On January 1st, 2021, bob's son was released as all of Rory Ferreira’s other albums were: on bandcamp and the various subscription-based corporate streaming services that control the music industry today; as an LP* with a number of tracks listed in (and to be listened to in) an enumerated sequence; as a series of titles followed by features followed by timestamps. But on bandcamp, in the album description, there is a link below text that reads “take a quick trip to the coffeeshop.” The link took me to, as the full title of the LP implies – the garden level of the scallops hotel. Or, more precisely, it took me to a Google Earth- or video game-like three dimensional rendering of a clean yet strangely abandoned cityscape – a stationary on-screen virtual space reminiscent of true physical space. The experience begins outside a charming little five story building labeled “scallops hotel” – the name of Rory Ferreira’s second artistic persona. Going in, I was struck by the near-fluid quality of the late afternoon light in the building. I felt warm moving from a space of ubiquitous sunlight into one where the sun was delicate and filtered. The touch of the light on the forest green and peachy pink-orange surfaces is intimate in a way that the aesthetics of the outside world are not. The cafe is scattered with various interactive clickable elements: a poster advertising a poetry reading here, a tip jar that links to the Herbal Mutual Aid network there, a page out of a Bob Kaufman book on the shelf, an edition of The Santa Cruz Sentinel on the coffee table in the back. The fundamental mechanic of the experience, though, is clicking between smiley faces of various colors in various positions across the space. Each denotes a possible vantage point: at each of these vantage points (the cafe’s entrance, the weathered upright piano at the back, the bathroom and its ad-hoc tapestry of graffiti and stickers, the dark wood of the bookshelf, etc) a different (unpausable) track from the album plays.
Even before I have mentioned sound (and this is, after all, a musical project I am writing about here) there is so much that could be said about the space (just from the first vantage point). Its echoes of the Google Earth experience took me back to childhood memories of checking out the wonders of the world through that blurry and glitched epistemology, to that sense of previewing a faraway place I’d like to go to one day. There’s a strange interaction between the simultaneous cleanliness and emptiness of the city. It’s an urban space that doesn’t feel neglected, but just as if all human life were to be replaced by air. The cafe invited me in with its warmth, with its million details made possible only by the frequent presence of human life – yet it is empty with the door ajar.
The fact that the building is named after one of Rory’s artistic personae, though, gives the place a gravity: this not just any digital rendering, but a digital rendering that (through visual metaphor) represents a man and his creativity. Its emptiness does, too: being there, I am the only one experiencing it. It feels at once like a janky old video game and the impossibly intimate experience of existing in another man’s dream. Though many read “The Abomunist Manifesto” as a nonsense poem (New York Times Editorial Board; Post), perhaps Rory saw some truth in Bob Kaufman’s statement that “Abomunists believe only what they dream only after it comes true” (Abomunist Manifesto, 1). Thus, in an effort to believe something, Rory made his dream true.
This resulting world-creation is an inherently limited one: it cannot be moved through freely but only perceived while anchored at a single vantage point. From there, the very act of looking around distorts the lines of the city: to look up is to force parallel lines to converge, to look down is to do the same, to change my gaze at all is to take these representations of built urban space and make them grow into infinity or shrink into a point; it is to turn stationary rectangles into convulsing triangles. The physics of the space contribute to a sense that the world would stretch to infinity, that I am in a space that could exist far beyond the scope of what I am shown.
I’ve started by focusing on a visual experience of the space, but what struck me first – though I can’t tell if it is because it’s the computer that processed it first or my own mind – was the music. Calmly muddied, lofi-sounding keys enter over a beat with a notably damp snare. Over all this is a voice that repeats phrases like “you’re listening to Bob’s son… activate Bob’s son… show me Bob’s son… go Bob’s son… play Bob’s son” (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, Outside the cafe). As long as I stayed at that vantage point, the track would play until its conclusion, after which I was greeted by absolute silence – it took this moment of silence for it to register that this space was not just empty, but stagnant. It was the sound and my ability to look through (and in doing so, warp) the world that brought about motion. The music and I both have a special significance in the space: we are the only movers.
