The mind of an Intricate Wordsmith
Here's something I didn't plan on saying when the Bee Mann project began. The fans changed an unreleased album. Not metaphorically. They actually changed it. The People's Sting: Chosen by the Hive is a 12-track…
LP1 answered how a man becomes Bee Mann. LP2 asks the harder question: What does it cost to keep being him, and who else is paying that cost alongside him? Bee Mann: Stings from a…
Every mythology has an origin point. This one is a Wannsee estate that doesn't exist yet. I built a character built from the logic of a beehive and twelve tracks that turned an annotated collection…
I’m writing this blog as my reaction to Lil Durk's trial as it unfolds in hip hop. It's not because I think I know everything, and certainly not to pronounce anyone guilty before a jury…
If you lived with me, one fact would become obvious fast. I am always writing. Always. Ex-lovers will attest to that. If it isn’t a song, it’s a blog. If it isn’t a blog, it…
Maybe you agree that I put this blog in perspective. So, here it is. Before documenting the creation of my Bee Mann albums, let's establish how we’ve made my music throughout my career. I make…
To appreciate the poem PantyDown, the reader must first understand the earlier poem, Hissy Fit. That sixth poem (in the book, Bee Mann: Stings from a One-Man Hive) documented one of Amira Will’s rawest pains.…
If you haven't been following along, and that's understandable, here's the story so far. I set out to build a Black speculative mythology. It is an Afrofuturist superhero story about a Black man carrying every…
Freddy Will stands at the bar in his Ankara, the African print blazing with orange, gold, and red against the black marble of the counter behind him. His Cuban link chain layered heavily at his…
There's a question that opens the song and the poem this blog is named after, and it's the only question that actually matters before any of the rest of this gets told. How did I…
This chapter opens on a rain-wet street in Brooklyn, New York. Freddy Will sits on the hood of a black classic Cadillac. His varsity jacket open over his white tee, his boots planted on the…
I have always been an Abrahamic thinker before I was ever a denominational one. Eastern Orthodox by faith, yes, but a man who has read the Quran cover to cover, who has sat with the…
Amira is walking down a cobblestone path flanked by arched hedgerows, red and pink roses climbing the green walls on either side, the corridor blazing with summer light filtering through the canopy above. Her white…
Before I publish the annotation for the poem (and song) COCAINE WITCH, I will say a few words about what inspired the idea. Several people have asked me about the meaning and the inspiration behind…
I have been saying it since 2008, when I launched this blog from the Lakeshore Blvd West in Toronto with nothing but a laptop, a head full of ideas, and the stubborn conviction that somebody…
