Jonathan McAfee’s last hurrah
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on defunct, Central Indiana arts website Sky Blue Window on July 7, 2015. Some formatting and style changes were made since the original publication.
Jonathan McAfee made a big splash last summer with his What People Like About Me Is Indianapolis exhibit at Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. The show featured 15 portraits of Indy’s most famous author. Half of the paintings sold during the exhibit’s opening reception, and the rest sold within a couple of months afterward.
“I had painted him a few times, and people would buy him. He’s got a great look to him. He looks like a cartoon,” McAfee says. “Indianapolis, in general, is just really all for Vonnegut. They just really like Kurt.”
The success of his Vonnegut exhibit — his first sold-out show — gave McAfee the confidence to quit his job in PR at Bohlsen Group. So in January he began to pursue painting full-time. He believes the work he’s producing now is the best of his career, as he focuses full attention on furthering his style and technique.
Photo by Matt Beuoy
“I’m taking way more time on my pieces,” he says. “I still paint pretty quickly, but I won’t say a painting is done now until I am 100 percent happy with it. Before, I would not wait until the last minute, but I’d book a lot of deadlines and have to get things done. I wouldn’t give it the same attention that I’m giving things now.”
On Friday, McAfee will debut 16 new paintings in a show at 3 Mass Gallery for Emerging Artists. The show will feature four portraits of local hip-hop musicians Oreo Jones, Sirius Blvck, John Stamps and Grey Granite. The idea came to McAfee as a cross-promotion of Chreece – a hip-hop festival in Fountain Square that Jones is organizing as a benefit for Indiana music archive and nonprofit Musical Family Tree.
“I had painted a bunch of different celebrities and icons over the years,” McAfee says. “I had grown pretty tired of doing that. I didn’t feel like I was getting to the spot where I was growing as an artist. I still enjoy painting people, and I had been interested in what these guys have been doing locally. I just feel like they have a really neat aesthetic going on. I like their style; I like their music.”
McAfee often listens to hip-hop music while painting in his home studio near Garfield Park. He prefers to paint along with music that has a strong backing beat. He says the music occasionally bleeds into the color choices in his work. “When I hear music, I see colors,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s influenced by the album art itself, but, typically, whatever I’m listening to I focus on those colors because of the album or maybe a music video associated with it.”
Beyond the appeal of McAfee’s new subject matter, Friday’s show is significant, because it will be his last solo exhibition as an Indianapolis resident. McAfee will move to Denver with his wife at the end of the summer. “I feel like I need a change,” he says. “I’ve grown complacent over the last several months to where I need to go somewhere and start fresh, make new contacts. It’s scary, because I don’t know anybody out there really.”
Photo by Matt Beuoy
McAfee and his wife chose Denver after falling in love with the city during a visit in March. His wife has a background in parks and recreation management, and the couple was looking for a city with more outdoor amenities. While visiting Denver, they stopped in a gallery at the suggestion of friends. McAfee introduced himself to the gallery’s curator, and told her he was a painter from Indianapolis who was considering a move. Much to his surprise, the girl enthusiastically confessed to being an Indy ex-pat. McAfee showed her a few postcards featuring some of his work, and that’s when things got really weird.
“I showed her the postcards and she looked at it for a second and she goes over to her computer and says, ‘Is this you?'” McAfee recalls. “I look at it, and it’s an image I painted — a portrait of the painter Basquiat. It was hanging at the restaurant Pure in Fountain Square. Her dad, who must still live here, snapped a photo of it, sent it to her and said ‘I think you might be interested in this guy.’ It was really kind of serendipitous, because this was the only gallery that I went into, and she kind of had heard of me in a sense.”
Though McAfee is scared and intimidated at the prospect of starting from scratch in a new city, he’s hoping the move forces him to kick his painting into high gear and work even harder. In the meantime, he is excited about sharing his latest work and celebrating some of Indy’s most talented, up-and-coming rappers. “Maybe I am painting some icons that are in the works right now,” he says. “Contemporary icons. I think they’re going on to do some pretty rad sh_t. Who knows, maybe I’m the first one to paint their portrait?”
