Nothing Scarce

On the other hand, his close collaborator Eric McNeal, a rising star as a stylist, said he was “the first fully-fledged artist” in his family. “My mom wanted to be a singer,” he continued. “She gave up her artist beliefs to be a mother.” However their paths and the kinds of guidance they received may have differed, each of them is concerned now with what they owe to themselves and what they, in turn, will leave behind.

When I spoke to the two of them, Jones called from his room in Brooklyn and McNeal from a hotel in Los Angeles. Video chats can have a distancing effect, with their not-quite-there presence, but they both bridged that gap with each other, picking up on old jokes and memories. McNeal spoke excitedly, leaning in towards the camera, especially when tasked with explaining the why of something. Jones was more reserved, a bit hesitant before settling into the rhythms of his answers. McNeal joked that when they first met in a shared car ride he didn’t believe Jones was a rapper—he was too quiet, too reflective. Rappers, in his experience, were braggarts. Jones smiled bashfully as his friend told the story, but didn’t dispute the characterization.
They both described this project as a break from their past selves. That’s a risky venture for a rising musician whose previous album, Arcade, produced the hit “Tropicana.” He shines on that song, especially its hook where he elongates words into a pleasant whine: it’s tailor-made for screwing your face up and swinging your hips on one of those days when sweat sticks to your skin. If you want to be a successful rapper and you make that kind of song, there is one imperative—make another just like it.

But looking back, Jones said, “I carried a chip on my shoulder for the earlier part of my career.” He wanted “stability,” and worried that, as a result, his work “wasn’t as honest and transparent” as it could have been. Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma issues unmistakably from the same mind. Jones’ music is warm and inviting. Even when he raps in double time, his funk inflections lend the songs a laid-back quality. When it came time to start planning the album’s release, he pivoted away from a set of traditional music videos and instead opted to create a short film of the same name. Momma was written and directed by Jones and the duo known as rubberband, Jason Sondock and Simon Davis, with creative direction by McNeal. The film, which premiered at Sundance and won a Jury Award for short nonfiction filmmaking (as well as a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lion), uses snippets of his songs as the backing to a series of miniature scenes that collectively sketch the shape of a young life. The moments are small and sticky: in one a group of friends lie around a car, listening to music and eating candy.

Although it has been described as a visual album, it is more accurately a piece of memoir. “Visual album” is a strange term to begin with. All albums, after all, were visual, until the need to store multiple vinyl records arose. For some time, the classics of the genres, like Prince’s Purple Rain, were still called films. Beyoncé’s Lemonade changed this. It was too big to be a video and too constellatory to qualify as a narrative movie. It was like a well-curated exhibit with the constituent parts reinforcing each other, but so autonomous that they drove towards coherence rather than a denouement.
Momma concentrates the fragmentation while veering away from the comforts of fiction, interspersing interviews on politics and policy in between recreations from Jones’ life. Based on the Black ABCs, a collection of literacy flashcards made by Chicago educators in the 1970s with an eye towards black students, the image’s rich tones and steady pace evoke the pleasurable memory of languid days. For his part, McNeal explained, “When I was asked to be a part of this project I went into it thinking that my role was going to be one thing, but as we began the process of laying out the cards I remembered that those ABC cards are a part of my identity and how I learned the alphabet.”

In some instances, the cultural connections were direct (A is for Afro). In others, it was simply a matter of creating educational material that acknowledged the existence of black kids. E is for Everybody:in the picture, everybody was black. In Jones’ film, the material is knottier. Shot by Chayse Irvin (who also worked on Lemonade), the images are more bewitching. A is for amphetamines. C for code-switching. J for jealousy. In an early scene (H is for Herringbone) a black kid runs towards the camera wearing what must be his first gold chain. He pauses, hands on his knees, beaming, until an older hand reaches in and snatches the chain from his neck. His face falls; on to the next letter.

