Nine Pillars Hiphop Cultural Fest co-founder Cullen "Fellowman" Wade made his new album, Death of the Author, as a tribute to a broad range of influences, from hip-hop to pop to folk, that he felt a deep connection to.
Cullen Wade considers himself a guest in the house of hip-hop. And he’s trying to make the most of his visit.
Going by the name of Fellowman, the Charlottesville emcee recently dropped a new LP and performed it in its entirety during a late December Facebook livestream. The 12-track collection, Death of the Author, is an ambitious concept album from a rapper and producer who’s made only one other full-length project.
“It’s the most personal thing I’ve done,” Fellowman says. “I think it’s the first time when I haven’t been trying to impress anybody. Being a rapper is competitive…A lot of what I have done in the past has been motivated by go-for-the-throatism. I wanted to put honesty over technique.”
And indeed, Death of the Author feels more real than Fellowman’s first record, Raw Data Vol. 1: Soul of the Shitty. Where Raw features smooth, bouncy flows—Fellowman says he’s always studied Method Man’s delivery—Death brings a more staccato, edgy style that would fit right in on a Run the Jewels track.
Conceptually, the new album pays tribute to 14 of Fellowman’s deceased musical heroes. He honors rappers, sure, like Mobb Deep’s Prodigy and TLC’s Left Eye Lopes. But Death is also a homage to punks like Joe Strummer and folk singers Phil Ochs and Victor Jara.
The idea, Fellowman says, was to explore his own attachment to musicians who’ve passed. The release of the album during a pandemic, when death is so readily on folks’ minds, was almost entirely a coincidence.
“I think Prince’s death in 2016—that was one of the celebrity deaths that hit me hardest. I was really upset about it,” Fellowman says. “My sister was asking me, ‘How can you be so broken up over the death of someone you’ve never met?’ And rather than dismiss the question, I wanted to kind of pick it apart.”
What does Fellowman come up with after exploring the topic? He hopes Death of the Author makes listeners think about the “intersection of music and our own biographies.” In “Waterfalls,” Fellowman tells the story of memorizing and privately performing Lopes’ verse from TLC’s chart-topping track of the same name. It was the first time he thought he himself could be a rapper.
In Fellowman’s new version of the song, he again performs Lopes’ verse word-for-word—and this time publicly. He also borrows the “Waterfalls” beat in its original form. “With the Left Eye tribute, it was really important to try to recreate that moment,” Fellowman says. “Most of the songs are built around samples of the artist I’m eulogizing. It was whatever seemed right for the occasion.”
The activist influence of Ochs, Jara, and others weaves throughout Fellowman’s lyrics—on Death of the Author and in his other recordings. The emcee is as comfortable pillorying the soon-to-be former White House occupant and bemoaning climate change as he is dropping pop culture references and clever turns of phrase. For a little from both columns, check the track “Run Straight Down (for Warren Zevon)”: “They say solutions need to be bipartisan / I watch the news and wonder what it cost to buy partisan.”
Fellowman explores the friction between corporate America and consumers in his rhymes, something he comes by honestly as a Monticello High School audio/video production teacher who long ago recognized his musical styling doesn’t have mass commercial appeal.
Last year’s December 26 Facebook livestream, which was also broadcast locally on WTJU, gave viewers a chance to donate to Operation Social Equality Mental Wellness Resource Center, a support hub for people of color. The production had a lo-fi feel, with Fellowman opening his performance singing and playing acoustic guitar, something he says he’s never done for a hip-hop show. A few technical issues caused early stumbling blocks, but Fellowman and his guests found their groove on the mic and between songs.
“It’s weird trying to perform with no audience,” Fellowman says. “You get no feedback—verbal and non-verbal. It can feel like yelling into the void. The way I approached it was sort of more like ‘an evening with.’”
Viewers queuing up the livestream are likely to notice why Fellowman considers himself a guest of the hip-hop scene. He’s a white rapper. And while that’s not as big a deal as it was 20 years ago when Marshall Mathers went pop, it’s something Fellowman wants to be respectful of.
“It’s a conversation that isn’t had as much as it should be anymore,” he says. “I have always approached it like I’m a guest. I absolutely acknowledge hip-hop as being an African American art form and I don’t want to ever be perceived as claiming ownership or unequivocal belonging. As soon as you start to act as if you have a sort of pass is when your pass gets revoked…If you are a guest in someone’s house, you follow their rules. You don’t put your feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.”