Stop by 3 Mass Gallery on Friday (July 10th) at 6 p.m. for McAfee’s exhibit entitled Peace-key Whees-key. The event is free and open to all ages. Or find out more info via Facebook. For more info on Chreece, follow along with updates from the Aug. 29 festival via Facebook and Twitter.
Written by Rob Peoni
Fresh Track: Cicada Shells “All Bones Do Remain”
I’d be the first to admit that I’ve been largely indifferent to the local hip hop scene here in Indianapolis, but considering Thought On Tracks is a blog largely dedicated to Indiana bands and labels, writing about local acts is something I’d like to do more of. Cicada Shells is a group I’ve been paying attention to largely because of Defame, the production half of the group. His evolving brand of spacey glitch-hop is the type of forward thinking production I love and his beat for “All Bones Do Remain” is one of his best yet. I was less familiar with Lorax, the MC half of Cicada Shells, but his strong, visual performance here ensures I’ll be checking for him from here on out as well. If the group’s upcoming album is on the level of this single, it has the potential to be one of best hip hop albums of the year in a year stacked with great releases. Stream or download the single (and the remix) below and get hip to one of the best reasons to pay attention to the Indy hip hop scene.
Connect with Defame via Twitter
Written by John Bugbee
Album Review: billy woods ‘Dour Candy’
Upon first hearing billy woods’ new album Dour Candy I thought it was the most accessible album that he had released in his 10+ years as an MC (part as a solo artist and part as half of the now defunct Super Chron Flight Brothers). Subsequent listens have proven that while accessible may be the wrong word for any album from billy woods, Blockhead’s stellar front to back production gives the album a consistent swing and polish that contrasts with the abrasive, experimental production that billy usually rocks over. This carries over to the lyrics, where the encyclopedic scope of international and historical topics found on his 2012 album History Will Absolve Me is shrunk down into a graphic novel of an album that details what it means to be billy woods in 2013.
While billy’s range of topics on Dour Candy might seem much smaller in scope, his choppy, reference-filled flow is as robust and intricate as ever. Almost every song on Dour Candy has either a word (panopticon, daguerreotype, slattern, epaulettes) or a name (Rafael Trujillo, Scheherazade, P.W. Botha, Marachera) that you’ll likely have to Google to understand the meaning or the context of its use. This type of obscure reference overload is a hallmark of his work. The more references you get (which also include sports, movies, TV, classic hip hop, literature, and weed) the more brilliant billy’s lyrics become. This might be intimidating for newer listeners, but his make-every-line-count style is custom built for repeat listens that lead to eureka moments months, or even years, after first listening.
The two themes found most throughout Dour Candy focus on dealing with and moving on from a long term relationship, and scraping by to make a living (both through selling weed and trying to become successful as a musician). “Gilgamesh” illustrates both themes as woods uses the first verse to tell a story of his ex coming back into town and stopping by only to tell him she was getting married. Woods gets the last laugh though- “came through on her wedding night, groom peeping through the keyhole/ tears in his eyes, lights off mijo/ All you heard was rattling medals, she left disheveled/ Merrily dug his own grave whistling as he shoveled”. The 2nd verse finds billy retreating to his hustle “feet up on the Ottoman Empire/ a two block radius at best, but the peasants still call him sire/ hold his marijuana and shoot when he says fire”.
The narrative from “Poachers” runs along the same lines. Woods raps “I’m on the third floor fire escape balcony seats, the roach burns discreet/ blue and red stage- lighting the street” detailing his perspective while his neighbor gets arrested for selling weed. With the neighbor out of the picture, woods is there to “spoil your daughter, court your spouse/ do little repairs around the house” (hence the title) before losing the relationship in the end. Woods has always had great, realistic songs that revolved around dealing drugs, but the vivid pictures he paints on songs like “Gilgamesh” and “Poachers” have an extremely authentic feel about them that seems to blur the line between fiction and reality.
