Aloe Blacc
Aloe Blacc navigates the crossroads of creativity, fame, empathy, and activism. His latest album, Stand Together, is a genre-blending collection of songs driven by a call for social change. Find him at aloeblacc.com.
Transcript
Aloe Blacc:
I don't think we're far away from festivals being screens where the front-of-house engineer presses play on music that was created by AI, showing visuals that are created by AI, where people are really just at the festival in order to be shoulder to shoulder and breath to breath, because that's the human experience. And it doesn't necessarily matter what's on stage and what's being presented. What matters is who you're with and how you feel.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today is the Grammy-nominated artist, Aloe Blacc. While he's best known for his hits like "I Need a Dollar," "The Man," and "Wake Me Up," music is just one part of his story. Aloe is also a biotech entrepreneur and a passionate collaborator with nonprofits. His latest album, Stand Together, is an example of that. It's a genre-blending collection of songs, each one rooted in a message of social impact and change. We cover a lot of ground, from when he realized music could be a force for social change to the future of AI and music. He shares how Marvin Gaye continues to inspire him and why he chose not to follow the advice he got from Bono. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Let's dive in.
You have this quote that I want to start with because I think it's going to be a theme throughout the conversation: "When things happening in the world seems so terrible and dark, it's so easy to get stuck in all the negative, but I try to do whatever I can to help people out of that. I want my music to be the light."
Aloe Blacc:
Yeah, it's ans important way to align myself with a positive mission and purpose as I create music. I mean, there's so many other things I could do in life and I've chosen this, or it's chosen me, and I have the opportunity to speak to a million hearts and what is it that I want to share with those people, those souls, those minds at all ages—people who are at the end of their journey and folks who are just sprouting. How can I be—I stand for them in something that is offering nourishment rather than extracting attention?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to talk about your relationship with music. Just to orient the conversation a little bit. What is kind of your first memory of music or the moment where it became something more than just pleasant sounds in the environs?
Aloe Blacc:
I think music was always something special for me. My dad had an amazing sound system and he would play music a lot around the house. My mom loved music and when I was very, very young, I'd say age four, I began to recognize outside of my family that music was a big thing.
Family parties and family events, of course there was always music. Lots of it was usually salsa or reggae or Soca, calypso. My parents are from Panama, so Caribbean music was big, but when I saw kids on the block dancing to hip hop music, break dancing, that's when I started to get a sense that music was even more special than my family thought it was. There's something else going on here and these are different sounds. This is not the sounds that I hear at home. So I started dancing with the kids on the block and started hearing hip hop music out of their Walkmans and boomboxes.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Was that the music where you started to connect it with social change?
Aloe Blacc:
There was early understandings, but not deep understandings when I was in elementary school. Listening to artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy, listening to even NWA, the kind of social commentary that they were making, these artists, was about the condition of African-American in the inner city. I was being awakened to experiences and ideologies that ultimately inspired an activist spirit.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to unpack the actual process of writing a song for you. Does it start with a sense of injustice, a sense of, "this is something I want to say"? Does it start with a melody? Does it start with a lyric?
Aloe Blacc:
Oh, it's always different. For the past 25 years I've been recording voice memos and writing down lyric ideas and sometimes it's just a melody. Sometimes it's just a word. Sometimes it's a phrase. Sometimes it's just a beat and sometimes it's just a bass line and all of these disparate pieces of inspiration end up getting synthesized in some way or another over time, or they end up getting embellished and amplified, extended at some point in time. I may bring the elements into a recording session or a writing session with other artists, or I may finally have a moment where I've figured out the connective tissue and I start putting things together and I do it on my own.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One of your biggest hits was The Man, and a lot of its popularity came from the Beats by Dr. Dre commercial with Colin Kaepernick, and for those that don't remember, this is the first ad following the controversy about Colin taking a knee. And so there's a really interesting dynamic here in which it's an ad to sell a product, and yet it's an extremely powerful social commentary about standing up for what you believe. Frankly, it's one of my favorite ads of all time, so I'm curious how you think about it because there's always a tension between when you marry capitalism and social change. That's a very hard balance to get right.
Aloe Blacc:
So I would say that my music is made to be heard, and if I have the opportunity for the song to be heard, and it is—the vessel carrying it is a TV commercial, I'm going to share my music in that way. It was just, I think, a home run—slam dunk? Field goal?—that Beats by Dre used the song to represent characters who were standing in their rightness, and I think about the way that I did the music video as well. It was representing heroes of mine who had an ideology and who stood by the ideology and they suffered greatly for it, but their perspective was about improving the lives of the most vulnerable in their community and it helped to give a picture to the music. It was squarely their concept that I gave my blessing for the song because my first hit was I Need a Dollar, and that was a song that was shared as a theme to a TV show on cable.
