“I think before it was just that I love my people,” he ponders about his motivations. “I love the culture from which I come. I see the beauty in what we are and what we can be as black people and I try not to be discouraged fully. Ultimately, for me, I have to believe it’s like God. I think a lot of black faith in God is because we need some shit to believe in. We need to justify why this shit is happening. So I believe that the fire keeps going first and foremost because I have to. And I don’t even know if that’s a fucking...”
He pauses on the expletive, searching as he often does, for the right words. Yet this time, a hint of vulnerability and desperation and uncertainty creeps into his voice.
“I don’t even know if that’s the right way to do anything, but it is because I have to. But now, firstly for me are my sons. I’ve got to try my fucking hardest to make sure that I leave them with a world with the least amount of debt, culturally, environmentally, societally. I have to try my best, because you never really know when you’re going to go, right? You never know. I have no idea, I could be gone tomorrow. And I don’t know what happens after that, but I do believe in the energy that we share while we’re here and I want to make sure that the energy that I invest on this planet will be beneficial to my sons.”
While many Americans are hoping that next week’s U.S. general election is a chance to vote Donald Trump out of office, for Jason, Trump isn’t so much the problem as the symptom of the disease. What Jason is standing up to is longstanding, systemic injustice that’s written in law, not the actions of one ignorant, racist president. Voting won’t make all that much difference, and even if Trump loses, that’s not enough. It’s going to take more than that. Indeed, there’s a telling lyric on WRONG GENERATION where Jason sings, ‘My Uzi weigh a ton, son – carry it.’ It’s a line adapted from the 1987 Public Enemy song Miuzi Weighs A Ton, which Travis Barker, together with the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and Raekwon, then recast for the drummer’s 2011 debut solo album, Give The Drummer Some. Sampled – and then repeated by Jason – here, it’s just one of many moments of violent outrage on this EP. ‘You wanted a fight, well, you got one,’ Jason spits malevolently on U WANTED A FIGHT. ‘I want to be there when the final racist statue falls,’ he proclaims on BITE BACK. Even on the short, beautiful, gentle LAST TIME, his words betray the soothing lull of the song’s melody: ‘You let us down for the last time.’
“I wanted to make it very clear that we know what’s going on and we can’t be fooled anymore,” says Jason. “The veil has been lifted. The semantics and rhetoric of ‘Things are going to change’ isn’t good enough anymore. We’ve heard that time and time again, and we’ve seen amendments that then just turned into modern day slavery. We’ve seen on television people be choked to death, shot to death, beat to death, not getting help until they die in handcuffs. We know it’s happening and we can’t be lied to anymore. We cannot accept blind faith, we cannot accept you just saying it’s gonna change. We need to see that change.”