By clicking on a blue smiley face in the doorway, I then teleport into the cafe. A new track begins: intentionally tinny, elegantly plucked, serene arpeggios are accented by an almost liquid reverb. This is overlaid with an echoing voice reading a poetic opening introducing R.A.P Ferreira. The walls’ gentle orange contrasts pleasantly with the green of the plants and the paint, all of which are lit by the warmth of a low sun and some dim ceiling lighting. The beat changes – the same instrument, now grounded in a lower register, repeats a chord, occasionally flourishing with higher extensions and often textured with some filters over a similarly damp kit to the track that played outside (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, In the entrance). As the track progresses through its sections, I do not know its name, only its position in the space. I can look around as I listen, and I can inspect various interactive details: an advertisement for a night of poetry reading dating back to 1976, an event with Jack Kerouac. As I do, the track goes on: the metallic ethereality of the song will suddenly give way to a brief facetiously-delivered ballad-like section, perhaps quoting similar sections from MF DOOM tracks. As soon as Rory gets me into a groove, it’s often only a matter of time before he disrupts it. As a result, the vibe of each vantage point – despite the world being frozen in an instant – is dynamic. Those groove changes demand a new relationship with the space: rays of afternoon sunshine land differently when filtered by lofi beats versus sarcastic ballads.
Whenever I please I can click another smiley of a different color, bringing me to a seat at the bar and its associated track. Or, I could sit at the desk in the back and check out some videos on the computer or a hand-scribbled note on the table, and listen to the track that plays there. Or, I could take a look at pictures of Bob Kaufmann: the titular Bob of the album, and listen to the track that plays there. I do not know the names of these songs as I listen, I just listen and look around.
Though the tracks of the album are all housed in (to use terminology implied by Rory’s visual metaphor) scallops hotel, Rory didn’t release the album under this persona: instead, he released it under his third alias, R.A.P Ferreira, crediting scallops hotel with mixing the album. bob’s son is a musical project housed in a spatial-digital representation of one artistic persona, made by another, and mixed by that first one. In itself, this already implies an interesting relationship between Rory and his music: it configures the act of mixing as an act of hospitality, an act of hosting some other person(a) in a space.
Personae have been a part of rap since the art’s inception: when people think of the father of hip hop, they don’t think of Clive Campbell, they think of DJ Kool Herc. Likely the most iconic musician in the genre to dive into the artistic possibilities of the persona – and undoubtedly one of Rory’s most major influences** – was Daniel Dumile Jr, more well known as: MF DOOM, Viktor Vaughn, King Geedorah, etc (“All of Dooms aliases?”). For Daniel Dumile, each of these personae is a character: MF DOOM is a supervillain based on Marvel’s Doctor Doom; Viktor Vaughn is the young, devious teen that would one day become MF Doom; King Geedorah is an alien who spits humorous observations about human relations (Reeves). Each of these characters, in collaboration with other artists, amalgamate and metamorphose into yet more personae: Jneiro Jarel and MF DOOM became JJ Doom; Bishop Nehru and MF DOOM became NehurivanDoom; Madlib and MF DOOM became Madvillain; Danger Mouse and MF DOOM became Danger Doom (“All of Dooms aliases?”). Daniel Dumile’s personae were all beings in a universe of his creation with the exception of one: Metal Fingers. Metal Fingers as a persona did not represent a character in a fictional world, written and performed by one artist – instead he was a particular approach to art: Metal Fingers is Daniel Dumile as a producer.
It is this pocket of DOOM’s teeming ecosystem of personae that Rory homes in on and tends to in his art. Rory began his musical journey as the rapper milo, and as a rapper he was about “my lyrics and what is me, honestly” (Rory in Cril) – it was the creation of his second persona, the producer scallops hotel, that gave him a new relationship with his art:
…this is the song we made. These are artistic decisions we’re doing, they don’t all have to be emotional or personal. Sometimes, they’re exercises… it’s way looser…as soon as you start making beats and you start to be like: how would I build a rap song? You know, what if I stop thinking of myself and my lyrics so personally and I start thinking of myself as an instrument in a rap song I’m building? And I just let myself rap, like, whatever I need to to fill the spot. Instead of being like “oh is that my style? Should I do that?” Like who gives a fuck, it fits here, let’s hear it! (Rory in Cril)
It was scallops hotel that “spawned” R.A.P Ferreira, a rapper. So, for Rory, this project is a collaboration between one persona that approaches music as works in themselves, as something to be built, and another persona that has an appreciation for the circumstantial, ad-hoc, “fill-the-spot” innovation that comes out of that but simultaneously still sees the music as an expression of the self (Rory in Cril).
