Amena Brown:
Hey, y'all. Welcome back to this week's episode of HER With Amena Brown. And last week we were talking about music. We were talking about Janet Jackson, whom I love very much. I hope that you were inspired to go back and listen to some of her music. If you ever had a workday that you were struggling to get through some, or you had a monotonous task that you're cleaning up, or you're working with an Excel sheet and you just need some motivation. You could turn on Janet's music. Or if you just need a little dance party for yourself, you need to get that danced out moment that Shonda Rhimes loves to give us. You know what I'm saying? You can do that with Janet's music. So I hope you did that. And that reminded me as I was trying to think about, why were there certain eras of time that I remember listening to Janet's music and other eras I didn't?
Amena Brown:
And then I remember, that's because I went through some seasons where I threw my music away and I wanted to dedicate an episode to this. I want to especially dedicate this episode to people who grew up in a very particular Christian environment. I want to dedicate this to you for those of you that are listening and are like, "What are you talking about? Why would you ever throw your music away?" I'm going to bring you a little bit into some conservative Christian culture, some evangelical Christian culture that maybe you didn't want to know about, but I'm just going to take you in there so you know how some things went. So I'm even going to go back beyond my own history, because my family on both sides, my mom's side and my dad's side, both have roots in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. And one of the tenets of, I guess I should say, it's almost not a tenet of the faith, but it's a tenet of what was supposed to be your social behavior.
Amena Brown:
If you are a person who consider yourself to be a Christian and you also attended a Pentecostal Holiness Church, because my mom also shared this with me, that this was true for her generation as well. That your social behavior was supposed to be as non-secular as possible, and secular in these environments meant the world, right? Because one of the tenets of the faith, if you were in more of a Pentecostal Holiness, Christian environment, is that people who were Christians were supposed to be separated from "the world," right? That the world was the den of sin. Okay? This is why even when we think about early blues music and different juke joint scenes that you may have seen in the movies, right? That there were always people who were supposed to be very church going folks. And they would not either want to be in this juke joint setting, where there was going to be music about love, romance, sex, about things that weren't considered to be godly, right? Or some of them did want to go, they just didn't want to be caught or seen there by other church people, right?
Amena Brown:
So this narrative has been going on for a very long time in different cultures, but in very specific ways went on in a lot of Black church culture in America, right? And went on in many other Christian cultures as well, because I have white friends who also say they have these experiences growing up too. So by the time I'm growing up, my mom is back in church. The church that I grew up in, I have to say, I give kudos to the church I grew up in because we were allowed as teenagers to explore the arts. So this is a time when we were wanting to do rap and hip hop dance, and all sorts of things that were popular in mainstream culture. We wanted to do that in church, and I have to give kudos to our church they allowed us to do that. That they weren't like, "Oh no, we don't want to hear that rap in this church." That they would allow us to do it as long as we agree that those raps or those dances would be about God, right? Okay.
Amena Brown:
So I became a Christian when I was 12 years old, and I don't remember anyone telling me to do this. But I just remember having this, and maybe someone did, and I just can't remember it. But I just remember having this instinct to throw my music away, and I've always been a person that loved music. I have musicians on both sides of my family, my dad, himself as a musician. So I've just always loved music. Any of you that have been reading my work, my books for a while, or have been to my shows, or been exposed to my art, know that music is a big part of that for me, music is very foundational for me. My dad was a big Earth, Wind & Fire fan. Any of you that listened to my Behind the Poetry episode on the poem Key of G. You'll hear me talking about there a lot of the early music that was really foundational for me.
Amena Brown:
So my initial growing up was not a growing up where "secular" and "sacred music" were separated. My initial upbringing until I was 12 years old, everything was meshed together. I would hear Earth, Wind & Fire when I was with my dad. I might hear Tramaine Hawkins with my mom. I might hear a James Cleveland song or an Andrae Crouch song at my grandmother's church. There were all sorts of places where that music was coming to me as a kid. And then, when I turned 12, we'd moved to Texas by this time to San Antonio. My mom had a period of time where she wasn't going to church, and then she started going back to church. And I decided, "Okay. I think I want to become a Christian. Seems all right from what I'm learning in church." And I just had this instinct to start getting rid of my music. And at that time, this is '92, '93.
