For Your Consideration: On Quelle Chris, Flowers, and the Emotional Stakes of DEATHFAME

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“I wanna be somebody. [...] I want people to know I was here, you dig?”

What is with Black folks being denied recognition to the point where we become obsessed with the concept? How can Black people write about flowers at a time like this?

I suppose I can and should only speak for myself. My ancestors were stolen from their homeland; I got the 23 and Me results to prove it. (10% British, if you catch my drift.) My predecessors invented rock ‘n roll and got it stolen from them by Elvis and Marty McFly. Some of my most profound creative inspirations were snuffed out way before their time, to the point where I’m approaching dozens more years dwelling this big, increasingly burning rock longer than they had here, which feels like a crime for someone who for a long time didn’t expect to live to see my thirties, let alone be on the doorstep of 40. 

I’ll keep the details of my own professional disappointments, the extent of simmering professional jealousy, and my resentment of people cruelly misunderstanding the function of this thing I’ve given my life to — music criticism, that is — all to myself for now. I’m well-aware that anything other than false humility looks ostentatious to people who don’t believe in themselves. 

Point being, there are plenty of talented Black artists, too plenty if you ask me, that only get their propers after they’re put in the ground or their ashes part and scatter in the breeze. The downtown New York artist whose paintings now go for millions, whose signature crown is emblazoned on t-shirts at Uniqlo. The American expat whose meditations on race and religion are celebrated, while his delightfully bitchy opinions on critical discourse are still wildly undervalued.  A brilliant rapper is gunned down when he’s barely old enough to legally drink and his name shoots up the charts.

And I’ve gotta be frank with you, dear reader: It ate away at the core of my soul to see the type of people honoring George Floyd in death who would walk across the street to avoid him if they encountered him while he was still alive. Martyring him for the benefit of a good performance. It’s exactly the idea we’re conditioned to be despairing of as Black people: Our names are always worth more when we’re dead.

Quelle Chris calls this far-from-recent phenomenon “death fame.”

The veteran underground rapper — pushing 40 in a field continually referred to as a “young person’s game,” even though many rappers these days aren’t even ready for prime time until well into their thirties — thinks about such things as much as I do. When you’ve been building your body of work for a long enough time, you can’t help but think about the legacy it will leave behind. Is it worth it to wait to have something passed along to a future generation, or are the stakes too high to forgo being celebrated today?

DEATHFAME begins in earnest with languid electric piano and thudding drum kicks, co-produced by Chris Keys similarly to the opus from their collaborative 2020 album Innocent Country 2, “Mirage.” Chris explains that “Alive Ain’t Always Living,” sometimes brothers get out of bed in an attempt to continue surviving. I was on a long drive in my girlfriend’s Prius the first handful of times I heard the song. Not exactly flush or prideful about doing field study for a writing project; just trying to work my way out of a rut. Sometimes staying busy helps me find my inspiration, and sometimes it just burns me out. 

“Alive Ain’t Always Living” gracefully touches upon the burnout it takes to achieve your dreams, generational cycles, and the need to check in on your loved ones and not self-isolate in the throes of breakdown. (Personally, I struggle with the latter mightily.) As writers, as artists, we often mine our trauma in hopes that people will see us; that they’ll find something in those caverns worth carrying with them through life. Occasionally, it works too well, to the point where large segments of our audience ignore when we offer celebrations of achievement or high self-worth, when we stand in front of the world in sure belief in our gifts.

“Keep it one hundred bucks, I birthed a lot of MCs / While you lames nerf the fuck out the art of MCs,” goes the chorus of “King in Black.” Quelle Chris’ beat (the bulk of the album’s 14 tracks he produced himself) has a lurch to it, a slinking series of low bass notes, crashing drums, and piano scribbles wandering in and out low in the mix. Chris notes the bitter taste of Kava Kava, downing cup after cup of the calming (and intoxicating) tea so as to not slap scores of lesser rappers to the ground.

One of the many things I’ve admired about hip-hop as a fan since the womb is how its artists have no qualms about sharing feeling underappreciated, overlooked, slighted; but also how rappers are unabashed in asserting their greatness, standing stage front and using their florid language to catalog all the ways other rappers have rungs to go before hitting their level. I feel like a rapper in this way, as I am highly competitive and always angling to see where my bars measure up to the skill of other writers. I’ve thrown away styles after catching scribes who would buckle under the weight of my notebooks jacking the structure and the syntax, but not the soul and wit. 

I’ve screamed into deaf ears about the chip on my shoulder from being so much better than so many of the peers who have been pushed ahead of me for so many years.

Elsewhere on “King in Black,” Chris raps about his desire to “smoke tree, paint happy trees” like Bob Ross and to be free in a world haunted by the sounds of invisible chains; to our mobile devices, to this thing called money, the thing a lot of people claim to hate but everybody needs. He sits in hotel lobbies abroad having not lotioned his legs, he walks into pot stores and reminisces about how he and his people used to bag and sell cannabis under threat of imprisonment. Now capitalists — most of them white, of course — make millions from the sale of buds from the leaf, Uncle Ike getting rich on the same corners brothers used to get hauled off to jail from. A moment of silence for all my old weed dealers who got pushed out by retail.

“Feed the Heads,” with its swampy riff and mud-caked drums, is a statement of confidence out of necessity. The track comes from the responsibility of being great as a way to filter out the chaff. Because if all these sucker MCs plant seeds to grow more sucker MCs, who will be left to pull out the roots and keep the art form raw? These rappers want to be Michael Jordan, team captain of the championship dynasty Chicago Bulls, but Chris is content being present-day MJ: rich, holding grudges, and wearing garish dad jeans. 

