Interviews

12 November 2021

An Interview with Adam Biggs

A conversation about the lyrical content of Rivers of Nihil’s newest heavy metal album, The Work.

24 September 2021

An Interview with Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is author of sixty-seven books of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and literary non-fiction. Passengers Journal published Dr. Meyer's short story "Thine is the Kingdom" in Volume 2, Issue 7.  In this interview, Audio Editor Charles Fleming converses with Dr. Meyer about various topics of interest: poetry vs prose, the absence of World War I literature in the Canadian canon, and more.  Also included is Josh Dickson's incredible reading of "Thine is the Kingdom." 

9 July 2021

An Interview with AD Carson

Professor AD Carson on politics in art, rap in the classroom, and impact on audience.

Professor AD Carson is an award-winning hip-hop performer and educator from Decatur, Illinois. In 2017, AD Carson received his PhD. from Clemson University in Rhetoric, Communication and Information Design, after submitting his thesis as a 34-track rap album titled Owning My Masters. In 2020 he also released the first ever peer-reviewed rap album with the University of Michigan Press, called i used to love to dream. Beyond the accolades received in the academic community, AD Carson’s work shows a decided revolutionary undercurrent, creating movements such as the See the Stripes campaign, initiated during his time as a student at Clemson University. See the Stripes came in response to the University’s “Solid Orange” campaign promoting school colors through their Tiger mascot and raised awareness of the darker parts of CU’s history and development. “As the stripes on The Tiger complete the picture of the university’s mascot, acknowledging the stripes on the uniforms of convict laborers, the strips of land worked by the sharecroppers, and the slaves, who bore stripes on their backs, help provide a necessary, more complete view of the history of Clemson University." #seethestripesCU

Poetry editor Andreea Ceplinschi recently had the pleasure of sitting with Prof. AD Carson as he shared his thoughts on the process of creating, editing, and publishing his art, discussed the impact of his work on the audience at large, as well as using rap in teaching Hip-Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia.

Passengers: Professor Carson, a lot of people view your work as activism. When you sit down to create, do you have in mind whether your work will just be an expression of a personal moment, a tool for survival, or deliberately set out with the same revolutionary intent that led to the See the Stripes campaign?

AD Carson: I don’t know that I see there’s a difference between survival and revolution. If the goal of the status quo is to eliminate me or my personhood, then my survival, I believe is revolutionary. I think that there’s something about just having ordinary experiences, like experiencing joy or just living, that I want to document as well and I sometimes realize that the stuff that gets shared and the stuff that resonates with folks oftentimes is the stuff that speaks about the terrible atrocities and not the stuff that’s talking about, you know, the conversation I had with my brother on the telephone. But I think that documenting all of those things is incredibly important because if not, then it may seem, and I may find myself creatively in this position where I think that if I don’t have something to say about the thing that everybody else is talking about, then I don’t have anything to offer. And that’s just not true.

I think that whenever I start writing a song, it’s not that I want to teach anybody anything. I think when I start writing a song it’s because I want to learn something. It’s usually because I have questions. And there are times where I start writing a song and then I realize that I’m asking the wrong questions, or I’m responding to the wrong questions, where I have to dig a little bit deeper and sometimes in the revision process, I realize a song that I wrote is not really the song that wants to be written.

I remain open to that, to not knowing in the moment and then learning from that piece later what might have been going on. And that’s definitely something I’ve seen with each of the projects that I’ve worked on.

Passengers: Beyond the survival and revolutionary aspects of your work, you also use it to teach Hip-Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia. Can you tell us a little bit about the Global South part of that and how hip-hop fits into UVA’s definition of Global South Studies?

AD Carson: This is something that, I will say, is not very intentional on my part. I think that it’s part of what I do because of perspective and maybe my location, where I come from, and then maybe speaking out against whatever these dominant narratives are. I think this seems to fit in certain ways with UVA’s conception of what that work might look like. Some folks might conceive of this work as “activism” and I’m not saying that it’s not, I’m just saying that’s not what I think whenever I’m doing the work. When I’m connecting with artists whose work tends to challenge the status quo or institutions that engage in these violent practices of excising the marginalized, it just so happens that hip-hop is a place where you might find quite a bit of that across contexts. I think the same thing is similar to working with artists in the Black Power Station in Makonde South Africa, our connection is because of a set of practices and the way that those practices align with some thoughts that we have about power and how to speak truth in the face of it. So I don’t know that we see ourselves as a Global South connection, or that we are even applying that language to it. I think that if you look backward at the work that’s been done and you have that as a rubric, then you might be able to fit certain aspects of our work into it, but I don’t know that that’s our approach moving forward into doing the work or into collaborating.