And I really felt it in the music. One of the tracks plays when you sit at the chess table. It is basked in golden afternoon sun; it has no clickable items other than an eighth of an ounce of weed. This is a spot (and therefore a tune) that is meant to be soaked in and appreciated, no action required. The track opens with the quintessential use of voice as instrument: scatting, which, for a couple of seconds, Rory does rhythmically over an oscillating, discordant, high pitched chaos. Being the lowest sound in the mix, he almost functions as percussion. Then, the beat suddenly changes to one primarily based on low sounds: a four-note bass riff with a spaciousness to it (since those three of those notes are concentrated at the beginning of the bar) and a beat mainly composed of a quiet kick drum. Here, the bars are slow with a simple rhyme scheme: “Hirsute, the most trivial pursuit / Giggling in spurts and fits / Playing trumpet 'til it hurt the lips / Trying to make grandiose announcements / From peaks of mountains” (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table). R.A.P Ferreira rears his head, before all of a sudden, scallops hotel introduces a new building block in the form of a watery pad instrument that is paired, a couple of seconds later, with keys that have a similar vibe. As this happens, the voice maintains the rhythmic qualities from the previous bars but, quite instrumentally, just repeats itself about “leveling up”, and eventually starts to sing. All of a sudden, this cuts to a calming interlude of a grounded, plucked instrument looping underneath an old-timey static-laden sample of Ted Joans dedicating a poem to the poets of the world. The mellow, fluid intentionality of his old-style dialect also functions like an instrument, complimenting and contrasting the matter-of-fact intentionality of R.A.P Ferreira’s earlier verse which remapped English onto the clicks of the beat. The plucked instrument descends into a darker mood and lower register, underneath a beautiful vocal sample pitched down and given a ghostly echo. It attempts to sing something I cannot quite make out, every time chopped up just before it can get past “she was m-”. R.A.P Ferreira spits the most poetic and expressive bars on the track yet:
We came running, innocent
Laughing blobs of blood and faith
Through this mother-father world, where laughter seems out of place
We learned to cry, please, they pronounce you human being
The secret jazz blew a sigh, I grew a third eye
And a fourth and fifth, never knowing the price of pork or cigs
Some familiar sound shouts, "Wait!"
Some are evil, some will hate
We got busy, stayed hidden, eloped
Life in the warzone, super atomic color cinemascope
Charitable wallets, screams are stereophonic
Marsellus Wallace
with them pipe hittin' niggas gettin' ready to –
Go medieval, hopscotching grassy knolls, like Knievel
Rifle at the easel, my specialty is retrievals
From the back of the mind, believing in the swinging
The sound of my skull unhinging
They were too busy dying on living ground to hear a simple sound
Too busy earning medals for killing children
In super atomic color cinemascope
Listening to jazz through all these important things going on
(Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table)
Before seamlessly flowing into lines from Bob Kaufman’s Jail Poems***– the 7th is recited in its almost its entirety, the final line, “Thank God for the Beatniks” replaced with “Thank God for the ruby yacht poet gang”, Rory’s label:
My, soul demanding a cave of its own (6, line 2)
My, soul demanding a cave of its own (6, line 2)
Someone who I am is, no one (7, line 1)
Something I have done is nothing (7, line 2)
Someplace I have been is nowhere (7, line 3)
I am not me (7, line 4)
What of the answers I must find questions for? (7, line 5)
All these strange cities (very similar to 7, line 6, which says “streets” instead of “cities”)
I must find streets for (very similar to 7, line 7, which says “cities” instead of “streets”)
Thank – God for the ruby yacht poet gang
Thank – God for the ruby yacht poet gang
Thank — God for the ruby yacht poet gang
(Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table)
Hearing it, I want to ask: what does it mean? What is it about? But the way Rory sees it: “I think it’s wack when a song is about something… to me when a song is about something, it instantly becomes a jingle, or a commercial, or an ad. It’s like, now this song is an ad for love… when you don’t know what a song is about, it’s a song” (Rory from Cril). So, in that spirit, I will appreciate the song that this wonderful poem is a part of.