Death of the Author is available on a name-your-price basis at FellowmanRap.Bandcamp.com.
Local duo Equally Opposite brings an element of fun to Paul Dixon’s video for “Teach You,” a track by Las Vegas rapper J. Ran (center). The Nine Pillars Hip Hop Music Video Showcase screens at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Friday. Courtesy of NOXID
Doughman got into filming music videos because he had to.
The area music producer was handing out beats to rappers left and right, but they wanted more than just music. They wanted a visual component to match the aural experience created in the recording booth. They wanted music videos.
This was back in 2012 or so, says Doughman, and at the time, there wasn’t really anyone local making music videos for rappers. Doughman had been vlogging some of the studio sessions, and so he took it on.
Since then, other independent filmmakers have joined the rap video hustle, and eight of them (including Doughman) will show their work at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.
Music videos have been vital to hip-hop since MTV aired Run DMC’s “Rap Box” in 1984. Since then, rap videos have had a lasting effect on the music video industry, and on American visual culture as a whole.
But the music video “is more important [now] than it has ever been for hip-hop,” says Cullen “Fellowman” Wade, rapper and co-director of the Charlottesville-based Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest. The internet is full of more music videos than MTV could ever air. Wade’s even heard some local rappers say that if they can’t make a music video to share on social media, there’s no use in recording the song in the first place.
Some mainstream, high-budget rap videos have come to be regarded as a form of short film, but that consideration hasn’t extended to their independent, low-budget counterparts, says Wade, who, in addition to his musical pursuits, co-hosts“Arts & Crass: The Highbrow Lowbrow Film Podcast.”
But the opportunity to screen independent rap videos at the Virginia Film Festival—which, in recent years, has hosted Spike Lee (2017) and Allen Hughes (2018), two of the biggest names at the intersection of film and hip-hop—can help bring that sort of credit to the genre, says Wade.
In curating the showcase, Wade asked independent filmmakers in the local hip-hop scene to submit their best work, knowing he’d get different pieces that together demonstrate a breadth of creativity and vision.
Paul Dixon (aka NOXID), a music producer who’s new to filmmaking, submitted the video for “Teach You,” a track by Las Vegas rapper J. Ran featuring Charlottesville duo EquallyOpposite.
Throughout the song, J. Ran tries to woo a girl, and the video follows the rapper on his ultimately successful journey. But that alone wouldn’t be much of a film-worthy story, decided Dixon. He wanted a little comic relief.
EquallyOpposite’s Zachary “ZacMac” McMullen and Lamar “Gordo” Gordon go after a girl and get completely, utterly, rejected. Dixon laughs when he talks about it—“they’re so cartoonish, so alive, and animated. It’s kind of perfect.”
Doughman’s submission, his video for Chef G’s freestyle track, “No Hook,” is a completely different type of video—this one sticks out to him for a number of reasons, namely the “gritty feel” that matches the essence of the song.
Chef G is the only person in the “No Hook” video, and he raps in three different locations: sitting on a bike on a street corner, on a broken-down mattress in an overgrown yard, and on the eaves of a yellow house. His presence is constant and his flow inescapable. You can’t help but listen.
And that, says Doughman, is exactly what a video can do for a song, for an artist. “Let’s just say, it’ll give you another look…it’ll make you listen different once you have a vision to it.”
The Nine Pillars Hip Hop Music Video Showcase screens at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Friday, October 25.
Woody Guthrie’s protest song “This Land Is Your Land” is “arguably more popular than our national anthem” according to American Songwriter magazine. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
Everyone knows at least one protest song. There’s Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which American Songwriter magazine says is “arguably more popular than our national anthem”; Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”; Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”; Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”; Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”; Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”; Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”; Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”; Fiona Apple’s “Tiny Hands.” The list goes on and on.
These songs endure because their comments on fascism, racism, neglect for the environment, sexism, privilege and more burrow deep into the ears, hearts and minds of listeners, stirring emotion and reaction by speaking truth to weighty issues that affect all of us in some way.
But protest songs aren’t just written by folk icons, riot grrls and hip-hop legends—plenty of Charlottesville musicians of many genres are actively writing and performing songs in the protest tradition. Here’s a sampler from local artists.
Keith Morris, “What Happened To Your Party?”