Ted Roosevelt V:
How to Make It in America.
Aloe Blacc:
Yeah, so that helped promote the song and then with Wake Me Up, the vessel was dance music. And so I'm just trying to get my messages out and sometimes it'll be a TV show or a TV commercial or a specific genre that'll help deliver the message.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It just strikes me that it is so hard to write a song, full stop, period. A hit, not a hit, anything—it's really hard to write a song. It's got to be substantive, too. It's got to say something really important and meaningful. I'm really just commenting on the difficulty of cultivating and creating that artist profile and the challenges of protecting it because there were numerative benefits to not protecting it. And incentives sort of have a way of changing your view on the world sometimes.
Aloe Blacc:
Yeah, they do. Financial incentives, always.
And that's one of the things I try to tell new artists who are like, how do I do what you did? How do I become famous? And I'm like, don't focus on fame. Focus on your craft. And get a job. You don't want to be compromising your art for the sake of pandering or trying to make a living. I don't think it's worth it, not for the sake of humanity.
What is art for? Is art for making money? I don't think so. Art is for sharing and communicating emotion and building community and extending culture. I feel like because there's an industry that has commodified art—the industry has become extremely mature and sophisticated in manipulating young hearts and minds into its structure, into its almost self-cannibalizing structure, but I guess I'm old enough to know better and I just try to educate people against being swallowed up. Life is what inspires the art that you create, go live life.
Ted Roosevelt V:
With Wake Me Up, after it was this huge hit with Avicii, you sort of reclaimed that song to some degree. What made you want to do that and put out the acoustic version of that song?
Aloe Blacc:
Well, I wanted to share the value of the song itself, so I knew that with the massive hit that it had become with the dance instrumentation, it would touch a lot of lives, but I also recognized that there are other venues for this song that the dance music will not be accepted in. And so I wanted to make a version that felt more like what we did in the studio when it was just my voice and a guitar. And then, recognizing the massive growth of the song, I wanted to use a music video to tell a story that was close to my heart about immigration, being a first-generation American, having many friends who are also first-generation or immigrants to the United States. So it helped to serve multiple purposes to create an acoustic version.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's a really powerful video to the acoustic version. And I'm curious, does the song take on different meanings for you in the different contexts?
Aloe Blacc:
Wow. I think, yes—with the video it has a clear message. It almost suggests that that is the inspiration of the song, which the song didn't have that particular narrative when I wrote it. The narrative of the song when I wrote it was about hope for the future, nostalgia for the past, and a transformation from being an indie artist to traveling the world, where the lyric or the idea of "wake me up when it's all over" made sense to write down. But I feel like everybody's got their own personal story that the song represents. I've spoken to many people and heard from many fans and talked to folks who were dealing with a parent's terminal illness, folks who were dealing with personal psychological struggles, or some folks who were just celebrating life, they were graduating from high school, and this is the song that reminds them of that moment. There's a lot that people interpret the song to be.
Ted Roosevelt V:
When you're writing lyrics—I mean, one of the great things about music and about good songs is that they're open to interpretation. How much do you, when you're writing lyrics, think about keeping them vague so that they can be more universal versus being more specific in what you're singing about?
Aloe Blacc:
I don't know. I think I'll write the song first and just, I'll probably more specific than not. I'm not interested in being too vague in a song. I had a conversation with, luckily I happened to meet Bono after one of the shows in Vegas at the Sphere, and one of the suggestions he gave me was like: when you're writing songs, don't resolve. And so in music there's musical resolution, so getting back to the original chord in a sequence of chords or notes, and then there's the resolution of message or narrative, and I thought, that's interesting. I see where that serves U2 and Bono really well. I don't know if that serves me and the way that I want to write or the way that I write.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I mean, it seems like Bono knows a thing or two, but there's probably not a prescription to how to do this.
