Diamonds & Chocolate

Marco Pavé and Zandria Robinson talk rap, resistance, and reimagining the Memphis sound.

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“Tell her about when you were an 8-year-old gangster rapper,” Zandria Robinson nudges Marco Pavé. A rapper, newly minted librettist, and her husband, Pavé has settled into a mahogany leather chair in the living room of the four-square house that he and Robinson, an author and Rhodes professor, share. It’s a bright January afternoon. Clear winter light flirts through the vividly painted rooms: turquoise, ochre, phlox. Pavé answers by mentioning a recent controversy surrounding a billboard featuring rapper Yo Gotti, “a product of Shelby County Schools.”

The billboard has been removed, amid discussion about whether Gotti is not an appropriate role model. “He is a role model,” Pavé retorts. “He’s my role model. I remember, sixth grade — I was at Cypress [Middle School] — he shot ‘Gangsta Party’ at the Watkins Market on the corner of Watkins and Brown. I remember skipping school to go to that video. This is before I really knew who they were, but I just had to be there.”

Pavé grew up around a culture that he describes as “hyperviolent.” When he was in sixth grade, a woman was murdered in front of the family’s house (“sixth grade dead body in front of the crib / even if I know who did it, ain’t gonna say who it is,” he raps on the track “One Hunnid”). Seventh grade, a man was shot in the head around the corner. That same year, another man was shot behind the house.

Inside the house, Pavé and his sisters used to stage family talent shows; Pavé wanted to be a singer. “Usher was my favorite singer and my favorite rapper — which was weird. He only had one rap song. I wanted to be that” — not exactly a rapper, but the rapping version of an R&B singer. Quite a specific niche. Robinson bursts out laughing: “Career paths!”

Next month, Pavé will premiere his first — and Memphis’ first — original hip-hop opera. Based on the songs in his 2017 full-length debut, Welcome to GRC LND (vowels missing “because the Grace is broken,” he has said), the opera, whose libretto he’s just finished, is about “the city of Graceland.”

That is to say, it’s about Memphis, through the looking glass and projected into the near future — around 2030. There’s a yellow fever outbreak, a new mayor who only cares to talk about crime. The characters witnessing this infected city, says Pavé, are “the quote unquote disconnected youth, 18 to 24, people who aren’t working, aren’t in school. If people look at me with a different lens, last year I was a disconnected youth. I didn’t have a job and I wasn’t in school.”

Pavé is 25 now. He spent the last year of his tenure as a “disconnected youth” releasing an album to critical acclaim, and touring nationally in support of his work. “I know plenty of ‘disconnected youth’ that are doing things that are changing the face of Memphis,” he retorts. The opera will be performed April 7th and 14th as part of the Midtown Opera Festival.

The rapper’s “government name” is Tauheed Rahim. As a senior at East High, he and a friend were always competing in “battles to be the freshest, have the most jewelry — I was always trying to one-up him.” Pavé was going by Young Kano, then Kano Marco Pavé (at the suggestion of that very friend), finally Marco Pavé. “And ever since, that’s been the vibe.”

Over the years, the metaphorical significance of the name has deepened, smoothed. In a pavé setting, diamonds are arranged in one continuous flow. “You can’t tell the sequence apart,” Pavé says. “It’s a metaphor for how I move through the world, for how people can be in the world — together.”

Zandria Robinson grew up in East Whitehaven Park when the neighborhood was mid-flux demographically. Nearby, the airport was expanding; white neighbors were moving out, going east. “That was a strange thing to see as a child — like, ‘what just happened?’”

Robinson’s mother began to impart race-theory lessons early — lessons about the contexts and nuances of growing up non-white in the South. “I was thinking, ‘I am good enough, I am super smart, and a violinist,’ or whatever, like a young person would think — like there was a logic to it. There was no logic to it — or it was a racial logic.”

The dysfunction in Robinson’s home stayed relatively hidden. Her father, who had come to Memphis in 1972, was a prescription-drug addict; for a time, Robinson assumed it was crack. But he went to work every day, pre- and post-rehab. In May 2016, he died while serving on the jury for a murder trial in its final day. Alternate jurors having been dismissed already, his death resulted in a mistrial. “One Black man was accused of killing another Black man,” his daughter recalls.

Raised in the Mississippi county where Emmett Till was lynched, her father would have been 3 or 4 at the time. “There are so many things [about him] I just don’t know — what may have happened to him, how it affected him,” Robinson muses. “We got race theory from him, too, but in indirect ways.