Known to at least one of his fellow musicians as “our rockin’ protest grouch in chief,” Keith Morris has a slew of protest songs, such as “Psychopaths & Sycophants,” “Prejudiced & Blind” and “Brownsville Market” from his Dirty Gospel album, plus “Blind Man,” “Peaceful When You Sleep” and “Border Town” from Love Wounds & Mars. He wrote his latest release, “What Happened To Your Party,” about a month ago. Morris says “it’s about Trump, the Republican party, fundamentalist Christianity, my brother’s suicide, and just what the hell is going on right now.”
Erin Lunsford, “Neighbor’s Eye”
Lunsford recorded this song about resistance in February of this year. “Brother we must resist / Sister we must persist / This is no easy road / We’re going down. / Shoulders sore from fists held high / Boots on the ground but our spirits fly / How will I know if I’m on the right side? / I’ll tell by the love, tell by the love in my mother’s eye,” she sings.
The Beetnix, “Dirty World”
“Most extreme acts of protest come from a sense of desperation and lack of hope derived from the belief that a person or group of people lack value or respect within a society or community,” says Damani “Glitch One” Harrison, who performs in local hip-hop group The Beetnix with Louis “Waterloo” Hampton. Harrison says that although Beetnix songs might not be protest songs by definition, “they definitely embody the struggle.”
“Dirty World” describes “the sense of hopelessness we feel at times, existing in a society where we know there are so many forces that work against the best interest of the common people,” says Harrison. “The quotes from George Carlin [the late comedian famous for his “seven dirty words” routine] further illustrate that feeling while fighting a losing battle against an elitist power structure.”
Matt Curreri & The Exfriends, “Vote for Me”
“I’m the real thing, I’m the real deal. I have things you would kill for / You can have ’em if you vote for me / I’ll re-rig the system to the way it used to be,” begins “Vote for Me,” a song that Curreri wrote during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Lauren Hoffman, “Pictures From America”
“They tell me war is justified, to forward all mankind / And peace only comes through sacrifice / Do you think they’re right?” Lauren Hoffman sings on “Pictures from America,” a track from 2010’s Interplanetary Traveler. The song paints a picture “of the juxtaposition between deep sadness for the world—war, injustice, bigotry, hubris—and the importance of human connection, because without that we could despair completely.” See also “A Friend for the Apocalypse.”
KNDRGRDN, “Police”
“The stylish kids put in their false teeth / They cut off their hair and occupy Wall Street / I wish I were pure enough to believe / I wish then again that all the fakers would leave,” Jonathan Teeter sings on “Police.” It’s “a criticism about the disconnected way that Occupy Wall Street was handled by protesters,” Teeter says of his Brit pop-y tune with ’tude. “Every group involved seemed to have a different plan and there was no unanimous decision for an endgame.”
“Then there’s the problem with the police / They cut their hair and keep the peace / They keep it with guns / And they keep it with mace / They keep telling me I’m in the wrong parking space,” Teeter sings on the next verse—the police are just as unorganized as the protestors. Basically, Teeter says, “this whole thing is one big fucking mess.”
Jamie Dyer, “King Of The World”
This song “protests the overall political structure that’s existed for all of history and the seeming human need to crown someone as a ‘leader,’” Jamie Dyer says. “The end result of how humans allow this idea to propagate is shown in our history: tens, hundreds of millions of dead humans at the hands of kinds, leaders and the state.” With lyrics such as “the meek will inherit what the strong will lose. / What the meek don’t want, I don’t use. / I heard about a party, I heard about a feast. / The most make a meal of the least,” Dyer’s message is clear.
EquallyOpposite, “Temper”
Hip-hop duo EquallyOpposite spits some of the most clever lyrics in town, and the message in “Temper” is crystal: #DONTCENSORME. It’s not the duo’s only protest song. Check “The Blind Mans outro,” too.
“Robert E. Lee’s in a public park / Out in the middle of a public park / The shadow of his sword falls on the grass till it gets dark / General Lee’s in our public park,” Brady Earnhart sings about the statue that’s caused a hell of a lot of controversy in Charlottesville. So “stick it in an alt.-right petting zoo,” he says. “The South’s not dead but the men who fought for slavery are / Emancipation Park is a Southern star.”
