Fast Love is a Slow-Burn
Interview with Black Hibiscus
“You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”
― James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings [Sampled in ‘PAINS’, Black Hibiscus]
On October 18th, the Brooklyn-based artist, Black Hibiscus, released his highly anticipated sophomore album, GROWING PAINS, a polyphonically textured progression of his debut, The End of the World, released in 2022. The artist’s five-track EP project, FAST LOVE, released earlier this year, lyrically foreshadows the thematic substance of GROWING PAINS. In its simplest sense, this sophomore release is an ode to maturation from fast-loving to the tedious ebbs of self-loving.
The cover art for this project provokes the violence of evolution, a prelude to the 10-track sonic meditation that is GROWING PAINS. Black Hibiscus drags us through these beautifully packaged convoluted spaces with the album’s opening track, ‘GROWING’, ‘DOPAMINE’, and ‘SELF/LOATHING’, begging us to interrogate our indulgence of comfort as the antithesis of growth. Amidst its sonically and lyrically provocative tracks, the playful quality of the project bleeds from FAST LOVE into GROWING PAINS, leaving us with pieces of thematic residue that hold space for loving and longing to coexist as the artist reckons with the liminal state of growth.
Can you describe the thematic evolution between your debut album, The End of the World and GROWING PAINS?
“I honestly think The End of the World was more thematically connected, somewhat loosely, to the gravity of relationships. A lot of songs are about characters from City of God, which was one of my favorite movies at the time. ‘Angelica’, ‘Benny’, and ‘Lil Zé’ was me projecting a love triangle onto the three characters, speaking as each of them. And then with ‘Basquiat’ and ‘Ninasimone’, I'm almost becoming them by exploring their relationships. The album really focused on characterization, but that's so, so far removed from me - I'm giving my take on it or my interpretation, but it's still not quite as personal. With GROWING PAINS, I wanted to dive into exploring my direct feelings about something for the first time. The project is really about this past year and what that's looked like for me.”
Cover: Dennis Free
Jay Jay, aka Black Hibiscus, graduated college last May. This is his first year as, what he describes, “a real person”.
“It's been very up and down. I'm so grateful for the amount of growth I've had in the past year with my music career, with my relationships, with so many things. But with all that growing comes a lot of changing, you know? Those weird emotions about holding onto things. It can be painful… changing that quickly.”
As much as relationships contribute to the mosaic of GROWING PAINS, with the desperation for clarity in ‘TENSION’ and ‘DON’T WANNA MISS U’, and the echo chamber of reminiscence in ‘FORLӦRN’, at its root, the album is a contemplative work on modes of self-soothing and superficial highs in a comfort-chasing culture.
“One of my favorite songs on the project is called ‘DOPAMINE’. The track is about my relationship with dopamine and drugs and all sorts of other ways dopamine shows up in life, but mainly just about self-control. I think this is my first time really tackling ideas that personal. And it was fun.”
There is a genius subtlety to this particular track, posing stimulation in opposition to self-control and the sobering passing of time. Black Hibiscus employs a sonic mimicry of intoxication, warping each vocal layer with an addictively monotone cadence. The lyrics playfully contemplate the existential implications of dopamine as the pursuit of synthetic happiness, contradicted by the artist’s indifferent intonation.
We’re then met with the upbeat, raging track, ‘SELF/LOATHING’, at the mid-point of GROWING PAINS. This track is the sonic fallout of FAST LOVE, an homage to the spiteful slow-burn of falling fast. ‘SELF/LOATHING’ sits somewhere between the sonic styles of King Krule and Paris Texas, establishing Black Hibiscus’ seat in the industry beyond the indie-soul genre. It is at this point in the project that we witness the brutality of untangling the self from attachment, dopamine, comfort, and admiration, inciting the dismemberment of the psyche that necessitates growth.
You’re clearly bringing us into a sequential narrative with the cover design of each single off of GROWING PAINS. Tell me about the artistic production and design for the project.
“GROWING PAINS kind of appeared as I was making it so I didn't have much time to think through the visual parts of the project conceptually. The Funkadelic Maggot Brain album cover was a big inspiration for the project with her head coming out of the ground. It's a pretty literal interpretation of growing pains - you see me growing out of the ground and the pain that comes with that, becoming more visceral with each cover.”
You recently directed this visually stunning video for the release of ‘TENSION.’ How do you describe the relationship between the track itself and your cinematic direction for the piece?