Amena Brown:
So I was listening to, I had bought my first CDs. My first two CDs were TLC's Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip, and SWV's debut album. Those were both my first CDs that I ever bought and played in my little boombox in my room. And this was in the era of the magazines, right? So I remember Right On magazine. I'm sure there are a bunch of magazines I'm forgetting, but if you were a person who loved hip hop at this time, and loved Black music, loved R&B. There were magazines where you'd look through them and they'd interview your artists, and have these posters and stuff that you could take out. So my wall was all posters of artists I loved, and little cutouts from the magazine. And I just threw everything away in my attempt to do what I felt I needed to do to be devoted to this faith that I had just discovered or rediscovered, because I grew up around church going folks. But I had never really made that decision for myself, right?
Amena Brown:
So from 1992 to 1996, don't ask me a lot about the music that was on the radio, because I don't know. Now, like what I was saying in last week's episode, I was still watching music videos sometimes, because at this time of my upbringing. There were shows that came on around that time that we were just getting home from school. So we would rush home to try to watch TRL or catch 106 & Park. We would want to watch these TV shows, and we would call our friends and stuff. So I remember still watching music videos sometimes, but I wasn't really listening to the radio. And I wasn't really listening to the artist enough '92 to '96 to buy their music and listen to it. Okay? This is when I entered my era of listening to gospel music. And of course, like I told you all, I grew up in a very church going family.
Amena Brown:
So my grandmother and my dad both played piano for choirs as I was growing up. So I knew a lot of choir music that way, but I never really listened to it on my own until my mom started going to the church that we went to while I was growing up, and I started singing in the choir. And so I just got all swallowed up in trying to listen to as much gospel as I could. So I was listening to John P. Kee and Hezekiah Walker. This was the era where Kirk Franklin originally debuted. I think the '92 to '96 was really when Fred Hammond was still a part of the group Commissioned. So I wasn't listening to Commissioned then, for those of you who are gospel music heads. I didn't actually get into Fred Hammond until later in the '90, which we'll talk about.
Amena Brown:
But all of that, early to mid '90s, that Donald Lawrence, any of the choirs, I listen to a lot of gospel choir music. I listened to Yolanda Adams. I think maybe Mary Mary was starting to come around when we were getting into the late '90s. But I really just fell in love with choir music. And one of the things that I really loved about it, obviously it was music that just had a message I believed in, but I also loved the baselines, and I loved the organ and the drum patterns, and I loved the harmonies. And I loved the parts and gospel music where the music would cut out. So it was cool because even though I wasn't listening to a lot of what would've been mainstream music, or pop music, or hip hop music of the time, I was still listening to Black music.
Amena Brown:
So it still had these bluesy R&B rootedness. And I think gospel's just a fascinating genre of music to me, because there are ways that the mainstream music of the day informs gospel. And there were eras of time where it was gospel that was informing how the singers and musicians and artists were performing even when they weren't performing in church settings, right? So I loved this for me, even though I discovered later as I got older and had more friends talking about what they were doing in '94 and '95. I missed out on a lot of that. I'll tell you all a fun fact. I knew some of the instrumentals to Biggie's music, better than I knew Biggie's raps. Because my friends that I rapped with in church, they would take Biggie's instrumentals and we would rap to Biggie's instrumentals at church. So we will wrap all our little Jesus raps to Biggie's instrumentals, and the rest of our youth group would be singing some other music to it, and I had no idea what they were singing.
