The Art Corner: Introverted Nation with Kareem Ledell
on music as Language, lyrical wizardry and blooming talent in Appalachia.
“every hero needs a home”
A man sits on a rock in the middle of a square in ancient Greece, he recites sonnets and spits rhymes for passers-by, he is not asking for money, just just making art. This is the scene I imagined as I read the words of David Abraham on a beach in the South of Spain, “The first large written text to appear in Greece- namely, the Iliad and the Odyssey- are paradoxically oral texts” says Abraham proceeding to then call Homer a rapper of sorts.
Abraham explains that stories used to be told orally before the written text took over, which means that storytellers could reinterpret narratives within their own contexts and make them their own, infusing them with their own reality, and then giving them to the world. Apparently, it is easier for a human being to remember rhythmic sentences, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” versus “eating fruits helps with your health”. It was a day when I thought a lot about oral history and poetry. The same day, I met with a wonderful artist who uses music as his most authentic language.
Kareem Ledell is a Johnson City, TN, based rapper and poet who has found in music a language that brought him out of his shell. He describes himself as an introvert and tells me that as a child he was very much into reading and writing and very little into socialising. Perhaps his introverted nature is something he highlights, but in his voice and movements, I see a whole world. Johnson City, he tells me, is a city where a lot of older people come to retire, and this is the narrative that the city has, one where young people leave and old people come to retire. But through his art and work, he is counteracting this narrative, “There’s so much talent here,” he says “sculptors, painters, but the community is small”. He tells me that one of the things he would like to do is to bring artists together and create bridges between them, he is keen to always say exactly where he is from, and not generalise it for an ignorant public who might only know one or two cities in Tennessee. Saying he is from Johnston City feels almost like a revolutionary statement, a scream from the depth to show that in this place talent blooms, and everyone needs to know.
Appalachia is a region in the United States with a reputation of being predominantly white and Republican, but the narratives that travel outside about any place are never the narratives of those living their daily lives in a context. Kareem was 8 years old when his family moved to the other end of the city, from an all-black to a mixed school. He admits the transition was hard, “I didn’t grow up relating to a lot of people,” he tells me, and the school change exacerbated his introverted nature. “I’d grown up around pretty much nothing but black people, and then it switched. We’re all just people, but just being in school at a young age, kids can be mean. And it just kind of made me start acting differently. I never realized how much it really affected me until I started getting to a reflective age. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.” he says.
He began to write to find an expression for his feelings as a child who had just been moved schools, and this passion slowly changed from writing to writing music as a way to communicate that felt comfortable for him, “I started making music because it let me be who I wanted to be and craft that narrative of who I wanted to be, the person I wanted to project onto the world and the type of people that I wanted to keep around me,” he tells me as he looks up in a dreamlike world. “I definitely credit all of that to music, because that was really the first time in my life that I was able to kind of speak my mind wholeheartedly.” As we speak, I truly notice the way that his tonality of voice, rhythm, and even his eyes, change when he talks about music. I bear witness to an unmistakable veracity and voracity, an unadulterated passion for the artistic pursuit, wherein words might not come easily in a one-on-one conversation, but they do in the harmonious melodies he weaves. “That’s who I am, that is the one time that I’m able to speak my mind,” he says about his music “I don’t know why, as old as I am I still have trouble just talking to people. There have been so many times when if I couldn’t say something, I would just write a song about it. I have something I want to say to you and I truly just can’t get it out, I’ll write a song and send it to you.”
I see in him an authentic love for the craft, and even if words don’t come so easily to him in a conversation he says, they do in a song. His music style is a mix of influences from Kendrick Lamar to Kid Kudi and Mac Miller, and as I listen to his pieces I am in awe of his lyrical wizardry.
My interpretation is that he is unafraid of experimenting with different types of music because his lyrics and rapping skills are incredibly well-defined. Kareem has a head in the clouds type of attitude but in his lyrics, there’s a strong groundedness, as if they were the anchor that let him experiment and move within the music.
In his video for Ain’t it Strange, we see a Kareem battling, or rather dancing with, contrasting feelings of wanting to be lost and showing the world who he is. The song then pauses to show a scene of Kareem with 5 friends, chilling on the sofa listening to his music, commenting on the lyrics and observing the process. It is an intimate scene, where Kareem feels both vulnerable and extremely confident, supported by his friends. The song then starts again with a completely different rhythm, violins in the background speak of melancholy for a time that has been let go of, and a harder darker beat sets the scene for a new beginning, almost building pressure for it. “Here goes a brand new pack in the mail, this time I have to excel. Ain’t going back where I was, my mind practically hell,” he raps.
One of the first questions I asked him in this conversation was if he thinks of himself as a poet, he wavered then said: “ Perhaps yes, I consider my music, poetry. Sometimes I write without actually having an instrumental playing. So a lot of times, it’ll just be stuff right off my head. And then I’ll kind of fit it in later on. So I guess in a way, I am”. After reading his lyrics and journeying through his styles, I feel that that type of surfing over the beat that Kareem does is achievable only through a meticulously crafted poetic style. I ask him to tell me about the lyrics of Ain’t It Strange and he tells me that it was a specific period in his life where he needed to say those things, but that things have changed now.
Together, we marvel at the beauty of art as a craft that is allowed and needs to be transformed if it is to remain authentic.
