Time, Self-Awareness & The Creative Spirit Work Process - Spiritual Art Supplies Issue #13
A Doechii case study
Abstract: Exploring and contextualizing the role of time & self-awareness in the process of Creative Spirit Work through a case study on the artist Doechii.
Last Friday, Doechii released her mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal to a significant amount of praise. When I woke up that morning, one of the first things I did after a 20-minute body scan meditation was listen to the project. I was captivated within the first few bars.
“Let's start the story backwards
I'm dead, she's dead, just another Black Lives Mattered - Doechii, STANKA POOH
Immediately, I was reminded of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., which begins with the main character losing his life in the first track. The nature of that album also encourages the audience to rearrange their idea about the temporal order of the story he is telling throughout the songs, with the last track doubling as an introduction which allows the album to be played backwards, maintaining chronological order.
I zero in on the element of time and chronology, not just because the concept is interesting, but because for the last few years, I have been researching Black people’s relationship to time and temporality. Through my own personal experiences & experiments, studying the planet Saturn from an astrological perspective (Saturn deals with time), studying the artist Sun Ra who spoke a lot about Black people and the nature of time, and finally, studying time through Black Quantum Futurism (in 2022, I worked with BQF as a Surveyor for the Time Zone Protocols Prime Meridian Unconference, examining & discussing various research materials and “develop[ed] protocols, resolutions, temporal tools, time zones, and new markers of time that [were] compiled and shared for TZP Surveyors and Unconference attendees to utilize in their communities with a commitment to working toward creating liberated futures, new space-times, and environments where these shared principles can be utilized and honored.” Check out the website here to access syllabi, library, notes, the Time Zone Generator, Time Maps, Non-Linear Time Zone Protocols, and more.) This would continue through my spending time with Octavia Butler’s Kindred as I read the book and watched the Hulu series.
Back to Doechii...
I visited Doechii’s YouTube channel earlier today after watching Erik Louis’ video which prompted me to go listen to a cover she did a few years ago. After hearing that, I decided to look through her videos out of curiosity. I intuitively ordered them from oldest to newest. There was one that caught my eye titled Core values…what do you REALLY give af about? I watched the video and picked up several gems that applied to her latest project, starting with the concept of time in relation to artistry. At one point she states:
“Time is not an expectation of mine. Time may be an expectation for the world, or other people, or my audience. There’s this pressure for artists & creatives to meet these time expectations. But if time is not an expectation to me, I don’t feel it necessary to try & live up to it. I don’t care.”
“I start to feel inadequate, not because I’m incapable, not because I feel like I’m not talented, but because I want to do it fast because that’s what I think people expect from me.”
As I continued listening to Alligator Bites Never Heal, the theme of time became more pronounced, if not in subtle ways. For example, in the song PROFIT, Doechii states:
“I'm makin' peace with the fact that I'm goin' pop and shit”…“I pledge allegiance to the motherfuckin' profit, bitch”
These particular lyrics stuck with me. Throughout this mixtape, Doechii weaves tales about her past, present, & future. She discusses how she has (or hasn’t) dealt with significant life events and what her priorities are. The song PROFIT makes it clear what she now values the most and how she has chosen to adjust to the decision to become a mainstream artist. It made me think about the backlash she received by collaborating on the hit song What It Is (Block Boy) with rapper Kodak Black who was accused of rape and pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. He is also an admitted colorist. Some people saw this as her selling out in order to gain popularity, but it’s interesting: across streaming platforms, the solo version of the song without Kodak Black is her most streamed song, even tripling the streams of the one that features the rapist on Spotify.
Perhaps the success of the solo version speaks directly to her true desire to resonate with those who appreciate her artistry. It would seem like a concrete and quantitative example of how abandoning the inner evolution she put so much into works against her material success. In the next few quotes from the video, she describes what I view as a Creative Spirit Work framework and applies it to her process, her expectations of herself as an artist, and how she wants her art to affect other people.
“I’m addicted to the encounter that comes with creating. I’m addicted to the experiences created around completing a creation. Not the fame, not the money, not the lights, not the people, not the applause, not the praise, not any of that. To come to that realization and have that truth feels so good.”
