence to manhood have, or even childhood to manhood I should say, have experienced.
TRHH: In that song you ask the question “If Martin was living/Would he comment like Cosby on our condition?” What do you think he would say today?
Thought Provokah: I think he would be where he was when he was fighting for workers’ rights. I don’t think he would share those same sentiments that Cosby did when Katrina happened and he went to go speak at a university and then told them, “New Orleans wasn’t anything before the hurricanes.” I think Martin would have his finger on the pulse of what’s going on more so since he figured out, “Hey, that Civil Rights Act, I’ve led my people into a burning building.” I think he would have been more progressive than what we kind of give it credit for. I think he would have been more progressive, I think he would have understood and listened, and had his pulse on the plight of black people more. I don’t think he would have been as detached as some would think.
TRHH: Is a Utopian society realistic or is it like you said before, just a metaphor for the afterlife?
Thought Provokah: That is a great question. I’ll put it like this, I’m in Jamaica, Queens right now. Across the street there’s a soul food restaurant, right next to that is an Arab owned corner store, around the corner is a Chinese food spot, another corner store with an Arab, another centered corner store next to that with an Arab, and then next to that is the African braiding place. It’s a melting pot now, but if you ask my mom in the 60s and the 70s that same corner of that same block it would have been all black-owned stores. The arcade was black, the cleaners were black, the corner store was black, the deli was black, it was all black-owned and black operated. So, I think once we get rid of the specter of capitalism, and I say the specter of it as if like it is all-encompassing, just the overall fixer for our problems, and we get back to community, community is the utopia we’re seeking.
That is the utopia. It isn’t, “let’s pool our finances together,” that’s part of it, but it isn’t the end all be all. Because what I find is once you get into a tax bracket of a billionaire or even a multi-millionaire, a lot of times you separate yourself from the issues of the people suffering. You don’t go back to those neighborhoods, you don’t live and breathe the air of the proletariat — of the oppressed. You don’t breathe that air anymore. The air is up here and you never want to go back down to the smog. What we do when we get there, we live in this like classist bubble like, “Eh, peasants.” I see it all the time. You’ll look on TikTok and somebody will literally make a video going to work and they’ll be like, “I saw this poor guy, he smelled on the train. I saw this guy smoking crack on his sidewalk,” not knowing how the economy is set up you’re two paychecks away from being that person. You’re literally there. You are no different. Your job can shut down. The way this economy is going he can cut that funding to your job today. You can be out here looking for a job sleeping on the street, especially in New York City. So, we have to get rid of this separatism idea that because I have a job I am better than the men or women or family digging in the garbage can for their last meal.
I remember after a bad game Shaq said he couldn’t handle the pressure. His father put him in the car, took him down to Skid Row and he saw a family there. Shaq hooked him up with a job, some food, and a place to stay. He said, “A man having to figure out what his family’s next meal is going to be, now that’s pressure. You’re a spoiled athlete making millions of dollars, that’s not pressure.” We have to put ourselves in others’ shoes as well as a community. How would I feel if I lost everything and I became an image of that man? How would I act? What would I do? What lengths would I go to, to feed myself, clothe myself? What would I use to repress the feelings of being destitute, poor, and without? So, it’s possible, it’s plausible but we have so many forces out there that convince us of our separate nature that it becomes hard to realize or see.
TRHH: So many. It goes back to what we were saying earlier, we behave like them. Classism. The isms — that’s not us.
Thought Provokah: It’s not at all.
TRHH: Innately that is not us because we’ve seen it all where we come from. I’m from the west side of Chicago, it’s extremely poor, very poor. We had neighbors who you would think they had a lot of money, they probably didn’t because we all lived in the same area. Everybody looked up to the Jackson’s because their house was immaculate, they kept their lawn straight, and they were just good people. And we had the opposite on the block, but it was a community.
Our block was cool, I can’t say that today, but when I was a kid you saw the spectrum. I don’t know how we got so far from that. It makes me think of Minister Farrakhan saying, “How can you love God who you’ve never seen and hate your brother that you see every day.” It’s real. He said, “Every time I see a black man I’m looking at God.” We need each other, and we really should be loving on each other, because we’re all we got. Our anger is pointed in the wrong direction sometimes, bro.
Thought Provokah: Yeah, yeah — that ire. As I travel for work I’m going from project to project and you’ll enter the building and they’ll be like, “Hey, you got an apartment for me? It’s kind of crazy in here!” And they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah you going on the 5th floor? You going to see such and such? Yeah, man she needed help with the rent. I’m glad you’re here.” That sense of community still exists and that sense of togetherness still exists in pockets of our communities. Communities that they want to move back to, that they want to gentrify so they can be close to the city so that it’s a better commute to their big offices downtown.
Because at first it was like, “I will never set foot in Bed-Stuy, I will never step foot in Flatbush, I will never step foot in Harlem. I’ll never step foot in Williamsburg. I wouldn’t be on Atlantic Ave.” But now you come to find out the Barclays is there and I think the other day there was a deal to build affordable housing that I found out about. That was the contract with the city after they got to a certain dollar amount. The city basically made them exempt from giving out those affordable housing initiatives. So, those people were displaced for no reason. Like you said, the anger is displaced.
It should be pointed at the system, but some people don’t have the literature to even know to begin as to how it is the system. And how this is systemic, and how this is orchestrated. How they took away the manufacturing jobs in our neighborhoods purposely. How they took away trade jobs. You saw what they just did with Job Corps, they took them out to schools and now all these foster kids and people who have aged out of the foster system who want to learn a trade and are not really equipped to learn in that system in school, they go to Job Corps. They cut the funding for it when it isn’t even a morsel, a drop in the bucket of what would affect the budget. This quote UN quote “DOGE scourge” that is going on.
TRHH: DOGE is a blatant attack on people of color, but it’s going to affect everybody. Maybe those supporters will wake up when their lives start getting affected, because it’s coming. If it has not come, it’s coming.
Thought Provokah: Yeah.
TRHH: Is Elysenya your most important album?
Thought Provokah: Yes. It’s my bravest album, it’s my most sonically diverse album. I was just recently married, I’m having a daughter, so this album was an ode to how I wanted to create a future for my family and my idyllic version of who we can be. And the funny story about Elysenya is when he goes into Ashes and Altars he doesn’t die, he comes back and the last song is “Building Elysenya on Earth” and how do you do it? How do you stand for restorative justice, how do we look at the man or woman and forgive them of their transgressions and bring them back to the light, as opposed to being just warped by the savagery of supremacy and these ideals. So, it’s my most important album because I had the bravery to not fit into this cookie cutter mold of an underground artist.
I stepped out on moral and principle, I stepped out on us really needing to have a message and to have something substantial to say, especially today. We can only talk about our wealth and our accumulation of futile trinkets and symbols of success, but the collective is suffering. It is indicative of Ubuntu, right? I am because you are, and I’m not when you’re not. So, if my people are suffering and I’m making a billion dollars, I’m still suffering [laughs]. We still suffering. If I can’t use my money to impact the way of life of my people then what am I really doing? I’m just hoarding resources. I’m just hoarding resources and I’m a lackey for capitalism, that’s all. So, this album is me stepping out and puffing my chest out and saying,” We gotta do something different” and standing on that.
Purchase: Thought Provokah – Elysenya