Aloe Blacc:
So for me, speaking to wanting to present and share light: I feel like there's something definitive about that, and I've decided that my goal with music is to not create anxiety or to promote depression or sadness. And I can see where in some genres of music, the angst and the lack of resolution is part of that angst, and the vagueness in lyric is part of that angst, and so I could easily write that way. I've studied everybody, so at this point I could. I just don't think it fits who I am and what I represent. So, I'll leave it to the others.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Your new album, and this relates to that, is Stand Together, and one of the songs on it is, you revisit a Marvin Gaye classic, What's Going On? That's a daunting song to revisit. I mean, it's like, one of the all time great songs. It's one of the all time great social commentaries. I mean, it is the sort of OG of social commentary songs. Why did you feel like you had something you could bring to the song? What did you feel you could bring to the song?
Aloe Blacc:
Yeah, it's the song that I would say inspired a lot of what I do as an artist because Marvin Gaye was so instrumental and effective in representing what an artivist is through the What's Going On album. The song, I thought, has been done lots of times by a lot of different artists, but what I felt I could bring to it was this dialogue between two of my heroes, Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye. And so Bob Marley using reggae music as a tool for positive social transformation, Marvin Gaye using soul music as a tool for positive social transformation, being a fan of both and wanting to bring the two together. And
I don't know that it had ever been done, but seeing that they were contemporaries walking pretty much the same path, but with different shoes on, I thought this is a fun exploration, something interesting. And also it is the character of the album, which is to amplify amazing community heroes and positive social missions.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So what brought you to that? I mean Stand Together and—maybe just give a little background on the album because I keep wanting to call it a concept album, but I don't know if that's the right use of that term.
Aloe Blacc:
I consider it a concept album. The reason why it's called "Stand Together" is because I've been engaged with this organization that's called Stand Together, and this organization is a nonprofit that funds other nonprofits that are doing work to support education, to support criminal justice reform, to support addiction and recovery. I met them when I was working in trying to share with my community and my audience about qualified immunity. It's a Supreme Court doctrine that ultimately qualifies federal agents, and because of that precedent that the Supreme Court sets, state agents, to be immune from responsibility for violating civil rights, and I think that's something that the public should know. We should know that this is a precedent that was set. It's not a law, it is just a doctrine. It is a practice, but that practice is what other lower courts follow. And so in order to transform that, we'd have to transform the way that the law is written so that it can only be interpreted in a very narrow way. And when Stand Together helped me get an op-ed into the USA today, which is one of the larger circulars across the country, I thought, okay, they're really serious about this kind of change. So I felt like writing a song about the organization and then I thought, oh, I can do this about a bunch of organizations, which then became an album.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That issue has become only more relevant since the album came out. I'm just wondering, does that add... does that make you feel even better about the work? Does it add more weight to the work? How does the changing social background impact the work in your mind?
Aloe Blacc:
I would say it just makes me feel like I was doing the right thing at the right time. I feel blessed to have made an album like this and trying to use it in a way that will inspire my peers.
So while your album is about heartbreak or love and reckless abandon, just find one song on the album to be about an organization that you find to be doing great work who could use the attention, and I've just chosen what side of the balance I want to be on.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You wrote a song about your relationship with your father on this album, and I'm wondering why you felt that this was the right album for this and why this moment.
Aloe Blacc:
This particular album, Stand Together, really is an opportunity to share messages that could serve humanity. I think the idea of the mentorship between a parent and a child, in imparting important life lessons, is worthy of delivering to my audience and to anyone else who might happen to stumble upon these mantras. And a song like Daddy Told Me So is an homage dedication to the relationship I had with my dad. And I'm always trying to find the pieces of life that are not on record. You find 'em in books, you find them in films, but to what extent do you have a three minute earworm that you will live with for hours and hours? Books don't do that in the same way, and films don't do that in the same way.
So this is an opportunity to give people a phrase or multiple phrases that they can repeat, and the power of word is very, very potent, and so why not give people these words? So for the young person who didn't have a father, maybe these are the words they use when they have a child, when they become a father. Maybe these are the words that they wanted from their father or from a mentor or from someone. By virtue of making a song inspired by my relationship with my dad, I feel like it goes beyond just what we had. Hopefully it helps others.
Ted Roosevelt V:
When you look at the music industry right now, it's evolved quite a bit in the last decade. Are there major structural things that you would like to see changed that would allow maybe more artistry to come through and less commercialization?
Aloe Blacc:
Yeah. What would be really awesome is to offer artists a one for one. If I make a song and I sell it to my fans, my fans will pay me for the song that they're purchasing. That makes sense. Rather than sort of this, black box pool of money that gets prorated based on the number of streams that you have and the number of subscribers that have paid into this pool. It doesn't really work, in my opinion.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And that's the Spotify model.