The readily comprehensible abecedarian framework structures what is really an associative collage made up of interviews, recreations, and archival tapes. Monologues about food security, civil rights, and creative control butt up against quiet stagings of communal life. In N is for Nappy, a group of friends sit on a porch in a saturated, husky dusk working out the kinks in each other’s hair. Little indignities, the late-night doubts of a lover, the lasting shame of finding yourself in a fight you cannot win (W is for Worldstar) are laced throughout what would otherwise be a more straight-ahead depiction of moral and educational uplift.
In spite of the elegance of the new images, the most surprising and compelling cuts are frequently the turns to old recordings of Jones’ childhood. It was a last-minute addition because, unlike most stars, Jones adamantly “tried to decentralize” himself. But McNeal joked that his friend’s family is “the most documented.” There was too much material to ignore. The placement of the archival material implicates him in the claims the film makes about the characteristics of a black youth. “As a younger artist I got caught in the trap of feeling that my story needed to be loud and pronounced,” Jones said. Now he is more interested in “that small mundane moment that you can never quite get out of your head.” A bildungsroman, with pitched vocals and punchlines.
“Black image makers, we put a lot of weight on ourselves,” Jones offered while reflecting on the process of making Momma. He is somewhat self-sacrificing in claiming this weight as an exclusively internal burden. Black artists are tasked with representation: with standing in for. Black art is repurposed into a tool by audiences and critics alike, as though listening to a song or being bowled over by a painting will provide some shortcut to the dark matter of blackness.
Before the archival footage was in the cut, McNeal insisted that Jones conduct the interviews with his former teacher and local activists in order to place him back at the center of the story of his own life. “People talk about the black experience so much it’s been reduced to a buzzword,” McNeal told me. “Topaz is so many experiences.” It’s obvious—we are all a mess of circumstances and happenings—but black artists often find themselves caught between yearning for solidarity and disambiguation. Whatever desires there were for self-effacement, the artists involved couldn’t help themselves.

On the album, Jones has a corresponding tendency to slip between I and we. On “Herringbone,” the first verse begins in first person—setting the scene of a cookout—but ends in the first person plural. He is speaking not just to his family but you and yours, too. Like many of the better memoirs, this toggling between the self and community makes it more than a record of subjectivity. When Jones interviews his middle school teacher, it isn’t to get a testimonial about his academic prowess: it’s to explain the racial and class stratification in his hometown. It tells you something of how he became who he is, and also, how New Jersey became what it is. Medicine with the candy, as Jones is fond of saying.

One could spend a long time picking out every visual and auditory reference in Momma, but it seems a bit beside the point. The film is a medley, playing some notes you know and others you might not. Artists are a voracious type. Picking out the lines of influence is the job of the historian. Jones, steeped in black artistic traditions, said he is “not much of a returner.” Kanye West and Spike Lee are important to him, and the shoutouts are there (“The blues is mo’ better, the food is mo’ butter.”). But what he wants is to be surprised by new art. After an artistic achievement like this one, he told me it was so “emotionally strenuous” that he’s in “a bit of a hangover.” Rappers don’t win many awards at film festivals, but as with his last album he didn’t seem eager to try and replicate the same kind of success. “If I had my way,” Jones said, “we’d never do this again. We’d only do new things.”
Over the course of the conversation, I kept thinking the two men were not terribly similar. Jones was more reserved with lengthier pauses before he spoke; McNeal was gregarious and playful. Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma has the same nature. It is by turns solemn and comedic, sometimes simultaneously. But there was one word both men kept returning to if only to reject it: scarcity. Jones characterized the earlier stage of his career as haunted by a “scarcity mindset.” Making it is celebrated in the industry because most people do not. When I asked McNeal what would have changed if he had seen a film like this when he was attending Shirly Chisholm Daycare in Brooklyn, he spoke of seeing possibility. “All that scarcity,” he answered, “would have went away.”

Blair McClendon is an editor, filmmaker and writer. He lives in New York.