Amena Brown:
I'm pretty sure we did a Jesus rap to Total's Can't You See, to the instrumental. I'm pretty sure we did that. And I was like, "Why are they singing along? What are their mouths moving to?" I didn't know anything about that song. That's how sheltered away from that I was. So at some point in '96, I get really interested in rap music because this is when the cipher was really popular. And I would see kids at school. Well, I'll have to think about this you all. Was I seeing kids at school? I think I saw it at church first, because I was in private school for ninth and 10th grade, and my private school was predominantly white. So nobody was really knocking beats on the table and stuff like that, that really was not happening at my private, predominantly white Christian school that I went to ninth and 10th grade.
Amena Brown:
But for 11th and 12th grade, I went to a public school in San Antonio, one of the largest public schools in the city. And so that changed everything for me culturally and in a lot of ways. So at church though was the first time that after the service, a lot of the guys that were in our youth group would pull together this cipher and I would step into the circle and listen to them rap. And I just found it so fascinating, because I had been writing poetry since I was 12. So I could hear that what they were saying in the cipher sounded like poems, and I had memorized other people's poems. And so I stepped into the cipher and tried to do a part of Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman to the beat box. And one of my friend, shout out to Aran Lee, I don't know if Aran listens to this podcast.
Amena Brown:
But shout out to him because after the cipher, he was like, "Yo, why don't you rap? You were able to do that with Maya Angelou's poem. Why don't you try writing a rap?" They'll say, "What's the story you could tell about yourself that would be really on brand." This story I'm about to tell you all is very on brand for me, because as soon as he said that to me, I immediately went to researching. This is very on brand for Amena, okay? I immediately went to researching and I just found or bought, I don't know how I did this in my mother's house. I'm trying to think about this. Although, I will say from my mom though, my mom, I think if I had tried to buy a Bone Thugs-N-Harmony album at the time. My mom wouldn't have let that fly, because she would've looked at that and been like, "I'm not going to have the devil in my house."
Amena Brown:
And those of you who know, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony know exactly what I'm talking about. But if you don't know and you Google it, you will look and see what I'm talking about. My mom wouldn't have been for that, but my mom was more open minded about that than some other people's parents. My mom did want me to listen to good music. So she let me listen to rest of development. If she listened to it and it didn't sound it was somebody talking real crazy. And she felt she could at least attest that they were not saying terrible things that I need to be listening to. She would be with it. So I don't know how I came across these things. No, I do know how. Some of these things that I didn't have at home, some of my friends did. So they would make cassette tapes from the CDs that their parents let them buy, if we weren't sure that my mom would let me listen to it.
Amena Brown:
So this is how I got a cassette of some of the songs off of the Fugees' The Score. My friend Trey had a cassette of The Roots album Do You Want More? Because I think that's the album that has Silent Treatment on it, and he handed me that. My little high school boyfriend, he gave me a cassette tape of The Boss. No, it wasn't The Boss. It was Boss, but her single was called Deeper and Deeper. It was a cassette that had Boss's, The Boss's Bruce Springsteen, just to be clear. So Boss, it was a cassette that had Deeper and Deeper, the radio version on one side, and then on the other side it had different remixes and other songs that we didn't know of Boss's yet, right?
Amena Brown:
So I just went and studied as many woman MCs as I could. I listened to as much Lauryn Hill as I could. I would fast forward to get to her verses on that little cassette tape, and listen to her and rewind it, and listen to her and rewind it. Missy Elliot had also come out around this time. So I was listening to her a lot. I listened to Boss, I listen to Rage. I would fast forward through TLC songs to listen to Left Eye. So just getting a chance to hear the sounds of their voices, and what they were talking about. That sent me back into an era where I basically started listening again to all the music I threw away. So I did that through the late '90s. I graduated from high school in '98 and came to Atlanta to go to college.