“I think for both of us — both my sister and I — that led to a lot of overachieving, or just excellence, perfection. Which didn’t abate for a very long time. Now I’m cruising.”

Pavé cracks up at the notion that Robinson, 35, is doing anything akin to “cruising.”

Relatively speaking, though, maybe? Robinson finished college (Northwestern) in three years, walked across the stage to get her diploma eight months pregnant, then propelled herself directly into a master’s in sociology program. Her daughter’s father committed suicide 10 days before classes started when Assata, now 14, was a baby. “And I’m back at the computer with a Boppy pillow doing stats. There were no messages. No one said, ‘You think you need to grieve?’

“It was that childhood thing: Dad’s on drugs, but you just keep going. Be excellent and everything will be okay.” These days, Robinson has found “a flow that I’m thoughtful about — not this almost violent amount of labor.”

She’s released a new book, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life, co-authored with Marcus Anthony Hunter, a grad school colleague who’s now associate professor of sociology at UCLA. She and Hunter were the only two Black people in their cohort at Northwestern and would compare their “urban sociological notes and experiences” drawn from her native Memphis, his Philadelphia.

In Chocolate Cities, Robinson and Hunter present an alternative cartography of the United States, a “Black map” — showing how Black people and culture have shaped what we know as American culture. The book’s two central premises: first, that Black American social life is fundamentally Southern; second, that as Black people radiated from the South to the North and the West, they brought Black “customs, worldview, and cultures with them to their new homes,” redefining those places around “chocolate cities” (cities with majority-Black populations).

Robinson is now working on an essay collection about mourning, Memphis, and music — more than a strictly academic endeavor. Before her father died, she was working on a project to be titled Soul Power, exploring Memphis soul music and the Memphis neighborhood, Soulsville, from an academic perspective.

Now the direction of that work has shifted, becoming more of a “sociological memoir” about her father, his adopted neighborhood, the culture, and the sound shaped by that time, in that place. In 1972, her father arrived to a “funky, post-King Memphis.” Robinson sees her narrative as more than either memoir or academic text. “The story’s still happening,” she explains.

“If I got suspended license, they got license to kill. / They probably think I’m ISIS, but it is what it is.” On the track “Hold Us Down” from Welcome to GRC LND, Pavé alludes to his dual identifications as a Black man and as a Muslim named Tauheed Rahim. “This is a thousand-year-old thing, the Christianity and Islam thing. September 11 was another chapter,” he comments. Pavé was only 8 years old in 2001, but still, “I was on the brunt of it, being in the South. Everybody saying, oh, did you have anything to do with that? Do you know anybody that was over there? And how’d you get that name?”

“But at the same time,” Robinson interjects, “you were writing all that gangster rap!”

Pavé continues, “Any youth that’s acting up — they’re upset about something, something is going on, and this is how they’re expressing themselves.”

When he graduated from high school, he was encouraged to go to college. “People were like, “I don’t know why you’re not in college, you’re so smart.” But he had charted his own course, and set to work pursuing and expressing it, urgently.

After all, he shrugs, “If I do it in a college class, I get a grade for it. If I do it in real life, I get paid for it.” With a line that scans as melodically as that one, I’m half-expecting to hear a drum machine in the background.

“When we met,” Robinson says, “he would say all the time, ‘Music is the thing. There is no backup plan.”

They met, as it happens, at The Word, a local spoken-word event now held at Slice of Soul on Madison. Pavé was performing as a favor for a friend, and Robinson was there to see off Tonya Dyson, a musician in the “new soul underground.” The couple have a perfectly calibrated Bogart-Bacall patter, so in their own words:

MP: I was there performing, and she was there in the back. I had never seen her before. I had been doing some shows all around, and I was doing some promo runs, passing out flyers. She said she wanted to blog about my music.

ZR: It had been 10 years since I had done the research for my thesis, which then became part of a book. I was like, I should see what’s going on in the Memphis hip-hop scene today.

MP: I hadn’t really had any press from any reputable people at the time, so I was excited. She followed me on Twitter, something like that …

ZR: … and then he kept @ing me on Twitter, like “HEY! HEY!”

MP: I was trying to get this project, trying to get this review, and then she added me on Facebook. And I was like, OK, it’s something else, she’s not trying to write no review, she’s trying to get reviewed.

