By Sean Alexander
“It’s ‘Dear, Derrick.’ Each piece of music that I make is writing a letter to myself.” These were the words of Derrick B. Harden during an interview on May 16th.
The name Dear Derrick came about in 2010 when Harden faced uncertainty regarding who he was as an artist. During this time he analyzed many different artists and their Identities. Previously known as Couture Inc. Harden looked at artists like Michael Jackson and others who used their real names as their identity, Harden found that using his name seemed to align with his new artistic direction.
One of Harden’s favorite TV shows is the 1988 sitcom, Dear John. When going through his rediscovery as an artist; Harden remembered this show and considered
“I started thinking about Dear Derrick. That sounds like a groove. I’m, writing to myself, Dear Derek.” From that point on he became Dear Derrick and the idea of his music being letters to himself formed. However, there is a second part of the name that Harden carries but often doesn’t showcase to the public.
“So my full artist name is Dear Derek and the Band,” Harden said. However, Harden does not actually use accompanying musicians when he performs. He clarified that the Band is all the people in his life who have helped him throughout his life and career as an artist.
Harden grew up in the inner city. While in the often harsh New York environments of his youth, he experienced many traumatic things. Thankfully, he also experienced and received help and kindness from people. These people are the Band. So when he writes his songs to himself, he also writes them to the people who helped and supported him.
Harden does not have a formal education in writing; in fact, the environmental obstacles of the Brooklyn projects prevented him from completing an education beyond the 8th grade. He was still able to progress and cultivate his writing skills outside the classroom. He did this by practicing what he calls “reckless writing,” which is when he writes, not worrying about sentence structure or formatting so much as producing raw content. This, he recalled, became a way to teach himself about words and what writing is for him. It doesn’t have to be lyrics, he said, just words on paper.
The first part of his process is simply writing, writing, writing. It could be simple, complex, a song, a movie idea, or just words. The goal is just to put words on paper. Through this process of putting ideas on paper, Harden continues to teach himself about expression and attunes himself to his emotions and feelings.
“I used to sit in the library and get lost. Charlie Ward was like the neighborhood good guy in Brownsville,” Harden said. ‘He lived on my project floor so I used to go to his house to read the encyclopedia. Words are everything to me still. I lose myself.”
Harden holds on to a goal with his music; to express complex emotions, ideas, and feelings in ways that are easily communicated to the audience.
“Very few writers want to admit that writing simple things is extremely hard,” said Harden. “… It’s very hard to be Nelly, in my opinion. It’s very hard to do commercialized music. It’s easier to be a complicated rapper with brainiac lyrics.”
In addition to rapping and writing lyrics, Harden has also ventured into the world of cinema. His film The Black Sea was recently presented in a string of film festivals including the Seattle International Film Fest. Harden co-directed and starred in the film. The film plays into his skills as an MC and rapper given that there was no script, the entire movie is off the cuff.
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What’s the overall process of creating a track? Where do you get your ideas?
For the last five to seven years, I’ve been making music from the perspective of what I feel as opposed to what I’m thinking. Before, my music wasn’t as personal, but now it’s getting to the point of being personal. And you can feel that this is a hard thing to do to make music. Especially, given it’s just me and a producer and an engineer. It’s not me and two other writers helping me evoke certain emotions that are in me.
I watched your film the other day. It was unscripted. How do you think that being a rapper impacts your other creative endeavors?
I think that I have the potential to be a good actor because of hip-hop, my experience with hip-hop, and the time that I’ve taken as an emcee.
Hip-hop has helped with the movie that I just did because It helps me get in my body, and not in my head. This (Being in one’s head) makes the viewer look at the performance completely differently. But when I’m in my body, the viewers are like, yeah, yeah, keep going, keep going. This is a good film. It’s the same as a song. It’s a rhythm. I’m very fortunate to still want to learn how to be a rapper. I still want to learn how to be an actor. I think our everyday life relies on us to do these things, to rap or sing or act. If you stole something and you convinced the person that you did not take that, and it was a victorious steal for you, this is acting. Nobody’s gonna tell you that, but that’s acting.
Lying is acting. Acting is a part of lying. There is nuance in there. Like everything else going on on planet Earth, everything is nuanced.
And so how do you think that acting and making music relates to being human?
I think the human experience is vibrant. I think each human being on planet Earth has a vibration, some higher than others, nonetheless, everyone has a vibration.
I think humanity loves music and visuals because it’s in our subconscious. It’s our hologram of what we feel inside. So music and film will always exist because it’s a projection of us.
Let’s talk about your project SUPERTHOT.
The title SUPERTHOT. I heard this James Baldwin speech. ‘To be African American is to be African without any memory and American without any privilege.’ And I was like, damn.
I was traveling, and I saw the Nike shoe, the Air Force One, right? And I started to see it everywhere in Europe, and I mean, everywhere. I thought that they didn’t expect to do this with that shoe. This is a regular shoe. But black folks are who made this shoe so prominent around the world.
Then I thought damn, there’s still no (prominent) black sneaker distributor. It’s almost like the black person is the prostitute globally. You can take from them and you can make it your own, but they can’t take their own and make it their own. Everybody gets upset. Your influence is like prostitution. So that’s where the whole SUPERTHOT comes from. It’s the question; Is the black person the global prostitute on planet Earth?
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Each of the titles of his SUPERTHOT albums comes from the art world: Post Deitch Depression, Life after Basquiat, and Yakub’s Art Diary. This stems from Harden’s observations on the art world, black art, and how it relates to his experience as a rapper, filmmaker, and all-around artist.
“You know, sometimes even being a creative, it’s a cookie-cutter world because it’s like, is Derrick’s hair funky enough? He doesn’t look weird. Where’s his nose? Like, why do I have to? And why do you think that that is creative? Not to say that it’s not, but what’s happening here, you know, if I don’t shop at the farmers market If I use the word n***** too much, they’d be like, I don’t know if he’s that creative.”
GALEXYTHOT, featuring Kool Keith the next installment of Harden’s ongoing project comes out in a few weeks.
Derrick is constantly cooking up new artistic endevors and is releasing new music reguraly, so keep your eyes peeled for whats next.
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