When R.A.P Ferreira finishes spitting, the ghostly sample sings “she was m-”. And this time, R.A.P Ferreira joins that ghost, whispering the words it has been trying to get out for the past minute: “most mesmerizing”, and then softly, like a lullaby, singing “I know, I know” – as if to console the ghost who has been trying to say this for his whole verse, who in his efforts to express this one line laid the musical groundwork for his beautiful poem (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table). scallops hotel embodies the role of the host here: he allows Ted Joans to introduce the verse as a poem, and therefore R.A.P Ferreira as the poet; he allows the plucked instrument to introduce its timbre on its own in the interlude before it sings in harmony with the sample; he creates the figure of the ghost.
I was a little hurt by the fate that scallops hotel dooms this ghost to – trying to profess a love but never able to finish on his own. This brings out an uneasy functionalism in the producer’s approach to his art. Though the ghost is a fictional creation, an illusion, and can be given the aesthetic of suffering for the sake of instrumental possibility, to think of the rapper as an “instrument” as opposed to a self-expressing person feels analogous to reducing someone from an end-in-themself to a means to something else – instrumental to another end. But hold on, scallops hotel and R.A.P Ferreira aren’t people, but the personae of one man. Does one really reduce oneself to an instrument? Maybe seeing oneself as an instrument isn’t a reduction at all.
I give all these words power; I give all these words my energy. So even when I’m sad or whatever I might not write the sad song these days… I want my energy, I want the whole world’s energy, I want all my fans saying these words: out loud, to themselves, repeating them, giving them power… Like when I was younger I’d be like [facetiously rapping] “I’m super depressed, duh duhduhduh”, and then it’d be like “Man, I can’t get out from under this black ass cloud, why?”. Well there’s thousands of people affirming my sadness to me (Rory in Cril).
Maybe, as an artist, to see oneself as an instrument is to grow into one, to create and cultivate new energies and move past the ones that hold us back. There was something quite striking about Rory’s gestures when he said this. For that last line, he moved his hands as a wizard casting a spell might: palms pushing forward, fingers flicking, as though he was channeling some force. That gesture felt so representative of the sort of relationship he has with art and its significance: art and the way people relate to it bring about forces and energy in this world.
On the track that plays at the pale orange smiley by the bathroom in between the front and back of the cafe, he raps “Remain unashamed to be sensitive / As such is the first stage of vigilance” before a sample plays in which his mother says “Two weeks after turning 19 / I gave birth to my first born, my son /Four months later, I had my first panic attack / I remember lying down / I remember putting my son down, unable to catch my breath” (Ferreira, “bob’s son cafe, By the bathroom). When asked about this, Rory said that he did it so that come the day his young son discovered the music his father was making, he could hear his father express that feeling and that vulnerability. It takes character to express an intergenerational anxiety – one that is so stigmatized, since the relationship of a parent to their child is seen as one that ought to be characterized by nothing but unequivocal love and care – so that one day his son could feel that vulnerability. The bar wasn’t about self-expression for self-expression’s sake; it was about putting an energy out there into the world. This was the moment I understood: that is the power of growing oneself into an instrument.
As Bob Kaufman wrote, but more importantly, said: “Let me spit mists of introspection, bits of me, / So that when I am gone, I shall be in the air” (Kaufman “Jail Poems”, 6).
So, returning to R.A.P Ferreira’s poem from the sun-basked chess table, the question is not “what is it about?” – for that is the question one asks for a jingle – it is: what energies, what bits of himself does he put in the air? Or, really, because he wants “to be in dialogue with this man, through time” (Cril): what energies, what bits of Bob and himself does Rory put in the air? He puts into the air, through a narrator, a picture of a human life that reduces its distinctness to a jarringly carnal level: “innocent / Laughing blobs of blood and faith”. He puts in the air a tragic relationship between parenting and the world it creates: a “mother-father world” is one “where laughter seems out of place”. To my ears, it almost echoes Brecht’s “dark times”, when “A talk about trees is almost a crime / because it implies silence about so many horrors”, when one questions “how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat / From the starving, and / My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?” (Brecht, 318). Life, brought down to this carnal level of “blobs of blood”, is done begrudgingly. One cannot just listen to jazz, one has to be “Listening to jazz through all these important things going on” (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table”).
