“Skydreamer” by Adrian H. Molina w/ Mannequin Rituals featuring Helen Chanthongthip, Up Before the Sunrise, released by CHiTT Productions (2008)
Skydreamer is the opening track off Up Before the Sunrise, my first full-length album. It was a dream. I had been writing rhymes for 10 years, constantly envisioning what my first album might look like. What would it sound like? What would I say if I had one chance, one album, to say something to the world?
I started writing material for Up Before the Sunrise during the summer of 2006. I had been through a lot during the years prior. In 2005 I left the life I was living. It was a life that wasn’t mine. It was beating me down, slowly murdering me, and it probably would have killed me, mentally and spiritually, if not physically. I faced my demons, handled my business, then tested out my wings.
Representin’ (4 Life) by Adrian H. Molina w/ Mannequin Rituals first appeared on Representin’ 4 Life EPin March 2007. It was re-released on Molina’s first full-length album, Up Before the Sunrise, August 2008.
My main goal with my first EP was to clearly define my work as an artist, to define what I represented. I knew that my music would not always carry the same serious tone… because Hip-Hop has always been about having fun… but after almost a decade of writing and performing poems and raps, I wanted everyone to understand how serious I was about creating RELEVANT music.
I wrote the first version of La Historia del Mexicano back in 2002 during my days as an undergraduate student activist. I began performing it as a spoken word piece, then a lyrical acapella piece, then rapping it over other artists’ beats. Mannequin Rituals put a sound to it in 2008.
Circle back to one of many beginnings. It was November 4th, 2006. I had the opportunity to open for Saul Williams at the University of Wyoming. Will Ross was running sound for ASTEC—the University of Wyoming’s student government sponsored production team.
I knew of Will, having run into him continuously at UW events, but we had never really had a meaningful conversation. Our worlds intersected, but we existed in separate realms in the small town of Laramie, Wyoming.
Something told Will to bring his mini-disc recorder to the gig. It was probably Saul Williams’ name and notoriety. While running sound, Will recorded my performance. Young Brown Poet lit him up, and the next day he emailed the vocal track to Dustin Neal, his fellow band-mate and co-founder of CHiTT Productions.
Out of nowhere, I got an email from Will, telling me to check out a rough mix of Dustin’s vision of Young Brown Poet. Will explained that he sent the track to Dustin in the morning, who ran home over his lunch hour and recorded music to the words. Will produced a rough mixdown and it was in my inbox the night after my big performance.
I was floored by what I heard. Completely unexpected.
Hunger Pains first appeared on Representin’ 4 Life EP back in 2007. Representin’ 4 Life was all about flippin’ the script on empty mainstream rhetoric like “keep it real”, “represent”, “stay true”, etc.
I was hungry to put my stamp on the definition of “true Hip-Hop”, something I now feel is unnecessary. There isn’t one "true form of anything.
In any case I took an aggressive approach to reclaiming these phrases and making them meaningful. Academics would probably refer to this as “repositioning the subject”.
There were seven tracks on my first EP: three songs and four acapella pieces. Each track was about defining what I stand for and represent as a poet and emcee.
The three songs on the EP were “Representin’ 4 Life”, “Hunger Pains” and “Young Brown Poet”. All three were re-released on Up Before the Sunrise in 2008.
Mass deception, coups d’etats left and right, shared confusion, no way to tell what’s real and what’s fake—a collective inability to ascertain truth from lies because the spin doctors are that good.
Polar ice caps melting, mass global poverty ignored, apocalyptic natural disasters, conspiracies linking what was once natural to what is now claimed to be man-made. Seemingly no empirical way to make sense of it all, so the masses don’t even try. They just wait for 2012.
Sticking with the theme of the moon, “Letters to the Moon Pt. 1 (Heart in Motion)” appears on Sacred Paths—a collaboration with Asia Jazz Project.
Sacred Paths is a 9-track album that fuses nu jazz with living word poetry. It was released on September 20th, 2009—a day that marked both Asia’s and Aju’s 26th birthdays. The album contains two tracks that are each almost 15 minutes long. These tracks are more like journeys, or opuses, than they are songs.
As MLK Day 2010 comes to a close, I am reminded of my responsibility as an emcee. I walk in many shoes and wear many hats. I use my music to entertain, to educate, to inspire, to provoke thought, to create controversy. These lines often intersect and sometimes they become blurry. I don’t expect everyone to support everything I do. At the end of the day, I am accountable first and foremost to myself.
On July 4th, 2009 CHiTT Productions released My America—a benefit CD for Papers the movie. Molina spent months compiling music for the project, which features artists from across the United States, including Denver, Albuquerque, Oakland, Harlem, and Minneapolis. The CD is raising awareness about immigration and racial justice issues, and it is steadily bringing in funding to support the Papers movement. Special shoutout to the Tru Ruts collective out of MN for contributing almost one half the music on the album. WireTap Magazine recently wrote about My America. The story ran Thanksgiving Day.
Full-leaves waving in vibrant young green splendor under true blue sky. Eye, enwrapped in cool shades of room shadows, wet hair drying slowly. Summer, ’07. A wandering tune, folding into itself like waves, makes its way through my day dreaming, through motions of my right hand and takes shape as scribbles on an open page of my unassuming notebook. My red camera records the fleeting sounds.
Mo-lee-na So-lay & Ah-joo = SOUL-AH-JOO: an independent, community-oriented, multilingual male/female music duo. SOULAJU fuses progressive Hip-Hop and Neo-Soul w/ world music influences. SOULAJU engages youth around issues of self empowerment, cultural identity, the power of the living word, access to education and the arts, gender justice, comprehensive immigration reform, and environmental justice.
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