Aloe Blacc:
That's the new streaming model, right? Right now, because of that model, you have artists pandering to the algorithm. The algorithm is buttressed by teenagers with discretionary time to stream. From my perspective, they don't have a sophisticated palate, so they're going to engage with the most risqué, salacious, rebellious messaging. And so when the algorithm gets pushed towards that messages like Daddy Told Me So don't really get an opportunity to shine. But if we were to pull a wide swath of human beings on what messages they'd like to hear, it would be interesting to see whether or not they've had their fair share of the normal pop narratives or interested in something that is not so common.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I mean, it sounds like the challenge of social media at large is the things that kind of get the hits are the more negative, the more the things that irritate you more that cause more outrage, more divisive, and yet everybody I think knows that that's not what's making their lives fuller and better.
Aloe Blacc:
It is a weird matrix that we're in, especially with the curation happening based on our lower selves, I want to say. It's not really our higher selves that we use when we're scrolling through social media. I've made this statement a couple times, but if you were walking down the street and on one side of the street you see a couple that's hugging and embracing lovingly, and on the other side of the street you see a couple that's fighting and yelling and screaming at each other's faces, which one will you spend more time staring at? And it just feels like what social media and algorithms are doing is feeding us what they know will stare at more, so that they can slip in the advertisements, and that's really what is driving these industries. And it's a trick, and I don't know how we escape other than to not be on the devices or subjecting ourselves to that trick.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, certainly a part of it is more positive content, more light content out there.
Aloe Blacc:
I'd say you need 10 times more in order for there to be an actual balance.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I mean, what's so core to music is its humanity, and yet there's this kind of risk on the horizon, or maybe it's here already, that AI can kind of step in and start creating music for us that particularly when you think about the algorithm that will be very popular on the algorithm but will have lost its humanity and maybe lost its social justice change that can come from it. How do you think about AI in the music world right now?
Aloe Blacc:
I think that there are huge changes coming. I've been creating playlists of my own, prompting instrumentals and songs that I feel represent genres and styles that I've never heard, and it's really, really fun to create these new sounds. And I think that when fans and other music lovers recognize that it's possible, then I have a lot of competition as an artist and people will have infinite amount of choices, and if they get really good at it, they'll have no reason to ever listen to music from a human being again, unless it's a personal choice, almost like choosing organic over non-organic food at the grocery store. Maybe you pay a premium for organic.
Ted Roosevelt V:
But does music lose something?
Aloe Blacc:
Yeah, for me, ultimately music is a tool for communication and a tool for communal activity. Will AI reduce that or enhance that? I don't know that it will replace the live element, but I can already see where there's some similarities. So think about this: The live element used to be bands on stage performing. Now, in many cases around the world on a regular basis, the live element is one person on stage pressing play on music that used to be playing live, but now you have a DJ pressing play on music that is by and large created in the box—"in the box" meaning in a computer. So no actual musicians involved. And I don't think we're far away from festivals being screens where the front of house engineer presses play on music that was created by AI, showing visuals that are created by AI, where people are really just at the festival in order to be shoulder to shoulder and breath to breath, because that's the human experience. And it doesn't necessarily matter who's on stage, what's being presented, what matters is who you're with and how you feel.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It makes me a little sad for some reason, I can't put my finger on it, but I always think of the live music experience at its very best is—yes, there's a communal experience, but there's a conversation between artists and people listening to it, and that the artist is getting something from the audience as much as the audience is getting something from the artist. But there's something about taking that one piece of that equation out that feels concerning to me.
Aloe Blacc:
I hear you. It makes me sad too, but I don't know that I can fully say that it's not possible and that it won't happen. But what if it offers something new in place and that something new is beautiful and great?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to ask you, because we ask everybody this question, but I'm really curious about your answer because of the life that you've lived: what is it to be a good citizen?
Aloe Blacc:
To be a good citizen? Okay, it's to have empathy for others, and it's to do your best to help others. I think that is it. I think it's always being in service.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love that. Aloe, thank you so much for joining us today. I have absolutely loved this conversation and I could go for much longer, but I want to be respectful of everybody's time here, so thank you very, very much.
Aloe Blacc:
Thank you. I appreciate you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you, Aloe, for such a generous and reflective conversation. I love hearing about your creative process and the values that shape your work. On Good Citizen, we're always thinking about what brings people together—shared purpose, meaningful action, a drive to create change—and Aloe, your latest album, Stand Together, powerfully taps into those same themes through the language of music. Check the link in our show notes and please give it a listen.
Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.
