[pic of “necessity” with a bunch of little babies. (pic of someone grumbling. Or a mother scolding a kid?)]
They say that necessity is the mother of invention.
But sometimes? Sometimes necessity is a mother.
If you know what I mean. And I think you do.
Let’s go back to 2012, shall we?
2012 was the last year of the Mayan calendar. A lot of folks thought the world was going to end in 2012.
For Melissa and I, 2012 was a beginning. In not one, but two major ways.
The first one was on June 23, 2012. That was the day we got married. Yay marriage! Yay us!
The second beginning happened a few months prior to our wedding, but we didn’t realize it was a beginning when it first happened. It was just a thing. A small, no-big-deal thing.
That thing?
I wrote a rap for a ministerial class and Melissa added a song part. It was called Big Bang (Biggity Bang) and we both figured that was the end of that.
But it wasn’t. We started writing more raps with songs.
At the beginning, everything we were writing was high-energy and somewhat silly. We were calling it metaphysical nerd rap.
I was writing my parts in a style adjacent to the old school 1980’s hip hop I had heard when I was in college.
We still thought the whole thing was no big deal and wasn’t going to amount to anything, but we kept doing it anyway.
And then the Mother came on the scene.
At the time, Melissa and I were performing in various spiritual communities around the wider Bay Area. She was Melissa Phillippe, the New Thought singer/songwriter with nine albums in release, and I was her accompanist. But once we started to write the raps, we started to perform those as well.
So far, so good, right?
Wellllllllll.
Once the raps got added to the mix, we began to get some pushback.
One of the spiritual centers stopped inviting us because some members thought the phrase “metaphysical nerd rap” was disrespectful to Black hip-hop artists. (More on that later…)
Another place hired us, thinking they were getting the older version of Melissa Phillippe, and when they heard our new stuff, they un-hired us.
And then there was the other place. A place we loved to go. A place that had a congregation that appreciated what we were doing, songs and raps alike.
A few months into adding the raps to our repertoire, we started noticing that we were only being asked to perform at this center when the Senior Minister wasn’t there. We found out, albeit indirectly, that she was not a fan of the raps. She wanted music only, not someone talking during the musical portion of the service.
Even if the talking was a fun little ditty with the scintillating stylings of Melissa Phillippe’s vocals. Still, nope.
This hurt my feelings, but I also knew that everyone has their own preferences. And this minister wasn’t a fan. No biggie.
But then I saw a video of a Sunday service at that center where the musical guest was a poet. A poet speaking her poems with music backing her up.
WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?
At first, I was livid. And hurt.
Now it was personal. The minister was okay with some people speaking during the musical portion of the service. She just didn’t want it to be me.
So I came up with an idea. An invention born of the necessity of the Mother I was facing.
Even though I’d only been writing upbeat little rap ditties thus far, I decided that I would write a poem. A poem that we would put to music.
Maybe that would go over better with this minister.
So I started the song Peace Presence Power. As I was writing my part, I kept hearing the chorus for Melissa’s song “Surrender.” So we added that to the song as well.
As it turned out, the minister didn’t like Peace Presence Power either.
But it didn’t matter. We now had a whole new direction we could go in with our songs.
A direction we never would have embarked upon had we not hit the seeming “obstacle” of the Mother minister.
Because of the change in direction, we stopped calling our songs metaphysical nerd rap and started calling them word songs. Metaphysical nerd rap only emphasized the rap part, and Melissa’s singing was an elemental part of what we were doing. Also, since we’d gotten feedback that the “nerd rap” term was offensive to some folks, we figured it was good to release it for that reason as well.
The term “word songs” was more in line with the new direction we were going in.
A direction that, as it turned out, was a bigger thing than we realized at the beginning. We’ve now performed our word songs at more than 70 spiritual centers around the country.
But if I hadn’t encountered the Mother? Maybe we never would have moved beyond nerd rap. Maybe the word songs never would have been born.
So even though necessity can be a mother sometimes, she still pushes us forward.
Toward something better.
Something new.
Thank you, Mother!
What’s your experience with the Mother? Share your comments below!
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