One of the few consistent themes in my personal and professional life has been a great interest in story telling. I was a fantastic liar during my developmental years, and turned this knack into a career in advertising. I’ve always been a voracious consumer of books and radio shows. Getting into visual art, for me, is just another way of telling a story. I hope that part of this art thing will venture further into audio territory because there are so many possibilities there, especially through a blog.
I haven’t taken the time to learn how to use podcasting software, but I learn best through trial and error. My apologies. Anyway.
Roddrick is one of my fellow art students at NCCU. Over the last ten months, we’ve become friends, and we’ve had some interesting conversations that span a lot of territory. A few days ago, I asked him if he’d let me do a low-fi interview with him, and he said “Aite.” After class today, we went to my house and recorded a 26-minute interview (of sorts) on my patio.
I asked Roddrick to do this because he’s literally bursting with energy and ideas. He’s 19 years old, and he grew up in a small mill town in North Carolina called Albemarle. His family is poor and black. If you aren’t black, and you saw Roddrick walking down the street, you might think “tall hip-hop dude with crazy sneakers.” And that’s where low-fi audio intervenes. There’s a lot more going on in his head than what you see.
If you have 26 minutes to spare, and you don’t mind the poor production value, I think you’ll enjoy what Roddrick has to say about being poor and black, how rural southern black culture views white people, what it’s like to go from a small town to an urban university, what swag means to a man, why he didn’t vote for John Kerry, and what Barack Obama means to a huge group of people that almost always get ignored, unless they’re doing something wrong: Poor, southern black men with beautiful brains.