'I want it to herald what I think is the mission of our generation, which is to integrate the diaspora with the continent.' —Jidenna
“To be able to see what people look like on the other side of the globe has a tremendous impact on me humanizing them,” Jidenna explains. “Now I’m seeing the flea market in Nairobi. Now I’m seeing a bunch of people in Dar es Salaam and in Addis Ababa that look like me and their hair is twisted like my hair. It has a slightly different spice in the way people dance or the actions people use, and I’m excited because I feel myself in them.
Upon releasing his 2015 jovial, trap-inspired “Classic Man,” Jidenna admits he wore a mask to protect himself from the world. “I was fearful of how I would be received, fearful of my power, fearful that I wouldn’t be listened to,” he says. Now he is more comfortable sharing his thoughts on black empowerment, feminism, polyamory, and sexuality. Opening up came with witnessing a new generation of raw artists like Cardi B speak their truth, no filter.
“I was socialized to think that sex was about me,” Jidenna says. “It was the way I was introduced to it. My sex education was porn. If I was a kid [now] and my parents gave me a smartphone and I hacked through the parental guidance setting, and I stumbled on PornHub and all these sites, man, I’d be more twisted than I probably am now. I would think that everything is aggressive, everything is geared toward the man’s pleasure.
Again he offers commentary on men resolving power complexes, on the album’s dreamy “The Other Half.” He points to the blues era as a time black men could be fully human in music. “A black man singing about ‘I don’t got no money and I don’t got no women,’ singing about not being able to protect and provide, and crying and weeping over a guitar, that’s a safe space.” He says that evolved to R&B, where men weren’t ashamed to beg for love.
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