Talaam Acey: Critcial Optimist

Shhh…just listen. Are you done? As you can see this is not another one of your run of the mill poets who starts off with brutha this and sista that and peace this or peace that. Talaam Acey’s poems are real on every level and the goose bumps that you have from that first poem that played should be just settling down and at some point you probably said, “damn.” In a time when we seem to be so desensitized and afraid to deal with, the Newark born, black nationalist raised poet deals with these very issues through his craft. Touring all over the nation his words have touched and inspired people to think and hopefully act. His razor sharp delivery and ancestorial words may be just enough to ignite the first step in a different direction for all of us.

Scheme: When did you first pick up a pen and really get involved with writing?

Talaam Acey: I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old. I got into spoken word in 1997, and I ended up going to a spoken word for a friend by mistake because I missed everything that he had been involved in including his birthday. So I came to this event even though I really didn’t want to. When I got there and saw what people were doing I really felt it was something I had to do like it was something I was born to do.

Scheme: What were you doing before this before it clicked in your head that this was something you were meant to do?

Talaam Acey: I was a business consultant and a college professor at Rutgers University and both of those were really coming to an end anyway, I had done everything I could basically do with those occupations.

Scheme: What was your background like were you raised with both parents?

Talaam Acey: Nah, I was raised by my mother and both of my parents were in Amiri Baraka’s Committee for a Unified Newark, they were both Black Nationalists but they still played a part in my upbringing. My father gave me a lot of books and challenged me a lot but he wasn’t in my life, my mother gave me a lot of books as well. I grew up with my mother and went to an all Black Nationalist school, so that was my upbringing, Black Nationalism.

Scheme: What is your relationship with your father like now?

Talaam Acey: We don’t talk.

“In our music and attitude right now there is a certain apathy that we’ve acquired and almost allowed to embody us but when we change it, it changes our mindset and then it’s reflected not just in conversation that you and I are having but it’s reflected in our arts, be it our poetry, our music, our media representations of ourselves.”

Scheme: It’s interesting for me because I got engaged in 2006 and the scary part for me is 95% of me doesn’t really care if my father came to the wedding or not so I was wondering even though you don’t talk to your father how do you feel and or what is your perspective on your father?

Talaam Acey: Indifference, I don’t hate him but he’s not someone I think about to often. I hope he’s well and I hope things are going well for him. I’m more in different, I don’t have any disdain or hate for the guy.

Scheme: Where do you think we can begin to salvage that relationship in the Black community between father and child even if they are not in the home?

Talaam Acey: I think a lot of things contributed to the estrangement between Black children and their fathers. It had to most recently with two things, crack, because of that particular drug a lot of us ended up losing and I want that to be clear that wasn’t a problem between the relationship between my parents. In a lot of households that particular drug was something that caused the children to lose respect for the parents and it caused a new breed of kids who of which many got a voice in hip hop records to talk about their experience. The other major thing that caused the schism was the change of the entire United States economy. In the beginning it was a agricultural economy and then it grew into an industrial economy which was what really the end of slavery and the civil war was all about trying to usher in an industrial economy. Now the U.S. economy is more of a service driven economy and after slavery African-American fathers were fighting hard to get manufacturing jobs and hard labor jobs in order to keep up and be a father in the household sort of like that James Evans(Good Times) thing. Now there’s almost nothing they can do unless they have the type of marketable skills this service economy requires and most, maybe don’t have that. So they want to be in a situation where they want to be fathers to their children but economically that can’t be. They never acquired the marketable skills to survive must less thrive in an economy such as this. How do you get it back? You get it back through education and the first thing you have to change is the mindset. In our music and attitude right now there is a certain apathy that we’ve acquired and almost allowed to embody us but when we change it, it changes our mindset and then it’s reflected not just in conversation that you and I are having but its reflected in our arts, be it our poetry, our music, our media representations of ourselves. It starts to change in the art then it starts to change in the mindsets and the masses.

“When Biggie rapped about crack on his first album he wasn’t glorifying it, it was something that he was almost ashamed that he had to do but he felt like he had to do. Of course by the second album he was moving major weight with the Dominicans.”

Scheme: When do you think crack hit hip hop?

Talaam Acey: Crack hit hip hop in the very beginning, well not in terms of rapping, but crack came about in the late 80’s and rappers started doing crack immediately because they hung around those drug dealers. I had a conversation with DMC from RUN DMC and he was saying the drug dealers were always around because they were funding rap even in the beginning, hanging out in the VIP room with the rappers. What changed was the rappers back then didn’t rap about crack, they didn’t rap about the cocaine. When did people start rapping about Crack? I don’t know, Ice T (laughs) and then from there the N.W.A thing and I don’t think they rapped about crack then the same way they do now. When Biggie rapped about crack on his first album he wasn’t glorifying it, it was something that he was almost ashamed that he had to do but he felt like he had to do. Of course by the second album he was moving major weight with the Dominicans and it got glorified and I know he dealt, I have a background of my own but obviously he wasn’t moving major weight with Columbians flying keys all over the world so that was bad. It became worse when people who never dealt a drug in their life and it got to the point where if you wanted to be violent you had to talk about drugs in your lyrics majorly!

“People have hard lives and there is plenty of room in hip hop for people to tell that story but the problem is that can’t be everybody’s story.”

Scheme: For you when did it hit home that you had to slow that down and change your path?

Talaam Acey: I was a little more conscious than the average kid so even when I dealt I dealt primarily to White kids, I didn’t even deal in my neighborhood, and it hit me right away that politically and socially I was dealing to another group of people although they were almost in the same social class that I was in. Realistically in terms of a personal decision its just stupid.

Scheme: What do you say to the rappers who say I rap about drugs and crime and they say that’s my life and or that’s what I saw?

Talaam Acey: The funny thing is I was writing to myself some notes and thinking rap in its most organic form was Melly Mele’s ‘the Message’ and it was a pretty raw rap especially for the time that it was written in and everyone understood this is what this man saw and you had no confusion to whether it was real. People have hard lives and there is plenty of room in hip hop for people to tell that story but the problem is that can’t be everybody’s story. That’s where we have the problem in hip hop it’s not that Snoop came out and dropped that first fresh album, it’s not that NWA came out and said stuff we felt in our heart and that’s how I feel, that’s not the problem and what makes it worse is that the majority of it is so uninspired. I’m not writing or telling poems about and I can tell I know more about it than they do.

Scheme: What is your message to people coming up in the arts but more specifically rap music?

Talaam Acey: Just like Chappelle said when he walked away from those 50 million dollars, you have to ask yourself the question of why you’re doing it and how much you’re willing to sell out for it because in the end it’s only going to be a flash in the grand scale of things. 90% or more of the people who are rapping, their careers are going to be very short and what comes later is going to be much worse than what they have now. I think if they want any type of longevity their going to have to sit back and think about what their saying because the reason why the artists have lasted is because of the honesty in their work, because in the end it is all about image. That’s the fuel today because people think image is the flash that makes people buy their stuff right now without the understanding that record companies have become organizations that really want to sell as much of your stuff make you as hot as possible and as flashy as possible in the now so that they can use you up and go to the next person. If you write things that conflict with who you are there is no room for longevity.

Scheme: Historically as a race Black people were very pro-active, from the Atlantic Enslavement era, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, when as a race did we become so reactive and to an extent accepting and tolerant of our current situation?

Talaam Acey: I know I’ve said it before but the crack epidemic was the big disconnect. It was the drugs that brought a sense of being disenfranchised and a sense of powerlessness but the beautiful thing about that is their going to have to come up with a new drug or it’s going to end (laughs). I’m optimistic about the near future.