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This song is called “Red Rose In The City”, and is one of the first songs I did as NM that succeeds at lightly finding the balance between abstract expression and emotional impact. The idea for this song first came from listening to “Jellyfish” by Ghostface Killah (featuring Capadonna, Shawn Wigs, Theodore Unit & Trife) in which somebody says the lyric “she a diamond in the rough, black rose in the hood” and I had just gotten back from a trip to New York City.
I was single and I was wild and I was lonely and I was irresponsible. The chorus of this song: “girl, I heard the devil ain’t never coming home / he’s a red rose in the city…” is basically about wanting to believe in goodness even in the face of adversity, even if it means lying to yourself for a little while.
Then kind of abstract: “hello pretty little miss, girl, you don’t get no sympathy yeah, you ain’t got no symmetry, odds are even, burning hot to the touch, cuz girl…” I don’t even know what I am talking about here… I suppose just generally feeling a bit in opposition to everything around me.
One of the things I was trying to do with this song, and it is something I am still fascinated with today, is how someone can take a beat that doesn’t change much, and turn it into a song by simply changing and varying up the vocal and lyrical stuff that you are doing / saying / singing. That is how I think about some of rap and reggea. These guys come in and what they do vocally is so exciting that the beat they are singing / rapping on top of doesn’t get boring, even though it is essentially a non-evolving loop.
So you change up melody, you change up phrasing, you change up your tone, you don’t pay attention to standard song structure, you do things off rhythm.
The second verse begins “feelings are weird, the first time I kissed you, I wished you had the internet girl”… That line always stuck out for some reason. It’s a truthful, honest, and timely lyric, not at all unreasonable, but for some reason it feels almost incongruous. The internet, now as ordinary as assuming someone has a telephone.
A lot of the lyrics for this song were lifted from my journals. It isn’t about one person or one event, it’s about many people and many events all thrown together, like the way a dream happens, all out of context, but somehow all tied together.
When I say, “what happens if the walls of a room collapse? / the space it still remains”, I believe that is actually a Deepak Chopra quote. I remember sitting on an airplane and watching him speak on one of those small TV screens that they build into the back of the airplane seats. I think he was on the Oprah show. This lyric was cool to sing at live shows because I could change the “of a room” part to the name of whatever club or space I was playing at. But then also, the deeper idea behind that quote is exciting, too.
“Stay awake through the surgery” was something that my buddhism teacher, Akasa Levi, used to say. I took it as an idea about mindfulness and being aware of everything happening around you, all the sensory details happening in this current moment, even when bad things are happening in your life, stay sober through the difficult and painful times, don’t ignore it, don’t lapse into denial as a strategy to cope with the day to day, WAKE UP! This song is layered with small buddhist ideas. You can visit Akasa’s website here.
This song also owes some of its inspiration to “No Said Date” by Masta Killah.
This main loop is taken from the very ending of “Blood on Our Hands” by Death From Above 1979. I just boosted the volume a bunch. Like I often do with my vocals, I doubled them, singing two takes right on top of each other. The majority of this song was completed on my tascam 4-track. However, Matt Kalish later added bass on this track and also added some noise from the famous sk-1 sampling keyboard.
The ending off this song is a riff on that classic dancehall song “Burrup” by Nardo Ranks.
This song was always fun to perform live. It has a more sing-song kind of quality than a straight-forward rap. And it seems like that’s the way things are going right now with all the auto-tune stuff happening. There are a lot more rap-singers today instead of just rappers.
This song could be done so much better if I did it over again, but I will never do that. It is an old song at this point. It captures a moment in time.
We did a video for this song where we hired some girls off of craigslist and a couple of them actually showed up, and we shot illegally in downtown LA and we got kicked out of some spots. LA rapper Ivan Ives was briefly in the video at the very end.
So yeah, red rose in the city - just reminding you that there is always some beauty, even during the darkest times, always keep a glimmer of hope alive, even when it seems impossible.
