Dropping the Mask, Sharing "The Love"
Learning from the music of Alphabet Rockers.
This week, I want to start broadening my focus beyond reflective essays. Don’t worry: I’ll keep publishing reflections—and honestly, there’ll probably be a bit of reflection in just about everything. But I also want to start highlighting music, books, and other media that provide good openings for thinking anew about fatherhood, masculinity, and belonging with others. These are works that I value, learn from, and think are well worth your time. Today, I start with a children’s music artist whose work I love: Alphabet Rockers.
Alphabet Rockers are a multi-racial, multi-gender, and intergenerational hip-hop collective of adult mentor-performers and youth performers based in Oakland, California. Their music is grounded in the fact that kids are always already learning who is welcomed and offered belonging in society and who is not, especially when the child is among the left out. Their music helps kids make sense of how injustice shows up in their everyday lives and understand their power to join with others in building a more just future.
Alphabet Rockers’ 2017 album, Rise Shine #Woke, engages kids directly in an exploration of racial justice and what it means to be a good ally, and their 2019 album, The Love, does the same for gender justice and diversity. Both albums are superb and were nominated for the “Best Children’s Album” Grammy Award.
Alphabet Rockers also put on a truly uplifting live show. My family and I got to see them perform before the pandemic, with the youth members of the group taking the lead on the songs. By the end of the show, I felt deeply moved and motivated, and I teared up more than once.
Here, I want to focus on The Love.
Every song on The Love lifts up a human story that gets left out of narrow patriarchal concepts of who men and women (and no one else) should be. The album upholds being yourself and knowing your value when others try to force gender stereotypes upon you, explores how to navigate pain and alienation mindfully and with kindness, and models acting in solidarity with friends who face bullying and marginalization. It honors gender diversity and the lives of transgender and non-binary people, and it celebrates the resilience of black girls in a white patriarchal culture.
The album also explores the damage that patriarchal concepts of masculinity do to men and boys, and this is where I’d like to dwell for a moment. In the song “#100kMasks,” mentor-rapper Tommy Soulati Shepherd and guests Yaw and Zumbi Zoom dig into how ideas about manhood like stoicism and rejection of weakness limit the power and freedom of boys and men to be vulnerable with others, be known by others, and know themselves deeply.
Listen to “#100kMasks” here, then keep reading below.
Shepherd lays out in stark terms one of the central commands of patriarchal masculinity to men and boys: “Just put all your pain, hurt, and love into this bag, man.”
I’ll be honest: that line puts a lump in my throat. It reminds me of every time I’ve withheld myself from conversation with someone who could have become a friend.
Shepherd suggests that he, too, internalized some version of this “be a man” ethos without knowing it and came to reflect on it critically only later, as when he raps that he “didn’t really understand / The knowledge passed” and “Wasn’t even aware I couldn’t stand it.”
Then, “#100kMasks” gestures toward a different vision of how boys and men can know ourselves in our wholeness by acting in community with others. “To be aligned in yourself is most important,” the song counsels, and this requires that each of us “Lift your family and community / cause this is how we build” both a more just world and a more nourishing understanding of ourselves.
I love the inclusion of this song on The Love, because it tells men and boys that their liberation is bound up with and, indeed, depends on the liberation of people of all genders. We’re all in this together, and we only get there together.
The music of Alphabet Rockers is important to me because it asks big questions about identity and belonging that kids are already asking themselves, whether their parents know it or not. Am I welcome? What is my value and my place in the world? Who can I trust? What can I hope for? With whom can I hope?
The intergenerational structure of the Alphabet Rockers collective also inspires me, because it models the practice of kids and adults learning from each other, in order to build on the past toward a meaningful future.
If you want to show your own kids a worthwhile music video, check out Alphabet Rockers’ video for “Shine (Melanin Remix)” below, wherein the youth members of the collective take the mike and the lead, backed up by the adults who led the original version of the song. It’s a great example of youth reinterpreting the work of their elders with fresh perspective and making it their own, and of elders creating space for and sharing power with the young, in solidarity and community.