“The song is really a conversation between two people about this tension between them which they work through as they switch between parts throughout the track. I wanted the music video to represent that same tension in an abstracted way. I had this thematic concept of the Garden of Eden and nakedness with the models acting as projections of ourselves, letting them interact with each other as Dachelle and I act out this tension. There's one shot in particular that I really like with the two of us facing each other, sort of talking very blankly and straight-faced, not really moving while these animated projections get further and further away. You really get to see what that tension and emotion looks like physically.”
In July you released this brilliant cover of Lauryn Hill’s ‘I Gotta Find Peace of Mind’ from her MTV Unplugged studio recording. Tell me about your relationship with the track and how you sonically designed your cover.
“I actually found the sample through ‘Purity’ by A$AP Rocky and Frank Ocean. There's something about it that's so strongly connected to growing pains and her personal relationship with God. I feel like I have a constantly changing relationship with the idea of God and that song is a really interesting way to process that relationship. I honestly typically don't like covers, so when I decided to do it I wanted to make it my own. I focused on chopping and rearranging the lyrics with my guitar and synth style to develop each layer as a sample. I wanted to pay homage to ‘Purity’ and ‘I Gotta Find Peace of Mind’ as a hybrid between both.”
How do you define your soundscape?
“Soundscape-wise it's hard to put into words - I like room sounds. Especially growing up with 80’s music like Michael Jackson, the styles of reverb and the way they laid out production, panning, and leveling decisions create the feeling of a physical space. It's like Michael Jackson is standing in front of me, the guitars are over there a few feet away, the drums are somehow behind me, and there's a little shaker thing that's to my left. I'm sort of spatially arranging something that I could imagine seeing.”
In the past four years of your musical career, we’ve seen you develop a poignant aesthetic as an artist, both sonically and visually. What inspires your artistic image and how has it evolved over the course of your career?
“Sonically, at least so far, a lot of it has been whatever I'm listening to at the moment. When I started, I was really into Bakar, that very indie punk-ish raw sound. Especially given my earlier musical skillsets, that was the guiding force of what kind of music I wanted to make. Visually, I feel like I'm only now starting to get real control over that. For my very first project, I just needed an album cover, so I got my brother to help who hated this because he was stuck with me the entire time. We were at home and I was like, ‘Please just take some pictures of me’. He was so reluctant. But I knew Illustrator and Photoshop so I just messed around until I was satisfied. The End Of the World was the first time I worked with my manager, Dennis. We had just met a couple of weeks before he invited me to stay with his family at Martha’s Vineyard to shoot some photos and videos for the project. I let him control the flow and organization of all those visual components. With FAST LOVE, I started having a little bit more control, but even then I wasn't shooting content directly. But this time around, GROWING PAINS was the first time I got to take full direction - planning the cover art design, storyboarding videos, what I wanted the story to be, and planning out how we were going to execute that.”
Who/what are your biggest non-musical artistic inspirations?
“I got really into film during COVID. More recently, maybe like two years ago, I found out about Ingmar Bergman, who's this Swedish filmmaker from, I wanna say sixties to the eighties. Every film of his that I've seen captures something that I feel is reflected in my music. I want to get into filmmaking as well, so he's definitely been a big influence. Within design, I draw a lot of inspiration from Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese American sculptor and product designer. His work explores a lot of interesting forms, finding interesting ways to play with space.”
What is your favorite track from your discography?
“My favorite released song is probably ‘Ninasimone’. I think it's just a very dramatic song. That was one of the first times I felt like I was able to access a spiritual plane of creation that all my favorite musicians were on. Beyond how much I enjoyed making the track, I felt like I was accessing something deeper with that song.”
What is your favorite unreleased track in the works?
“My favorite unreleased song is probably ‘So Long’, a song I wrote a few weeks ago and still haven't recorded. It’s very fresh in my mind, maybe I have some recency bias but I'm very excited for that one to come out.”
If you could collaborate with any artist who would it be?
“I think it would be Dean Blunt. He's this British, I wanna say, indie musician, but indie isn’t even the right word to describe it. I would consider him one of my favorite artists beyond his music alone. As far as what he's doing creatively, how uniquely individual that creation is while still connecting universally, is very interesting.”
Quite fittingly, GROWING PAINS exists outside of the confines of any single experience. Embellished with palpable moments of longing, rage, infatuation, and frustration, GROWING PAINS is a 35-minute sensory simulation, flipping our auditory lens inward. Amidst the convoluted terrain of growing pains, the textural integrity of this project is gracefully upheld between choral vocal runs, raw field sampling, and its incredibly polished production. By unveiling his pain - the sticky, the bloody, and the romantic - Black Hibiscus has accessed an innately human process of growth offsetting the superficial.
