We recently connected with Jevaugn Fleming and have shared our conversation below.
Jevaugn, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?
I wish I had started my music as a career sooner. I mostly started creating music as a necessity for myself. It became my free time… my inner voice vocalized in harsh melodies, maniacal drumming, stank bass grooves, and djenty guitar rhythms. Any moment that wasn’t involved with school, was invested into my music and instruments. However, at the time I never saw it as something to pursue. Just something to cleanse me whole. I don’t regret any of that time spent just learning myself and how I want to sound as it gave something I feel is 100% me. It gave me my original self in music and I will always appreciate the moments of silence I took to hear the voice in me.
I guess most of what I’m feeling when I say “I wish I started sooner” is my age. I just turned 29, and I’m still in a position I hate. Still in an environment I hate. Still dealing with the same struggles I hate. Still dealing with people who also hate these very same things, but don’t want to try and escape… or just don’t know how to. And why would they listen to someone in the same position? It becomes a disheartening cycle leading us to believe this is our faith, so we never try and risk our comfortability for a chance at real liberation.
I was sitting in my hoopty one day and this small group of guys were walking by talking about the future. One guy said, “In 5 years, Ima have my dream ______.” I didn’t get to hear the rest cuz his homie started laughing like “No you not!” and the original speaker responded, “I’m deadass, watch.” His homie really had the nerve to bet against him in rebuttal. I don’t know their friendship, so I could be reading into it, but having that kind of energy in your circle, in your neighborhoods, in the people “protecting and serving”, will never uplift the community and its inhabitants to a higher standard of well-being, and life. This mindset is something I hope to alleviate from my communities one day.
Jevaugn, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a self-taught creative chasing entrepreneurial dreams and activist visions. I hope to one day leave my imprint on this world as one of the greatest to ever music, while changing the world for the better. My music itself will not always reflect those sentiments as I too am a person living with the human condition (Hoorah for our multifaceted existence!), but I hope my honesty still finds understanding in the hearts of my listeners. I’ve been creating music for 11 years now, and my lore starts heavy. Quite literally. Hip-hop has my soul, but Metal will forever have my heart. Bands like Animals as Leaders, Monuments, TesseracT, Chon, Northlane, and Structures changed the entirety of my mindset and world. I pushed myself to learn guitar, bass, piano, and drums (slightly) just so I can create whatever I wanted or felt at any moment, and it be the truest feeling of my element. The truest feeling of my mind, body, and soul.
I’m dreaming big things for my music and career, and I hope to see them all come to life along with the people I love and care about.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
A lesson I had to unlearn is that love is enough in life’s purpose. Love is a heavy facet of our human life. It can change us for better or worse as the fashion in which we reach these deeply woven emotions stem from countless hours of dreaming. Planning. Before the words of romance even arise from our mouths, we might’ve dedicated many moments of energy attempting to understand the love inside ourselves, inside another, and that love in unison. Seemingly, we never consider what it takes to maintain that bond until times passes and we truly learn the person we’re with and the world we live in.
Through my experience, I continuously saw how love wasn’t enough to sustain a person’s will to life… or even a relationship for that matter. Much like Beauty, or Freedom, Joy, and Sadness, Love is this universally relative emotion that we all come to experience. It may look and sound different for everyone, but the physicality of the feeling is what we all understand. The rush. The thrill. The excitement. The pain. The shock. The disappointment. The blurriness of it all still reveals similar truth to us in body. Whether Love is tagged with adjectives like unconditional, superficial, honest, fake, we eventually learn how we want to be loved. Realizing this should also bring about the awareness of it all being a heavy price-tag and I don’t solely mean monetarily.
For the imaginative version of love that has been heavily marketed to us through films, social media, music, and now podcasts, it requires a structured foundation that even allows our mental to feel a level of ease unbeknownst to the common person. It requires clarity. One thing about the characters in Rom Coms is that no matter how cheesy and horribly written it is, all the characters know themselves, or it leads to moments of learning and self-reflection. I hate them joints, but I see the purity of it all. However, we’re in times where toxic controversy and obtuse egos are our emblems and symbols of love to be herald because people want to be entertained. Quiet that drivel on a dirty pillow. Dribbling like Perkins, just nasty (I joke).
But I feel we’ve been so muddied up by watching the romanticized economic and social power struggles of others, that we feel it’s common and natural to do that to the people we claim love towards in our own lives. The influence contorts something that should very well be easy, but the world has shifted and so has what we think we is required to be loved. To me, love is not just something we should say especially when suffering is a reoccurring reality. Love is not a mere emotion, but an obligation. With feeling love comes a duty to love otherwise it’s just a word. Of course it needs to be healthy. There needs to be equal reciprocation in effort, desire, and understanding as we cannot fix everything in someone’s life. Some situations are out of our hands and it could simply come down to class. Classism has truly assisted in destroying the sentimentality of love and romance at all levels. At least in New York City.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
DO NOT SUPPORT AI MUSIC!!! I 100% understand the creative ingenuity it invites to the artform, but it does not come without the risk of destroying the integrity of the artform. I understand that AI requires people for it to do it’s manmade purpose, but much like our manmade history, we see how industries abuse and orchestrate quiet chaos’ that disenfranchise the ones who supply and feed its pockets. Let’s really talk about it:
It opens far too many doors for an artist to be used, mishandled, and eventually obsolete. Outside of the ones who would resist and continue creating that sound that only a person could be born to create, why would an artist find faith in chasing a dream of musicality and individuality? The automation of music could lead to more “fast” production for the sake of profit in a shorter time-span.
However, my main gripe about AI in music is how massively it infiltrated Black music. Everything that was going viral consisted of Black artists and Black voices. It is our music that’s being picked apart in an attempt to monetize. Intellectually, Black people run industries. It is our branding, personality, likeness, and overall influence that produces an industry’s profit. We have a strong ability to elevate brands marketability through our influential presence in entertainment, sports, music, and the like – there’s no reason why a random person under a white sheet should be able to profit off that so easily.
I am not worried about the creativity of the artform, but how an independent artist will be able to sustain themselves business-wise. I do feel that the rise of “AI music” will bring a greater appreciation towards the naturally created pieces of music we have always known and will always love.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/GhettoPopeDreams?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=c521d5b3-8f1b-4f69-a13a-11ce4d1984f6
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ghettopopedreams/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@ghettopopedreams7321
- Other: https://soundcloud.com/jevaugn
Image Credits
Elio