On “Agency of the Future,” Chris wrings magic out of a dusty stylus needle and clearly acknowledges his consistent Best of Year list placements — he’s been a year-end staple pretty much since 2018’s excellent Being You is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often, as well as show-stealing guest spots on Armand Hammer’s unbelievable run of albums since 2016’s Rome — boasting they should close the curtain on the game rather than retire his jersey after he leaves the court for the final time. Year after year, highlight verse after highlight verse, and yet Quelle Chris still dwells in the middle space of critically acclaimed rappers. Not quite as well-known as many of his friends and contemporaries, but arguably every bit as revered by those in-the-know.

Hmmmmm, sounds like a very familiar station in career to me!

The twinkling music box boom-bap of DEATHFAME’s title track finds Chris twisting phrases touching on early PINK, “when niggas thought she was mixed with something,” and the financial improbability of being a great artist from someone who has managed to make a decent living. You have to treat your art like a business lest you’re willing to allow people to take advantage of you, you must draw the line somewhere when you know your art has value. DEATHFAME also finds its author noting the flowers Black people frequently speak of aren’t edible arrangements and would rather take the money to put food on the table for his family. 

“How Could They Like Something Like Me?” serves as DEATHFAME’s emotional centerpiece, as Chris sings a straight-up ballad over the sole accompaniment of waltz-tempo piano. The song speaks to the sort of celebrity worship and fame obsession prevalent in American culture for over a century by exploring the other side of it. The self-loathing of the star being obsessed over; or more particularly to Chris’ situation, the cult artist celebrated by fans for his brilliance but goes through struggles with his mental health and personal frustration. When this album came up in my conversation with ELUCID (one-half of the aforementioned Armand Hammer), he cited this song specifically, which in my book is enormous praise.

Hitting through clouds of smoke fogging up brain cells, the beats on DEATHFAME offer a homespun feeling while the drums (of which I’ve written about plenty already) kick their way through a thick layer of dust in the air. Chris mentioned in his press release for the album that he wanted to take it back to his days making beats in the basement.

Quelle Chris only brought a small handful of people with him into the proverbial subterranean floor of DEATHFAME; the aforementioned Chris Keys (who together scored the Oscar-winning biopic Judas and the Black Messiah) teamed up with Quelle on four tracks, while Keys and similarly blunted genius Knxwledge culled the emotive and balletic single “The Sky is Blue Because the Sunset is Red.”

Crashing cymbals and jagged free-jazz piano guides “So Tired You Can’t Stop Dreaming,” featuring a spotlight verse from rap’s preeminent spiritual weightlifter Navy Blue with a verse that takes up more than half the song. The song’s central lyric comes from Chris’ chorus: “If Heaven’s got a ghetto, Hell’s got a resort,” the private lake of fire for those who have done good deeds and were rewarded with eternal damnation as the counterpoint to Tupac Shakur’s theory that there’s a hood in paradise.

While Chris ruminates, “I came up on both sides like DeLorean doors” and pledges to donate with interest to the culture should he ever decide to take a knee, when he cedes the song to Navy, the young MC steps in front with one of spotlight verses of his career so far, carving out years of soul searching in the span of one extended verse. He abstains from alcohol and pork but proclaims himself a “marijuana baby” who sources strength from the green like Popeye; references Andre 3000, his peer in rap transcendence MIKE, and both Archie Shepp and Leon Robinson’s character on Above the Rim; scarfs down cornbread muffins with gravy; does the daily chore of self-care; and forces his way through misery to find his destiny. It’s a sterling work for both Navy as an artist and Chris as a producer; the latter taking the format of the former’s magnum opus Navy’s Reprise and rendering it a little weirder, making it hit a little harder.

The striking line near the end of Navy’s verse reminds me of my own struggles leading me to where I am: “I’ve landed where I’m destined to be.”

There is this notion of the “legacy artist” we as people who listen to music consider deeply once an artist has crafted enough hallmark work to be viewed as deserving of a legacy. Quelle Chris has forged a career as one of rap’s most thoughtful talents, to the point where he is immensely justified in writing, recording, and producing a full album around a very specific theory about legacy. DEATHFAME is a powerful statement about taking the concept of legacy into your own hands, to say you’ve built a body of work worthy of being appreciated today.

As I careen closer to the comic tragedy of being a 40-year-old music critic, I’ve softened a little in my urge to snatch those proverbial and elusive flowers from people who read and/or write about music. Not every great band needs to be famous. Not every great rapper needs to move 50,000 units every time they drop an album. The fact that the work is there is good enough. Both their work and mine. The reason I put deeper thought into my full work as a writer to begin with was to be a carpenter for something that would hopefully still be around when I’m burnt to a crisp and served up in a ceramic jar. I know death fame awaits because that’s just human nature: to overlook what we have until it’s reduced to a pile of ash. 

Fuck it, then. Who cares? I’ll be dead. Whatever the afterlife has in store for me, I’ll be far, far away from this terrestrial world and people’s half-cocked opinions. My physical essence will hopefully spread along Commencement Bay and y’all can do whatever the fuck y’all want with my words.

Maybe I’ll come back as somebody y’all will actually listen to. Or maybe I’ll live again, die again, and my words will mean more having died a thousand times over.