“I hear slaves would follow the Northern Star to freedom. At this point, I’m hoping other Southern towns will follow Charlottesville’s suit and cleanse themselves of the Confederate monuments that are getting more embarrassing with every passing year,” says Earnhart.
Fellowman (ft. Sizz Gabana), “Loot This”
“Almost all of my songs are in the protest tradition,” says MC and lyricist Cullen “Fellowman” Wade, but he feels that “Loot This,” from his 2016 album Raw Data Vol. 1: Soul of the Shitty, is especially relevant to Charlottesville this summer. Wade says the song is “a response to the respectability politics of liberals who say ‘I don’t understand how destroying their own communities helps advance their agenda.’ Institutions of power have consistently shown that they value property rights above human rights; our showing flagrant disregard for their property is the only proportionate human response.”
“Give me uncommon stars in a barren ether / A sure direction of universal entropy / Feel their cold gazing with blackened eyes, but without fire,” members of Astronomers sing in unison on this stargazey rock track from their 2011 album Size Matters. The song “isn’t protest so much as unity, which I am much more for,” says Astronomers’ Nate Bolling. “I realize it’s a bit abstract, but it was meant to be so that it could be interpreted individually by listeners. The gist is that there’s a lot of people out there and everyone’s moving in their own direction; lots of confusion and bad stuff too, but somehow we figure out how to live together.”
Tracy Howe Wispelwey has made an album rife with protest songs—the titles speak for themselves, really: “Call to Nonviolence,” “Do Not Be Afraid” and “People Come Together,” on which she sings, “People come together, come together right now/ Fear won’t find us when we know we’re a family.”
Gild the Mourn, “Hanging Tree”
Local goth duo Gild the Mourn were compelled to cover this track from the Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt. 1 soundtrack to “convey its message to our audience: We have been mistreated, we have suffered injustice and accepted it as life. Now we rise together and unify, we fight,” says singer Angel Metro. In the film, Katniss Everdeen sings it while citizens of Panem rise up to protest torture they’ve experienced at the hands of the Capitol. It goes: “Are you, are you / Coming to the tree / They strung up a man / They say who murdered three / Strange things did happen here / No stranger would it be / If we met at midnight / In the hanging tree.”
“D.I.Y. D.I.Y. D.I.Y. D.I.Y. die trying/ D.I.Y. D.I.Y. D.I.Y. D.I.Y. die trying/ We found the lost and gave ’em microphones to yell/ Until their voices echoed ‘change’ down in the well,” goes the refrain on Breakers’ song on the importance of unity and empathy, and how it’s that’s not easily achieved. “long story short…if you want something done, you have to do it yourself,” says Breakers songwriter Lucas Brown.
“In our current political climate, it feels like there has never been more division between groups of people,” says Brown. The divide can be attributed to many things, such as news outlets pushing certain agendas and constant consumption of varying perspectives on social media. “People are much easier to control when their worlds are shaped to their own beliefs by constant consumption and affirmation of said beliefs. When they fear or despise their fellow human beings because they disagree, all hope of unity is lost. And for those in power, unity is the enemy. …Connecting with others has never been easier, yet face-to-face human interactions have suffered a blow. A large number of voices could be united on this front, but the internet usually turns them into an echo-chamber of babble. …If you can empathize with and find a common goal to unite the people around you, everybody’s efforts are necessary to make any change,” says Brown.
“Ghost of the King,” Gina Sobel
This bluesy/jazzy track “deals with mountaintop removal, changing economies and the people left behind,” says Sobel. “It can be hard to see through culture and history, even when the issue is something like blowing up mountains.”
We’ll update the page as more artists submit their songs, so check back periodically for more. Got a song to share? Send it to cvillearts@c-ville.com.
Spititout Inc. founders MC Remy St. Clair and FellowMan work with DJ Double-U to close each Rugged Arts showcase with a freestyle group cypher. “It’s like walking on water, not having a limit,” St. Clair says. For every MC, says Fellowman, when you’re ready to be heard, “you know it, and you grab that mic.” Photo by Eze Amos
When R.U.N.T.215th was growing up in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s, he routinely stayed up late and recorded Lady B’s “ Street Beat” Power 99 FM radio show, taping it on his boom box. He’d listen to the tapes over and over—the sets were packed full of Public Enemy, MC Lyte, Audio Two and Melle Mel tracks, plus in-studio rap battles and the music of the Bridge Wars—a track-for-track rivalry between the South Bronx’s Boogie Down Productions and Queensbridge’s Juice Crew over the birthplace of hip-hop music.
