Dilla Brought Us Here

Last night was the "One Won't Do" J-Dilla tribute show at North 4 Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After getting off the stage and over the painting on the wall of Bill Cosby naked with rainbow swirls shooting out of his johnson, I took a second to look around and realize what was happening. I was surrounded by family. This is not family in the traditional sense of blood relatives or people that would take a bullet for you. This is something different. This family is born out of something very exclusive yet inviting. It's this thing... This love of music. This love of art. They seem to bind people together in a way that's indescribable. The collection of familiar faces when you are about to perform, the conversations about what's going on in each respective world of creativity, the exchange, the mutual admiration, the overall scene- it has value. Not to say that it doesn't have its fair share of salt and slight sense of competition as well, but those are minor dings and barely felt. What I'm talking about is the unified climb. The beautiful struggle we all go through as artists gets less painful and more pretty as the members of this community grow and continue to embrace each other. That is truly the only way any scene can expand. It gets bigger from the inside out and not the other way around. In the end, we're all still the youngsters rhyming in the cafeteria, singing in the school talent shows, painting on the walls and dancing in the community centers. The only differences now are that our canvasses have gotten bigger, our palettes more sophisticated and our vision more refined. We don't call it dreaming anymore. That's for kids.

-Kendal