We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Micah (BlackBuddhaBear) Shelton a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Micah (BlackBuddhaBear), thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

So it is very common that you hear people talk about all the mistakes that they think their parents made raising them, and they may be right, so I’m glad you’re taking this a different way because we tend to be very sensitive to the things that we don’t like. Instead of me complaining about the things that I wish my mother had taught me (that she probably didn’t even know herself) I always remembered the things that gave me a “What would Jesus do?” sort of feeling that I took from my mother. Be advised, I’m a poor Black man from South Side St. Louis City raised partially by his workaholic mother and the other part by the experiences I had in the city, so these aren’t heartwarming Hallmark stories of families around the dinner table, so bear with me (pun intended).

One moment that really changed me from my mother’s son to something else was the first time I got jumped by some kids that had a run-in with another group of kids that I was running with at the time. I was maybe 13 or 14 at the time but like many children at that age, I was still trying to figure out what was what. I had two nieces, the daughters of my oldest sister, that I took care of a lot so I had this sense of maturity despite my lack of street savvy because of being brought up in a mostly Jehovah’s Witness family. Anyway, so the group of kids I was with were all brothers and were roaming a neighborhood that we didn’t live in. They got into a shouting match with some kids from that neighborhood and things got very tense very quickly. So as the oldest brother in our group that felt himself our leader confronted the leader of the other group of kids, he realized only after running his mouth that we were outnumbered. He made sure to appear calm and confident to both groups but I could see him backing away and trying to find an escape route.

All of a sudden, he breaks out in the other direction mid-shout and his brothers almost instinctively follow him at full speed. Me being of the naive mindset that we would eventually come to an understanding and end up being friends after this performative shouting, I was still thinking while the people I called friends were making their getaway. I finally turn on the jets and try to catch up but it was too little too late. The other group of kids catch me halfway up the alley, push me down, and surround me. My group of “friends” was nowhere to be found. So, if you know anything about kids, when they have their first taste of power, their mind runs wild with how to abuse it. So they rain down punches and kicks on me as I cover my face and try to keep from losing my teeth (they also took my shoes and threw them into a random backyard), but then the leader of the kids gets in between the altercation and calms down his makeshift gang.

I don’t remember what he said to them because I was too busy telling myself not to stand up yet because I didn’t want to become a target again, but after he said it he came over to me and said “You’re not even worth it.” No doubt something that he heard on tv or something and used as an excuse to not continue doing something that would most certainly land him and/or his friends in jail. So they walk away laughing and proud of themselves for feeling like they defended their territory, and I slowly stand up and begin my shoeless, 10-or-so-block walk back home.

This is the most important part. As I walking, I reflected on those brothers that I had spent so many days playing with and how they could leave me so easily to, as far as they knew, my death. What would they say to my mother? I thought on that hard as I felt the broken South City concrete embed itself in the bottoms of my feet with every step. That was my first face-to-face encounter with betrayal.

I was mad. I was already past the stage of WANTING to kill someone, particularly that group of brothers, and I was trying to use the remainder of my walk to figure out how to do it without going to jail and shaming my mother. This is when my mother’s lessons kicked in. This is when I thought of the decency that she taught me and how it shouldn’t be dependent on how decent your others and adversaries were. Like many Black households, her best means of conveying decency was through religion, and one thing that always stuck with me were the stories that she would read to me from the “My Book of Bible Stories” book that were stories about “obeying God” but also had an easily understandable lesson about doing unto others as you would have done to you. After considering that many of my machinations of revenge seemed pretty cruel.

“You know that isn’t right.”, I said to myself with both pride and shame going back through the violent images cycling through my mind and bouncing against my already fractured sense of loyalty to my fake friends…

as you can see, I still think about that day, and I’m glad that it happened the way that it did because it made real so many things that I had no real understanding of such as friendship, loyalty, goodness, betrayal, the reward of hardship, and a number of other things that would come to feed the character I am today.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Sure! My Name is Micah Shelton, but some know me by my musician name “BlackBuddhaBear”. I am a St. Louis based Singer/Songwriter that performs with musical groups “LOOPRAT” and newly formed group “The Coalition” that includes two of my LOOPRAT bandmates “Armani ABomb” and “Davie Napalm”. How I got into the music business is actually a great story.

LOOPRAT’s guitarist Joey Ferber actually was the one that invited me into LOOPRAT and got me doing music professionally after asking me to sing on one of his solo projects at the time. After that initial collaboration, he asked me to sing on another project he was doing with a duo called “The Belief Cycle”. The name of the song was called “Never Better” and you can go listen to it on all streaming platforms. After doing the feature on that project, the band agreed that they would like to bring me into the fold seeing as how they were in need of a vocalist for the group after Tonina (their longtime vocalist) began her solo career. That was about 3 and a half years ago and I’ve been making music with them ever since (as well as other artists such as Monkh, Electric David, Kinfolkandthem, and The Palmer Squares to mention a few).

