Shad isn’t trying to comfort his listeners this time. On his latest album, A Short Story About a War, the Toronto hip-hop artist (full name: Shadrach Kabango) portrays a world much like our own, a world of vulnerability and rage, of fear and rationalization. Even though this album is a departure from Shad’s love for entertaining his fans, he wants listeners to question the things that make them uncomfortable and understand where those feelings come from.
“I really like making people feel good,” says Shad. “That’s, I think, a feature of a lot of my music. I really love entertaining people, but I also think it’s important sometimes to make people feel uncomfortable, and hopefully consider those feelings. Like, why do I feel uncomfortable? Why is it hard for us to watch another person’s vulnerability and another person’s rage, given that those are really natural human emotions?”
The video for the song “The Stone Throwers (Gone in a Blink)” is a visual representation of those feelings of vulnerability and rage.
“It’s a real challenge for me to make videos, period,” says Shad. “I don’t think as much in visual terms. Even just the fact of this story coming to me is a kind of strange and unique experience, because I think more in terms of language. The director, Matthew Progress, is a really dope rapper, and dope all-around creative person, so I trusted him and I said, ‘Hey, listen—this is what this song means to me. This is about vulnerability, and it’s about rage.’ And I kind of said, ‘Take that and let’s go.’ So he came back with this idea of nakedness and screaming, to represent vulnerability and rage, respectively, and I thought, ‘Listen, that’s great.’”
A Short Story About a War originated from a picture that came to Shad’s mind, and after years of cultivating this vision, he decided to put it to music.
“I just kinda got this image, this snapshot in my mind, of this desert landscape and all of these different sort of factions fighting each other,” he says. “It was one of those situations where, immediately, I saw all the parallels to our world—between this desert world and our world, and these factions, and their mentalities and philosophies, and rationalizations for violence, and those that exist in our world. I mean, at bottom I think it came from just observing a world of intense competition, a world where I feel like competition and individualism is driving people apart.”
The character of the fool is brought up multiple times throughout A Short Story About a War, and this fool tells listeners that fear is just a state of mind.
“I think we live with a lot of fear,” says Shad. “And, to me, this fool character is something that occurred to me when I was just imagining this story, and imagining this desert world and all these people fighting. I imagined this guy who just didn’t really believe in the violence that was happening around him. He just sort of smiles and picks a bullet up off the sand and is like, ‘Why are you people running away from this?’ That’s become a figure that I’ve thought about a lot the last few years, just this sort of idea of how much of our fear is based on something real, and how much of it is in our minds, is kind of an illusion that fear has created.”
Shad
Saturday, February 23
$20, Capital Ballroom
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