![]() One aspect of that is to redevelop the space so it is cooperatively operated and managed. So that looks like the steady but surely development of the Apex Bar, bringing that back to life in the 21st century as this community cultural hub … as well as this international destination for Afrofuturist music and culture.” Step two, we need spaces to be able to take these refined experiments and then produce them and promote them at a scale because that's where economy begins to be generated. “Step one, we need spaces to be able to create and experiment. The neighborhood has been a hub of cultural and music economy, and with revitalizing the Apex Bar, his vision is to build a “new hyper-local music economy.” If all goes according to plan, he's looking at a fall 2020 grand opening. In a very real way, this symbolizes for me the resurrection or renaissance of Black music culture in the North End.”Īnother track off the album, “Bout My City,” is his response to a number of things, including how many times people not from the North End would come to him with a story that centered people from outside of the neighborhood as the actual leaders of what was going on in the neighborhood. It was one of the first songs written for "Structured Water." Bryce Detroit (whose birth name is Bryce Anderson Small) started writing the album in late 2016 and one thing he’s particularly proud of is that “every lyric was written and composed in the North End. … We're going on three years later, (and the lyric) ‘to keep a Black business out of gentrifying hands’ has a very particular meaning.” So that was me, as a futurist projecting what was going to happen. We had just been accepted like, hey, you just won. So we hadn't even gotten the check for the grant yet. ![]() ![]() ![]() “One of the aspects of being an African storyteller, or jali, in addition to bring forth the rich historical legacies of our people through story and performance, (our responsibility is) also to tell stories that project the future that we want. When rapper and producer Bryce Detroit wrote these lyrics in late 2016 for “Rap Song,” off his newest album, "Structured Water," he and his partners had just secured a grant to bring back the Apex Bar in North End. “We got a couple hundred bands to keep our Black business out of gentrifying hands.” ![]()
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