“I want [the people who encounter my art] to understand [my work] will resonate, which will trigger an encounter, and that encounter will trigger your evolution. Those are the things that are so important to me, my art and my music.”
(I am unable to hear her use of the word “encounter” and not imagine a spiritual or supernatural encounter, akin to the way ancestral spirits are often a part of Creative Spirit Work.)
The video that these quotes came from was posted on January 26th, 2020. The amount of awareness and conviction that is within these quotes aligns with the project she subsequently dropped later that year, almost 10 months later to the day on November 27th, 2020 titled Oh The Places You’ll Go. Her first viral song Yucky Blucky Fruitcake was on this project. The track God exposes how much her spiritual inner work played a role in not only her creative process but the manifestation of the success that followed. Interestingly, the track that precedes God, titled Black Girl Memoir explicitly states her desire to gain money and power in order to “make it (presumably the poverty, trauma, mental & emotional illness she discusses in her music) go away”, a’la Solange’s Cranes in the Sky. From here we see the throughlines of prioritizing capital (“I pledge allegiance to the mothafuckin’ profit”) as well as the contradictions (“I’m addicted to the experiences created around completing a creation. Not the fame, not the money..”) within her complexity as a spiritual being, a human, and an artist.
In the same song, she says:
I wish I wasn’t dark so I could look like ‘Yonce
I wish I had a big ego like Kanye
Then maybe I could spit three stacks like André
And we ain’t gotta walk three blocks to do laundry
Or I could be Erykah
Sing about the moon and astral ‘ject out of 'Merica - Doechii, Black Girl Memoir
In this verse, Doechii shares a gut-wrenching vulnerability about her struggle with internalized anti-Blackness and colorism, possibly giving more context to her decision to work with Kodak Black who has also stated that he dislikes his dark skin (consider reviewing music critic Henny’s analysis of Doechii’s latest project and the way the masculinization of dark-skinned femmes comes through in some of her lyricism). Though she has advertised more self-acceptance in her music as she traversed her early 20s leading up to the collaboration with Kodak, the ultimate decision she made to feature him on the song reveals a collapsable timeline showcasing how she has betrayed herself, as well as the ways that she is coming to terms with it (“I'm makin' peace with the fact that I'm goin' pop and shit”). She also expresses a desire to astral project out of America (land of the fundamentally anti-Black), a foreshadowing of the Afropessimist/Afro-surrealist theme she utilizes in STANKA POOH (credit to R. Anansi for naming this context on Twitter).
So what? - Conclusion
First, I appreciate Doechii’s reflection on time and how adhering to time is more about her audience than her expectations of herself and what she truly values as an artist. This reinforced my ability to not apologize for not writing a Spiritual Art Supplies issue in the month of August. As a result of not rushing to meet a deadline, I was naturally moved to write this piece that is more in alignment with the ethos of Creative Spirit Work than anything I have produced this year.
Doechii’s concept of time as a storytelling device is effective, making her work more compelling, giving it staying power, and perhaps immunity from trend cycles that ravage true artistic brilliance and resonance. I believe her realization that she is not a slave to time nor moving at other people’s speed is foundational to her being able to utilize the concept of time favorably in her creative endeavors.
Lastly, the self-awareness Doechii displays not only in her music but also in her reflections on herself and the world helped her apply a Creative Spirit (frame)Work that resulted in the completion of Oh The Places You’ll Go, which was crucial to her progress as an artist and spawned her first viral (high resonance) song. This self-awareness seemingly pushed her further along on her life journey, granting her access to opportunities and experiences that exposed internal contradictions and also resulted in material success.
As I reorient myself as an artist, a creator, a world-builder, and a future-coder, I find it helpful to not only enjoy Doechii’s artistry and admire her transparency, but to take notice of the ways she has integrated self-awareness and temporal sovereignty into her creative process. Thus making something that has proven to do exactly what she set out to do: create work that will resonate, facilitate an encounter, and trigger my evolution into the next phase of Creative Spirit Work.
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