R.A.P Ferreira gives the idea of jazz other properties, though. It is jazz that seems to bring about the growth of three new eyes, though: R.A.P Ferreira does not immediately tell us what they see, but only lets us know what they don’t: “the price of pork or cigs”. What follows in the poem – what surely they must see – is the “warzone” on the super-visible “super atomic color cinemascope”. So, R.A.P Ferreira puts into the air a relationship with jazz (perhaps to be read as a relationship with music or art in general) where jazz as sensitizing to already flagrant injustice (so flagrant it is broadcasted), but is something one listens to nevertheless (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table”). Repeating an energy Bob Kaufman put into the world many years ago, R.A.P Ferreira’s response to this is his “soul demanding a cave of its own” (Kaufman “Jail Poems”, 6) – he wants to retreat: like those in Plato’s allegory who, upon seeing the three dimensionality and vibrant “atomic color” of the world, want to return to a more limited knowledge, in which he knows not even himself: “Someone who I am, is no one / … I am not me” (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table). Then, inverting an energy Bob Kaufman once put in the world, where he sought to find “cities” for “strange streets” (Kaufman “Jail Poems”, 7) – R.A.P Ferreira seeks to find “strange streets” for “cities” (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table”). If the street is where life is played out, for Kaufman, there was strange life being lived: it just needed to be situated in a place with other strange lives. But for R.A.P Ferreira, there are strange cities that lack streets, that lack life, and he “must” find that life for them. To me, R.A.P Ferreira inversion of Kaufman’s energy here lands as a pessimistic one, one that paints a picture of a world with a more fundamental and more drab problem. Yet after, while Kaufman’s poem only says “Thank God for the Beatniks” (Kaufman “Jail Poems”, 7) once, R.A.P Ferreira thanks god for his crew – the ruby yacht poet gang – three times (Ferreira “bob’s son cafe”, At the chess table”). And though I do not know how Bob Kaufman delivered that one line, I could deeply feel the soul and gratitude exuding from R.A.P Ferreira’s delivery of those last three bars. Despite all the dark energy R.A.P Ferreira put out in this poem, despite the darkening of the bit of Bob Kaufman’s self he put out into the world, R.A.P Ferreira wraps it up by putting an energy of deep, loving gratitude into the air. For his artist friends. Keep in mind that you listen to this poem in the sun, after all.
*bob's son: R.A.P. Ferreira in the garden level cafe of the scallops hotel
**For example, he raps “Wrote a rap song I couldn’t translate to my white friends / An infinite loop of MF DOOM muttering ‘aight then’” in the track “Gaudeamus igitur (For Kang Min-gyu)” (milo). If the untranslatable lies in your relationship with someone’s art, I’d imagine that artist was quite the influence.
***In parentheses next to each line is the number of the Jail Poem from which the line comes, and the line it is in that poem.
Bibliography
Brecht, Bertolt. 1998. Poems, 1913-1956. Translated by John Willett, et al. Routledge.
Cril. 2021. “R.A.P. Ferreira talks Bob's Son Album, Purple Moonlight Pages, Scallops Hotel and much more.” Out Da Box TV, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFeIZe4SG5s.
Ferreira, Rory. 2021. “bob's son cafe.” ruby yacht poet gang. https://cafe.rubyyacht.com/.
Ferreira, Rory. 2021. “bob's son: R.A.P. Ferreira in the garden level cafe of the scallops hotel | R.A.P. Ferreira.” R.A.P. Ferreira - Bandcamp, ruby yacht poet gang. https://afrolab9000.bandcamp.com/album/bobs-son-r-a-p-ferreira-in-the-garden-level-cafe-of-the-scallops-hotel. Accessed 5 May 2024.
Kaufman, Bob. 1989. Abomunist Manifesto. San Francisco, City Lights Books. Eclipse Archive. http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/ABOMUNIST/Abomunist.pdf.
Kaufman, Bob. 2019. “Jail Poems by Bob Kaufman.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/155619/jail-poems.
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Plato. 2003. The Republic, translated by Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee. Penguin Books, pp. 514a-520a.
Post, Bryce. 2017. “Analysis of Bob Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto | by Bryce Post | Medium.” The Brycical, Medium, 27 November. https://thebrycical.medium.com/analysis-of-bob-kaufmans-abomunist-manifesto-fcef6807e30c.
Reeves, Mosi. 2003. “Creatures from the black lacuna: MF DOOM.” The Wire [London], no. 233, July, p. 10. https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/35021/spread/10.