Amena Brown:
It was an interesting era for me to return to listening to music that wasn't gospel, because it was almost a perfect era for hip hop and what was going to become the new soul music of the time. So by the time I'm going to college, Lauryn Hill has released The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Outkast has released Aquemini, and I'm in Texas, right? So it's interesting to think, I feel like a historian talking to you all now. But I like to say these things because things are different than they were then. And one of the things that I really appreciate now about my time of growing up is how regional music was then. So in some ways I appreciate, in other ways it made things hard, right? So for those of us who are hip hop fans, it was because hip hop was born in New York, it took a long time for hip hop from the South, or hip hop from the Midwest, or hip hop from the West to get that same respect, right?
Amena Brown:
So those parts of it being regional were not so great. But there were great things about some things being regional, and that me living in Texas, we were hearing more Master P, No Limit. We were hearing more Slim Thug. We were hearing more of our regional music than we were New York music at the time. And the music that really infiltrated in Texas, at least the part where I was in San Antonio that infiltrated us sooner than a lot of New York music, was music from the South. I remember when Outkast, it was right at that '97 going into '98 that I was hearing people at the lunch table being like, "Who is this? Come listen to this." He said, "Am I crooked letter?" Like everything, okay? So I just remember feeling that cultural wave coming. It's really interesting to think about that, and that wave was happening at the time that I was graduating high school going into college. So of course, coming from Texas and then moving to Atlanta for college, then it was like, I was getting exposed to this whole other new music.
Amena Brown:
I mean, Outkast was obviously a huge deal here in Atlanta, and UGK. It was almost being in Atlanta, ironically, I was getting exposed to even more Texas music, and then other Southern music because all of that was really popular in Atlanta period, right? So it's just a fascinating thing to think about that era of time moving here. Okay. So then, I get to college, you all are going to laugh. I get to college in '98. I am coming from this very sheltered church girl background. And I was basically given my marching orders by my family, and all of the people that were in my church community that really just were behind me and supporting me and wanting me to succeed. And the marching orders were, "All right, you need to get to Atlanta. You need to find a church to join and go to, and just bury yourself in that so Atlanta doesn't turn you out."
Amena Brown:
It was pretty much what they were saying without saying it quite that way. So I basically, even though I'm a Janet Jackson fan and she was like, "When I was 17, I did what people told me." I'm pretty sure I did that long past being 17 years old, because I was like, "Well, that's what they said so that's what I'm going to do." I came to Atlanta, found a little church to join, got to be a part of this campus ministry. So I was doing that, and then I went through another period of what throwing my music away. And this time I'm pretty sure I remember some people telling us that we were getting that message, you are what you listen to, and some of why you're struggling with this or that is because you don't listen to enough music that's about God. So child, I threw away my music again, you all. I'm talking about, got to college and threw my music away again.
Amena Brown:
And I know I'm not alone in this, if you're listening and you also threw your music away at various times because of your church upbringing, please DM me so I know I'm not by myself. If you give me permission, I will totally share your stories in my Instagram Stories. Because I know that I have other friends who also are like, "Yeah, I know. I don't know the music during that time period, because I threw all my CDs away." So I threw my CDs away, blessed my heart, I threw away The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. And during this era was when Fred Hammond's Pages Of Life double album had just come out. And so that piece of gospel music is still just a very important piece of music for me, and really carried me through a lot of those early years of college.
Amena Brown:
Fred Hammond put out quite a few albums after that, and I would buy his albums. And it was during this time, during my college time that I was more exposed to white church and white church music, what we would consider to be your CCM or a lot of what worship music sounds like, right? It's very different from the gospel worship music that I grew up with growing up. So as I got exposed to that CCM music between college and my early 20's after graduating, I was listening to more of that. So there's an era between '99 and 2005. Don't ask me much of anything about what was on the radio during that time, because I just don't know. I was in my friend's cars, they were listening to different CCM artists of that time. We were listening to Jars of Clay and we were listening to Watermark at that time. You were really old school CCM listener if you know who I'm talking about when I said that.