One night, Lady B played KRS-One’s “Criminal Minded,” and R.U.N.T. was hooked. Captivated by the wordplay, the sense of individuality and social consciousness expressed in song, he recalls thinking, “I’ve gotta do this.” He started rapping at home and in school, in the upstairs room of a neighborhood Episcopal church. He filled rhyme books and stacked them in his closet; sometimes, he says, his mom’s abusive boyfriend would tear up his rhyme books, but R.U.N.T. kept writing and rapping. He emceed, performed at block parties and the local Boys & Girls Club. He got into graffiti art, which, in addition to emceeing, DJing and breaking, is one of the four original elements of hip-hop culture.
R.U.N.T. began planning his future around hip-hop, but then his mom finished nursing school and they moved from Philadelphia to Charlottesville, a small city with an even smaller scene.
He’s been working on growing that scene ever since. After participating in a few different projects in town, including Burnt Bush Productions, R.U.N.T. formed his own hip-hop collective, Spititout Inc., in 2005, with the intention of cultivating an underground hip-hop circuit.
R.U.N.T. and his current Spititout Inc. collaborators—Rose Hill native MC Remy St. Clair and NOVA-raised producer and poet FellowMan—have organized Rugged Arts hip-hop showcases since summer 2013, first at Eunoia and now at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. Rugged Arts is a unifying, artistic outlet for underground artists from Charlottesville and the surrounding areas, and Spititout Inc. emphasizes that it’s a safe and welcoming space for hip-hop culture. It’s the place to go to be exactly who you are.
St. Clair says Spititout—made up of a second-generation Philadelphia hip-hop head, a white man and an openly gay black man—is “a blueprint for unity within the hip-hop community.”
Every Rugged Arts event tells “the story of a struggling city that never really gave our art form a chance,” says St. Clair, who hosts the showcases. When certain venues would host hip-hop, the organizers would have to jump through hoops—hiring extra security guards, purchasing extra insurance on the building— and that makes holding a show fairly difficult, financially and otherwise, St. Clair says. (Other venues currently hosting local hip-hop shows include The Ante Room, Milli Coffee Roasters booked by Camp Ugly and Magnolia House.)
Spititout Inc. feels that the stigma against hip-hop, especially underground hip-hop, is unwarranted. It’s all about peace, love, unity and having fun—those are the core values, R.U.N.T. says; it’s not about violence and hatred.
That’s not to say that the showcases are soft. “Rugged Arts is a place where you can talk about social issues and plan events to confront certain social issues,” R.U.N.T. says. The music addresses poverty, oppression, racism, sexism, politics and so much more, but there’s a social activism component to it as well: There’s always a donation box on the merch table, raising money for causes such as the bail fund for those arrested during the protests in Charlotte, North Carolina in September.
“What we stand for [at Rugged Arts] is what hip-hop stands for and has always stood for,” FellowMan says, and that’s for equality and voice and against exploitation and oppression. “It’s important that we continue to make politicized art because…art is maybe the only tool we have [against suppression], so it’s vital that we encourage it.”
Spititout Inc. looks for genuine, individual and entertaining artists with a social conscience who are pounding the pavement in search of a platform. They book around five artists per showcase; each shares his music with Rugged Arts’ DJ Double-U, who fires the beats at the right time in each artist’s set.
The promoters have plenty of goals for the future of Charlottesville underground hip-hop. R.U.N.T. hopes the scene diversifies while continuing to offer socially-conscious entertainment; he wants local artists to tour and touring artists to stop in Charlottesville. St. Clair wants area hip-hop acts to play Fridays After Five, and FellowMan wants to see hip-hop at the Tom Tom Founders Festival. “I would like to see a ‘community event’ actually accept us fully and not just tolerate us,” St. Clair says.
Every Rugged Arts event ends with a cypher, a group freestyle where anyone in the house can grab the mic and spit it out. DJ Double-U plays the beats—often made by local producers—and the mic is passed around. Everyone knows when an MC is ready to talk—you can see it on his or her face, St. Clair says—and when the hand touches the mic and the words start to flow, it’s an audible emotional exhale. It’s relief, the remedy for whatever ails them that day.