Something that I have strong opinions about is working with other artists without the promise of money. The reason I say that is because if you know anything about the St. Louis music community then you know how many of the artists here do their craft for the love of it as opposed to going on the premise of building a sophisticated business on their passion. For that reason, I am more about building relationships and rapport with artists as opposed to telling them “I don’t want to work with them unless they pay me”. I’m about building, learning together, and making outstanding music with or without sophistication because the ideas to capitalize on won’t always be there. The most important thing that I think about when I consider whether or not I want to work with another artist is the content of their character because you can get so much more out of a good relationship with someone than a single business endeavor, especially if they owe you one for helping them out. People of good character will break their backs trying to pay you back for something that you did for them, and I’m the same way.

If there was one thing that I wanted potential clients and/or fans to know about me as a business/artist I would say that it would have to be my dedication to embued music. What I mean by that is music with actual content, emotions, SOUL behind it. I want to tell stories, I want to pull something out of listeners that has been neglected by the manufacturing of music. The songs that stay with you are the kind of songs that are written from mental spaces such as me reflecting as I sat on the ground beaten up, angry, betrayed, scared, yet happy to be alive. It is decisively not made from the demand that someone has for a sellable product, because that is only a byproduct of a good song. The thing that people want is a song that gives their experience a voice. That doesn’t just mean deep music or shallow music, but music that speaks to real experiences and feelings that people have.

Okay, let’s go there. Music is one of the primary vehicles for anyone’s culture and that dynamic has been thoroughly perverted by the music labels that are only concerned with the profitability of something. If they presented themselves as an honest platform for the development of Music and its culture, that would be ever more profitable for them just being a part of that and assisting those artists in gettting their music heard. Look at Spotify and Youtube Music. That is really their greatest utility of allowing all music artists to upload their music to be consumed by anyone that cares to.

It needs to be understood by all parties involved that music is and has always been a form of communication and what we have in front of us as artists is all of us being in a room to share an experience that we’re having but the only people that are getting the mic are the ones that play the game created by the labels.

The true content and aspiration of the imagination is lost in that process. I sound like someone fully absorbed in the naivete that everyone should be equally heard and considered in this process, but I’m not. We shouldn’t be heard because we simply want to be, but because we actually have something to say. This isn’t me advocating for “small talk” in music essentially, but the utility of honest discourse in music, and that will never happen if the ones that get to decide what is heard and popular are the ones that are only concerned with the selling of a song.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

In this current setup, the best thing that society can do is to not use the major labels as their primary provider of music and to support the artists that are doing and saying something that speaks to them, regardless of whether or not they are popular or the artist that just pulls up a stool down at the local bar and starts strumming on their guitar.

As stated before, giving the major labels this power is crippling society in a number of different ways because the reason that music is one of the primary aspects of any culture is because it plays a significant role in the expression of the core ideas and development of those ideas in culture.

In short, we as people in society are mentally and emotionally stunted because our music is mentally and emotionally stunted. The labels feed us what they want to feed us, not what we need.

So support artists to keep the conversation alive and not just the business.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

So, the biggest thing that stands in our way as independent artists is the lack of funds in order to be able to get to the level where doing music is profitable enough to where we can ONLY do music.

So something that I wish I knew more about are artist grants and getting money from the government in order to fund creative portfolios because even when people aren’t willing to pay whatever for your Art at whatever rate however many times, you still need to pay your rent, pay for food, pay to not have to sell your time to something like a regular 9-5 that isn’t allowing you to develop your passion and talent.

I used to work at a place called The Regional Arts Commission that did exactly that, but I was on the Building maintenance side. Funny story, that was actually the place where I met Joey Ferber and Tonina Saputo. I’ll tell that leg of the story next time. haha The Regional Arts Commission is an actual government entity that redistributes tax dollars gained from the hotel tax to Artists from the region. Thankfully, it has one of the most straightforward titles I’ve ever seen for a government organization. So, if you live in the St. Louis region and you’re an artist, you should look them up and see what resources they can offer you in order to make doing Art for a living a truly viable option.

The point I want to make is that I know that these resources exist but most artists don’t know about them or know how to utilize them. Something that I’m sure government entities understand, local and federal, is that when your artists leave your area in order to make money in other industries or in other places, that is literally a business that is leaving and the entire area suffers from that. What would New York, Los Angeles, Paris, so on and so forth be without their artists, visual, musical, and otherwise?

So I’m definitely going to learn more about that and I think every struggling artist should do the same.

Contact Info:

• Website: LOOPRAT.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackbuddhabear/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/micah.shelton.14/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/micah-shelton-a6590171/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/blackbuddhabear

Image Credits
1. https://www.instagram.com/whyshootback/ 2. https://www.instagram.com/wtfdidharryshoot/ 3. Anthony Patten