Amena Brown:
We were listening to wow, '98, '99, 2000, 2001, we were just listening to those CDs. So we weren't listening to the radio, and by then it depended on where I was living if I had a TV. So I also wasn't watching music videos. So there's a whole era of time right there that I was just listening to worship music. And those of you that have been listening to the podcast know that right out of college was really when my poetry career "started." And that started in a lot of white church environments. So I also got exposed to a lot of those CCM artists from that day and started listening to them. Initially, I think it was cool to me at that time to hear this music that to me sounded like this love letter to God. That seems very intriguing to me at the time. So I got really involved in that.
Amena Brown:
Okay. Then, somewhere around 2005, some things started to go awry at the church I was going to. So I think the other thing that happened between '99 and '05 is that I was back in a church bubble too. I was working in church when I graduated, as far as traveling with Christian organizations, going to different church environments. I was very heavily involved in my local church with the college ministry there. So outside of church activities, I really didn't have a life. I wasn't going on dates. I wasn't going to concerts. I wasn't going to comedy shows or art galleries. It was church stuff. People's houses that I went to church with. If I went to the movies, I was going there with people I went to church with. And then it was all of a sudden, it got to be 2005, and things at the church were getting wildly unhealthy.
Amena Brown:
And people were leaving the church and we were all left to decide, were we going to stay? What did we think of the people who leave the church? It was all this turmoil. And it was then that I think I was really having more of a creative crisis where I was, and I think I've shared this story on the podcast before. But I'll say it here in brief again, for those of you that may just be getting to this episode and you're like, "I just got here. So I'm going to tell you this story." But I think it was also around this time that I had been performing poetry, but I wanted to have time to go back out to the open mic, because the open mic was not necessarily where my career started in the sense of where I started to get paid. But the open mic was where I started to learn how to write well and how to find my voice, how to perform well.
Amena Brown:
So anything I took into these career and professional settings that were paying me, I learned that from the roots of these environments that I had been in and they were truthfully, most of them, very specifically Black poetry environments, right? And so I think I started to feel untethered from that, and I returned back to the open mic setting and I had this poet, shout out to Megan Volpert who said to me, "Hey, I really like your work, but I just feel like I never get to know you. I never see you in your work." And it was really odd to me to hear her say that, because it shook me a little bit and she moved on, we talked about something else. But I remember driving home after she said that, and just really thinking about what is it about my work that she can't see me.
Amena Brown:
And the truth is the idea in a lot of CCM and worship music is this idea that we are not supposed to be seen as humans. The idea is that God is supposed to shine. So God is all of the something and as humans that we are nothing. That's a lot of the basics of a lot of worship music then, and a lot of worship music that's out now. So as a poet that was doing poetry in these environments, I had started to take on that type of writing and that type of mentality in my poetry. And when she said that to me, it really shook me because I did think about the roots I was coming from. And even in a lot of gospel music, especially the gospel music I grew up on, I don't listen to current gospel music.
Amena Brown:
So I cannot speak to that unfortunately, but the gospel music that was formative to me, it had this way of acknowledging you as a human, acknowledging that you are a person who struggles, acknowledging sometimes that you are a person who is oppressed, who is dealing with things and systems beyond your own control, and that there is a God who liberates, right? And so I think I started to think about that. I started to question like, "Why am I feeling like I need to disappear from my work and what God would actually want that of me in general, but also want that of me as a Black woman? Why would God want me to disappear? Why does God need me to disappear for God to shine? God's going to shine anyway. And isn't God shining through all of this creation? If we believe that God is the one making all of us, isn't God shining through each of our skin tones and hair textures and all the things?"
Amena Brown:
So I was contemplating a lot during this time. And so I ended up returning not only to some of the music I threw away, but in a way returning to some of the roots of music that I loved. So I remember I went back and started listening to these Jackson 5 records. I would get a lot of my music from Walmart because there was some music that I wanted to listen to that was mainstream music, but I didn't want to listen to all the cursing and everything. Sometimes I still don't, you all, to be honest, sometimes I do though, and I'm not going to lie about that. But back then, really. So I was buying a lot of music from Walmart, and so I'd go into Walmart to get whatever rapper was out. I want to get their music so I could listen to it, but I don't want to hear the cuss words, right?
