Coole High Looks To Elevate With Black Jew

It can be tempting for hip-hop artists to consider changing their style to cater to the lowest common denominator, but Brooklyn’s Coole High (photo: R) has built a career based on resisting that temptation. “I don’t have to dumb myself down,” he says, “and I will not.”

Coole High’s latest project is a collaborative effort with producer Black Sparx (photo: L) titled Black Jew. Due out February 21st, Coole High describes the project saying it’s aimed at adult hip-hop fans. “It caters to their way of life,” he explains, “a lot of the subject matter alludes to bettering yourself, holding down your finances, getting into real estate, stuff like that, talking about things that kind of elevate, or help elevate, an individual’s way of thinking.”

He adds, “It’s more of an inspirational, realistic approach to how we live every day, and more motivational, so to speak, rather than regressive.”

Ironically, roughly one year ago it was Coole High who needed to find inspiration, and motivation. “I was really down on everything,” he remembers, “my different relations that I’ve had with people, (my) money wasn’t right, my spirit wasn’t right, there were just a lot of things that weren’t working according to what I had initially planned, and I went into this, I guess, perpetual state of depression.”

Something that helped him break out of that depression was the writing he was doing for the Black Jew project. He says that, at the time, the lyrics were “more inspiration for myself.”

While his lyrics aim to be inspiring, some may consider the name Black Jew to be eyebrow raising. The initial inspiration behind the name was a combining of both Coole High’s and Black Sparx’s names. “If you knew my government name,” Coole High explains, “you would kind of assume that it’s a Jewish name if you didn’t see me.”

The name Black Jew, however, has grown to have a much deeper meaning, and it’s a meaning with origins rooted in hip-hop.

“Hip-hop, as a culture, was founded from a place of struggle, from a people of color,” Coole High explains, “fast-forward 30 to 40 years later and this culture became something that was picked apart, and separated from the different elements of it, for other people’s personal gain, whether it being for profit, or to express themselves, or to better their families, by enhancing their way of living, so to speak. For some people it’s to get them fame, and notoriety, or girls. Whatever pleasure that people saw hip-hop to be, or to assist them to be, then that’s what they used it for.”

Coole High connects this with his personal history.

“I grew up in a lot of different neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and one of the neighborhoods I grew up in was Crown Heights. I spent a lot of time living out there, and when I was young, seeing how, and those who know Brooklyn know that Crown Heights has a dense Hassidic Jew population, and one thing that I noticed, and I admired, about their culture is that they had a grasp on the economy. They knew how a dollar worked. The dollar exchanged like eleven hands at the time before it left the community. That, to me, was impressive.”

This led to another aspect of their culture that made a distinct impression on Coole High. “They had a lock on the real estate,” he remembers, “it was virtually impossible for somebody that looked like me to go into their neighborhood to buy a home. Even though homes were available, they would buy those homes themselves and sell them to somebody else. That’s how they kind of locked down their community, and to me that showed a lot of, how can I say it, that showed a lot of strength in community, and strength in the people.”

For Coole High, all of this combined to spark an idea.

“I’ve said a lot of times we could adopt some of these ideals, and some of these ways of thinking, and kind of help ourselves, so why not take certain elements from another culture the same way people took elements from the hip-hop culture to better themselves? Why can’t I do the same from a culture that I admire certain elements from that can better myself and my family?”

It’s a visionary concept from an artist creating visionary hip-hop.

“You can’t always be in the club poppin bottles,” he says with a bit of a laugh, “you can’t always be turnt up.”

So when you’ve turned down because you’d rather pay a mortgage than pay for bottle service, the Black Jew combo of Coole High and Black Sparx are here to provide you with the perfect soundtrack.

You can listen to Black Jew on all major streaming services, including Bandcamp.

 

Story originally ran on Arena.com.

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