0
0
The bee is hardly new to popular music and culture. Gordon Sumner became Sting after a black-and-yellow striped sweater inspired a nickname that eventually replaced his birth name in the public imagination. Lil’ Kim became the Queen Bee. Wu-Tang Clan extended its universe through the Killa Beez. Beyoncé transformed “Bey” into the BeyHive, turning the Hive into a language for the relationship between artist and audience. Even Blind Melon’s famous Bee Girl used the image of the solitary bee searching for others like herself. So when I created my Bee Mann mythology, I wasn’t pretending that I had discovered the bee. I was interested in what else it could mean.
For me, the bee became a way of thinking about the individual and the collective, gender roles and marriage, family and responsibility, enemies and alliances, survival and belonging. You see that in Afropolitan and Road Wins. That is why Stings from a One-Man Hive begins with the apparent contradiction of one man calling himself a hive. By the second album, that contradiction starts breaking apart. Bee Woman emerges as a protagonist in her own right. Wasp Mann and the larger mythology expand the world around them. And eventually, the people listening to the records become the Hive themselves. The symbol wasn’t the invention. The world I built around it was.
AFTER THE PEOPLE’S STING
The Hive doesn’t stop building once the fans have had their say. If anything, that’s when the real work begins. Or… on the other hand, the real work often starts years before the stage lights turn on. The People’s Sting: Chosen by the Hive falls in the middle of an unexpected chapter. The next chapter opens almost immediately. Here’s where the Bee Mann trilogy is headed, what comes after it, and how all of this fits into a career that started twenty years before any of you ever knew that I, too, would build a “Hive.” Remember, I folded up my Sandmann alter ego after learning about E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, the famous 1816 story that opens his Nachtstücke collection.
The point I’m making about Bee Mann is that I’m conscious of pre-existing symbolism and names rather than pretending they don’t exist. Or that I am the first artist to come up with the general idea. In the Sandmann case, I actually retired an alter ego after discovering an important literary predecessor. However, with Bee Mann, I’m doing something different. I’m acknowledging a long history of bee symbolism while arguing that my particular mythology and architecture are my contribution. I placed Bee Mann in a lineage stretching across very different genres and generations: Sting → Lil’ Kim → Wu-Tang → Beyoncé → Bee Mann. Each says something different.
BEE MANN III, DEVILS MAY CRY
Bee Mann: Devils May Cry is the third and final album in the Bee Mann music trilogy, landing on November 26, 2026. Sixteen crossover songs, closing out a musical arc that began with a one-man hive that turned out never to have been one man at all. As fans of The People’s Sting already know, three tracks that were once meant as early previews for this record found a permanent home elsewhere. Their departure forced me to rethink LP3 more fundamentally, and the album became stronger and more distinctive because of it. The trilogy ends stronger for it. And by trilogy, I am speaking of the three main albums that accompany the Bee Mann books specifically.
AFTER THE MUSIC, THE BOOKS CATCH UP
Once LP3 drops, the music side of this trilogy is complete. But the publishing side will catch up. Book Two, Siege of Wannsee, and Book Three, Devils May Cry, are slated for 2027. By the time that rollout finishes, the Hive will have delivered the complete three-book Bee Mann trilogy alongside its three-album musical trilogy. Think about a mythology told twice over, once in prose and once in sound. The alternative would have been to drop all three books and albums in one go. Like one Book plus album after another. Book One is accompanied by two albums, while Books Two and Three are accompanied by one album. The decision is to release the music first before the books.
2027: YESTERDAY WAS YESTERDAY
Right behind that, if God permits, Swift Nightz Music Society will release four new EPs across 2027. The series is called Yesterday Was Yesterday: seven songs on each EP, every one of them carrying its own crossover appeal. These are hip-hop records at their core, but the point was never simply new music. The point is that they commemorate my fiftieth birthday, a full look back at the life that got me here. There’s another irony. Bee Mann: Stings from a One-Man Hive revealed that there was nothing one-man about the Freddy Will Hive. Yesterday Was Yesterday commemorates my fiftieth year. I made it at forty-eight/forty-nine, right after finishing the Bee Mann trilogy.
I’ll share more as the release dates get closer. For now, what matters is that they arrive at the top of 2027, right after Devils May Cry closes out the trilogy. By the time this stretch is complete, it will have delivered three Bee Mann books, three Bee Mann albums, and four Yesterday Was Yesterday EPs. That’s the milestone this whole era was built toward. An era in the 2020s with its own identity. 2028 is where it’s supposed to get even more interesting, because that’s when the next series of books already in production starts to see the light. Block Lore, You Can’t Ghost the Dead, and Afropolitan are all slated, each one carrying its own world and its own reason for existing.
WHAT 2030 COULD LOOK LIKE FOR BADSON PUBLISHING
God permitting, with good health and a long life, my goal is for my music and literary catalog to have grown and diversified far beyond where it stands today by 2030. That goal is exactly why I moved abroad from the United States in the first place. To diversify my portfolio. Once I launched my independent music and literary careers in Canada, the plan became Europe, and eventually Asia. Yes, I’m chasing the culture and atmosphere of new countries or continents as fuel for what I create. I’ve done that to an extent already. By 2030, it should be true to a much greater extent. Although I should say, Europe has had such an effect that I might probably just stay here.
TWO DECADES OF ERAS
This Bee Mann and Yesterday Was Yesterday stretch is set to be a milestone. But it sits on top of a much longer road. Here’s the full map, for anyone who wants to see how far back this goes. The Stay True era ran from 2006 to 2007. Then came While I’m Still Young, from 2008 to 2010, the same window that saw my first book, My Book of Chrymes, debut through Soul Asylum Poetry & Publishing. Right behind that came Dark Horse from Romarong, lasting until 2012, which delivered my second book and album with Soul, plus the spin-off City of Kings: Reloaded EP in 2013. By that point, the book-plus-companion-album combination was already my signature move.
2014 brought the Laboramus Exspectantes era, carrying the book Hip Hop Kru Zade, and this one ran long, all the way until I left Canada in 2016. That move took me to Belgium. And guess what? Belgium became something like what The Gambia had once been for me. A place where I wasn’t releasing much, but where I was absorbing, writing, and quietly building what would come next. I never released a new album there, but I wrote and composed a great deal of material I’m still drawing from today. It’s where The Sandmann’s Journal eBook series first took root. In 2017, Views from the 7 arrived as a spin-off from both the While I’m Still Young and Laboramus Exspectantes eras.
I released African Black: The Unreleased Anthems & Ballads in 2020 and CrossOver: Best of Freddy Will with DJ Desperate in 2025. Honestly, that stretch could go either way. Call it an extension of Laboramus Exspectantes, or call it a long musical hiatus, marked mostly by eBooks and one-off singles like Naturel Light, Girl from Happy Hill, and Celebration. That 2015 to 2025 stretch saw me promote several albums that never saw the light of day. There was Devils May Cry, Written in Gold, Laborious Expectations volumes 2 & 3, Yesterday Was Yesterday, and Quandaries of a Conqueror. As you can see, those projects’ materials are feeding my new projects now.
Which brings us to now. The Bee Mann era began in 2026 and is set to conclude in 2027, exactly twenty years after Stay True first started this whole journey. The point of all this is twenty years, one throughline. And I would hope the music and the books improved over time as I grew older and matured. Every era builds toward the next. Books and music keep finding each other. Every project finds its audience, and every ending turns out to be the start of something monumental. The Sting was never the end. It was proof that the Hive is listening. Devils May Cry is next. Yesterday Was Yesterday is right behind it. And everything after that is still waiting for its time to arrive.
