Bun B dekonstruerar Soul Food

Utdrag:

But at the same time there are some very dark moments to the album as well.

Well you have to think that a lot of the food that we eat as soul food is basically trements of slave and plantation lifestyle. The eating of tripe and pigsfeet and oxtails is not by choice but these are the parts of the animals that were leftfor slave workers to eat, rather than sitting in despair and crying about itwe were able to still have fun and enjoy each others company. Because it wasn’t just about the food. It was again about the family setting and the unity and the sense of togetherness that soul food dinners represent. It all comes back to being home. No matter who you are or how big you get you come back to your momma’s cooking and you’re home.

I never really thought about the record that way.

That’s funny because down here that’s the only way to think about it. It reflects on that entire plan of society from the plantations to the civil rights movement and the one thing that you see as the common thread through it all is the sense of family. And in black families in particular everything revolved around dinner. Everybody went to work, everybody did their chores and errands but everybody made sure to make it back home for dinner. And in spite of slavery and murder and lynchings and all these things we still have to stay strong as a family.

Do you remember what you were doing when you first heard “Cell Therapy”?

Oh absolutely, I had just moved to Atlanta when they released “Cell Therapy.” I remember hearing that piano and being like “woah this is kinda heavy, this is real.” And when Khujo just really started going into the dynamics of differnt laws during the Jim Crow period I was like “wow that kind of stuff still resonates today in society.” At the time it was really just the black americans and american indians who were the lesser citizens, but now, people of all races, creeds and colors are being held down by these same type of laws that were used specifically to hold black people down or red people down. It’s now just meant to hold everybody down within a certain tax bracket or a certain class of society.