ZR: I was new to social media, trying to figure it out —

MP: ‘New to social media’?!

ZR: He was in my messages. He asked, what do you do? I was like, I’m a sociologist and a writer. Like 10 messages in, he was like, are you married? I was like, oh my god! Is this the way the youngsters are doing dating nowadays?! Then we kinda went from there. That was what, March, April, and then in November [2014] we were married.

We’re back to the Yo Gotti billboard and the topic of role models, spinning now into a conversation about rap and identity. Pavé and Robinson are both scholars of rap history and motif; they’ve observed how audiences and critics ascribe autobiographical certainty to rap in a way that we don’t assume of other art forms. If a rap artist uses the first person, we assume he is talking about his own experiences, not inhabiting a character he’s created.

Hip-hop artists, like all artists, are, Robinson offers, “witnesses to some things that we otherwise would not know about, and need to. All witnesses are role models — they tell us about the world, they teach us that we should tell of our experiences.” That’s why Pavé wrote so many different voices — enough to fill an opera, as it turns out — into Welcome to GRC LND: to tell of a range of experiences.

Black Lives Matter protesters marched in downtown Memphis in July 2016, beginning at FedExForum and ultimately shutting down the Interstate 40 bridge for four hours. Pavé wasn’t there. But when the group gathered again the next month, at Graceland — the night of the annual Elvis vigil — he was present, witnessing. And, simply, living within his own skin.

“What easier way to describe what’s going on, than just being a Black man. I’m a full human being, a full person. But I go to the club, have fun, get drunk, use cannabis — all these things happen as a Black person. And I also go to protests, as a Black person, and I’m upset with Trump being president, as a Black person but also as a full human being.

“When I was 15, I didn’t have studios, didn’t have places to go. And somebody’s in that position right now, which means I still need to work to make sure that doesn’t continue to happen. It’s taken over my life through my art, because that’s my life if I didn’t do art.”

Robinson has absorbed the protest moment of the last few years in her own way. She’s been turning inward, finding stillness. When this political and cultural moment ends, she says, “whether it be in 2018, 2020, 2024 — things will change. We will go back to our post-racial fantasy, and then it will be time to get back to work. And I will have been charged up.”

“Before this moment, this particular moment, I was that almost stereotypical protest person on campus, always doing advocacy work. My parents came from the Civil Rights tradition, and my father was a super union guy; I was immersed in resistance as a way of life. Then when all the media stuff happened in 2015, I felt very alone, even though I was part of this emergent protest moment.”

She’s referring to a tweet of hers that resulted in death threats and online recrimination: she typed, “Whiteness is most certainly and inevitably terror.” These days, she hears more people using similar language. “It was after that, a lot of people started saying, ‘Let’s talk about whiteness,’ and there was much more of a swell. I was like, ‘Good: I’m tired.’”

The stillness she’s cultivated is its own kind of statement, its own kind of defiance. Pavé notes that “Black women bear the burden for everybody. So the silence, the stillness, saying no — it’s very much a form of resistance; probably more than going to a protest with a pitchfork.”

Turning inward has meant folding herself into domesticity, at home and with the children. Assata, Robinson’s introspective 14-year-old daughter, draws quietly, or watches anime. Jordan, the couple’s 4-year-old son, is a ball of boy energy. “I would have said gender was all socialization,” she says, “and then he’s just, like, jumping off of things, jumping into things.”

Pavé jumps in, “It’s all personality, before anything. Gender norms are us putting it, but personality is personality.” As in his home, so in his work: Pavé’s rap has become more aware, more awake. “Once you’re introduced to different perspectives, and think about all people, all ways, from LGBTQ to women’s rights,” he expands, “you can’t just go back to rapping normal. It’s like, OK, I’ve got more responsibility now. I got to do a little bit more. No, not a little bit more: a lot more.”

“Man, it’s the dream right now.” Pavé has been part of the Memphis hip-hop scene for long enough to know when things are sparking, flowing, connecting. When he graduated from high school in 2011, FreeSol had just been signed to a record label; “Yo Gotti was still riding his wave, Drummer Boy was still here — a lot of folks were still here. And then,” he pauses, “everybody from the trap house up and moved to Atlanta. Everybody that was anybody moved away.”

Pavé has been chasing the success — and the feeling — of those earlier days of Memphis hip-hop ever since. “And now — it’s here. It’s back.”