Passengers: This April you held a public lecture called Rap as Resistance: from Fuck the Police to the Bigger Picture; your students seemed really interested in defining the term resistance. Since Fuck the Police seems to be such a pivotal moment in hip-hop history, reframing the narrative from exposing the status quo to call to action, could you tell us what resistance in rap means to you and if it begins at the call to action?

AD Carson: I think that […] resistance in some cases begins as existence. Like your presence signifies a kind of resistance. I think about my, and not just mine, but many of my students being in a place like the University of Virginia and then choosing to do the kind of work that we do there, even if we are sort of narrating the day-to-day, there is something about that that feels antagonistic to the institution, that I imagine certain folks would not want to be there, to exist there. I think that it happens in some ways that seem really passive and some ways that are more openly calling folks to certain kinds of action. I think that is the line that I was trying to get the students to kind of think about: all resistance doesn’t have to look like of sound like Fuck the Police. There are occasions where simply being in the room is not resistance, particularly being in the room and being silent while whatever has been happening continues to go on. I think sometimes that is packaged and sold as resistance and I think that it’s not. It has something to do with context as well. And I do mean context and not intention, because there are times that we might intend to resist and don’t and just because we intended to it doesn’t mean that we should call it resistance after the fact because it’s just not.

Passengers: In the realm of resistance and call to action, your song Just in Case off i used to love to dream took on a “call to action” quality, transforming from a letter to your mother into something entirely different within the context of the album. You wrote about part of its journey for NPR’s Code Switch. How did this piece evolve for you, from initial concept, to album, to single with its own video?

AD Carson: The piece started because of living in South Carolina; there had been a case where a teenager had been killed by a police officer in a near-by town, and there was a vigil. I drove out there and […] the family of the young person asked if I might say something at a rally they were having because they were trying to get an investigation to make sure that the video was released. I agreed to speak and then I thought what’s the thing that you might say at an event like this?

But in the context of the album, which I think is kind of different from the context of creating the piece, it’s framed a little bit differently[…]. It’s in between a track called Crack USA and Stage Fright, maybe like an internal memo. Like speaking out toward the idea of Crack USA and the weariness of going out and performing in public after a long time, there’s this like if anything happens, I just want the understanding to be that it’s not me who did it to me. I don’t know if I look at it as a sort of a turning point in the album, so much as it’s sort of as interior as it gets before going back outward, at least that was my intention. Starting with a thing that’s sort of personal and then sort of, out of that context, it resonating different ways, I think it also speaks to that process of putting a project, an album project or a mixtap/e/ssay together is like trying to design your way through the narration or the arguments so that folks might be able to follow it in a certain way. I know that the way the album is ordered is very deliberate on my part, but the order in which the pieces are written and the reasons why the pieces are written are so different from the argument that I’m trying to make with the project.

[…] And that’s the thing that maybe doesn’t get captured in that video for Just in Case, because that’s going to have to exist on its own, as a piece that’s out there on the internet, so if you don’t listen to the album you don’t hear how it moves from track 3 to track 4. And if you don’t listen to the album, you also don’t get how we move from Just in Case to the next piece. […] I guess sometimes we do extract a paragraph or a long quote and that stands in for this thing that we really like, but I imagine the person who wrote the long quote would want you to read the rest of the essay.

Passengers: It’s probably the same process a poet might go through when putting together a collection and thinking about what the message of the collection would be vs. the message of any single poem that might have to make it out there on its own. You’ve said about Just in Case that you would love for people to engage with it as text but would also like to hear it in the background at a cookout. And since this piece is already out there on its own, with its own video, do you think an increase in popularity to the point that it might get played at house parties would help or eventually distort the message?

AD Carson: I don’t see any reason why it can’t be both of those things. This is what ampersand is kind of getting at, that the either/or choice doesn’t have to be that; it can be something more that is encompassing more than the binary. So of course, I want people to thoughtfully engage with the project, but I do believe that the more they engage, the more there will be thoughtful engagement. At least that’s my optimistic view of it. And if there are more people that engage with it, even if what they have to say is not very thoughtful, we can have a conversation about the common thing that we’re talking about, about the piece, that you disagree with me on, or whatever that might be. So this is also the reason to publish something about the album with folks like NPR or wherever else, because I think it’s important to make the work available. That’s why the album is free, it’s open access. I’m not trying to sell people records, that’s for certain, I’m not trying to make a lot of money selling people music, I want to make it accessible, well free, because I want lots of people to listen and engage with those questions that I’m trying to wrestle with myself, and I think that other people are likely trying to wrestle with as well. 

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In the aftermath of our conversation, engaging with questions seems to be at the core of AD Carson’s creative process. Whether it be questioning the status quo, asking a work in progress what it’s trying to say, or urging the audience to ask those questions, Carson makes it clear that constant query is the key to revolution and growth, both creatively, and as a society. Therefore, for the purpose of mindful creation, and mindful engagement with creation

please ask questions