Stream: Kenan Bell, ‘The Blacks’

Kevin Bronson on September 4th, 2020

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Fresh off releasing his “Cellular Theory” EP early this year, rapper Kenan Bell jumped back in the game today with the new single “The Blacks,” a sinuous meditation on blackness.

Inspired by the social justice movement, Bell arrives with “bars and bars and bars of blacks” to contribute to the national conversation on race. The track offers compelling food for thought, especially if nature gave you a lighter pigment.

Bell, a schoolteacher by day whose family roots are in the Deep South, grew up in Southern California, mostly in the suburbs. “My white friends questioned my blackness, my Black friends questioned my blackness,” Bell says. “It happens to this day.”

“The Blacks,” which samples a jazz interpretation of of Nina Simone’s “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” acknowledges how he fits the stereotypes (rapper, basketball player). But, with his characteristically playful flow, he also challenges the overarching subtext of color: that black = bad.

“Black as the cat just crossed your path / Notice how ‘black’ used to symbolize bad / Black as the dark thought I just had / Blacker than that / Blacker than Black,” he chirps.

Woven into the track are spoken-word samples from the likes of Richard Pryor, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“The EP I’m working on now is a change of pace,” Bell says. “It has dance moments. It’s minimal. It thumps in a new way. I’m feeling really inspired by everything that’s going on in the world right now. If we keep the pressure on, I don’t think my kids will have to have the same experience I did.”

||| Stream: “The Blacks”