The relationship theme continues through songs like “Tumbleweed” and “Fool’s Gold.” “Tumbleweed” features ruminations from billy and Aesop Rock about moving on from relationships and trying to embrace the single life over some head-nodding, percussive rhythms supplied by Aesop’s old friend Blockhead. Woods excellent verse on the posse cut “Fool’s Gold” featuring Open Mike Eagle, Moka Only, and Elucid tells the tale of a man waiting at a Courtyard by Marriott for his regular hooker in “the same room as our first date” willing to risk his marriage for ‘fool’s gold’. The guest MC’s all offer similar tales of times they got their hopes up for something (Open Mike’s verse about a DOOM-poster show is particularly great).
“The Undercard” and “Hack” both further detail the struggle to survive as a drug dealer/rapper and the internal conflict that is created as a result. On the opener “The Undercard” woods takes us through picking up a re-up and performing at a show the same night and all the emotions that go with leading a double life, each side with risks and rewards. “Hack” finds billy feeling old and bitter, both with the “pick up, drop off, pick up, drop” lifestyle as a drug dealer and with the modern mechanics of the music industry: “woods, you need a new free project every month and a half, and moving forward the publicist only accepts cash.” Billy woods’ bitterness towards the world around him has always been evident, but on Dour Candy he also sounds more self-deprecating than ever.
While the relationship and drug dealer/rapper themes are prominent throughout the album, Dour Candy ends with a trio of politically minded songs that would sound right at home on History Will Absolve Me. “Pro Wrestling” cleverly compares cheating, script following pro wrestlers to politicians and features several perfect vocal snippets, including this closing gem from Ric Flair. “Lucre” certainly isn’t the first song that billy woods has dwelled on the merit, or lack thereof, of religious ideology, but its bluntly stated chorus:
“They say god remakes the world every day/ But the amount of good and evil, he never change/ It’s said that you pay for what you do/ But to see bad men buried with honor is nothing new/ I often hear hard work is its own reward/ and that the world is promised to the meek and the poor/ I take that like a kiss from a whore”
Dour Candy’s closer “Cuito Cuanavale” takes its name from a battle in the Angolan civil war in which the Angolan army was helped to victory by Cuban reinforcements. It features a chilling beat from Blockhead and another great chorus from woods (“They want it one way, but it’s another…”) that helps explain why power and restlessness are so closely tied. “Cuito Cuanavale” serves as yet another enthralling chapter in a book of politically charged songs centered on recent African history that only billy woods could write.
While Dour Candy is most definitely a billy woods album through and through, I would be remiss if I didn’t give Blockhead a little more credit for his efforts. Fresh off producing one of the most well produced albums of 2013 (Illogic’s Capture The Sun) just a couple months ago, Blockhead is reestablishing himself as one of the best producers in the game. “Tinseltown” and “Central Park” stand out in particular as two of the best beats on the album and have quickly become two of my all-time favorite billy woods songs. The jingling, mystical atmosphere on “Tinseltown” blends with some rugged drums and guitars to give woods the perfect canvas to paint a picture of his up to date mentality. Blockhead’s bouncy, almost DJ Premier-esque beat for “Central Park” is classic hip hop production at its finest and far removed from the progressive style of beats that woods raps over most of the time. It’s downright refreshing to hear him rap on the bright, warm production featured on “Central Park”. Billy woods has always had a great ear for beats, but I hope he continues to seek out this kind of catchy, upbeat production that serves as a great contrast from his usual production palate.
For most musicians, it would seem like an impossible task to try to follow up a defining album like History Will Absolve Me, but at this point billy doesn’t seem capable of making an album that’s not great. His never-dumbed-down, uncompromising style might never give him the recognition he truly deserves from the masses, but with each successive classic album he releases, he nets a new batch of lifelong fans. If you haven’t fully jumped on board, now would be a perfect time to do so. Cop the limited-to-300 colored vinyl over at Backwoodz Studioz.
Connect with billy woods via Facebook
Written by John Bugbee
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