Amena Brown:
And then, Walmart would sometimes have on sale these compilation CDs and stuff. And so that's really how I went back to listen to a lot of older music, even music that was popular before I was born. So that was how I started digging back into these old Jackson 5 records. And I remember I was just listening, I don't remember what record it was, but I was listening to this Jackson 5 CD. And before I realized it, I had just been listening to that three weeks straight, just over and over and over. Just the rhythms, the background vocals, and the ad libs. Oh man. The way they were produced just fascinated, and then I would just go down a rabbit hole. I went through the Jackson 5 for a while, and then after I got through all their records, went back through Michael Jackson's early records.
Amena Brown:
Some of these songs I knew, I knew Thriller, and I knew Workin' Day and Night, I knew some of the hits, but I had never actually listened to the albums through and through. So I went back and listened to those early like Off the Wall, and all of Thriller the album. And then, that sent me to wanting to listen to Bill Withers once I started looking more into some Motown things. And then, I got down a Chaka Khan rabbit hole, and then wanted to go back through Stevie Wonder's albums. And so I think in a certain way that returned to me this rootedness in Black music, number one. But I think number two, it also returned to me this idea that music is not sacred or secular. It was around this time of my life that I decided, I don't want to categorize music like that anymore. And that there are songs that other people would deem to be secular that are very sacred to me.
Amena Brown:
And truthfully, I would say this is true of me today. There are many songs that people today would call sacred, especially people who are in the environments I used to be in that are still in very evangelical environments or very wide evangelical spaces. There are songs that they would consider to be very, very sacred that are secular to me. So for me, I feel like what I discovered there in that early, not even early 20s, probably mid 20s into my early 30s. What I discovered about music that's so powerful is that I think music really exists to help us express all of life, to help us express our humanity and the holy moments as well, and that our humanity will experience holy moments.
Amena Brown:
That music is there to talk about leaves on the trees. It's there to talk about how much your heart is breaking when you have a breakup. It's there to talk about what it feels like to fall in love, what it feels like to have good sex. Music is there for all of these things. Music is also there to sing about your thoughts and feelings or prayers to God, music is there for all of that. And I found that to be something so powerful. I actually was on a tour once and Matt and I, when I say Matt, I'm talking about my husband and also the producer of this podcast. And we have been talking about for a while, just as a podcast team, Matt, Leigh and I, Leigh who's my podcast production assistant, and assistant, and friend, just everything.
Amena Brown:
Anyways, we've been talking about me doing some episodes here where we tell some road stories, and I am going to do that. So I'll come back and share some of those with you. But I thought about one in particular as it relates to this episode. And Matt and I were on a tour, I'm ciphering through the details of the tour so that I cannot tell you enough details that you would know who I'm talking about. But anyways, we were on a tour and there were multiple acts, multiple bands, and such and us. And we had this, which happens when you're on tour, you have these periods of time during the day because all the shows are at night where you end up hanging out whether you wanted to or not, because you're all on a bus. You end up hanging out with the production crew, the lighting folks, or the other bands you may be on tour with.
Amena Brown:
And we run on tour with, at that time, it was a really well known Christian band. And we were talking about music and really talking about the state of what was considered to be Christian music at that time, and how a lot of people loved the message in that music. But musically, a lot of that music was very uninteresting. It didn't jam, it didn't have good bass lines. It didn't have musicality to it that you also felt like, "Wow," impressed by or that you felt impacted by even. And so we were talking about that with this very, very well known Christian band that I won't say the name of. And although, even if I said the name, some of you that are listening, "I don't know those people."
Amena Brown:
But anyways, and the leader of this very well known Christian band, he said, "You know what, my wife and I, we have," however many kids they had and he was like, "And we only let our kids listen to Christian radio because we never want our kids to hear all the bad stuff that's in secular music." And so I said, "I don't have any kids," and I was like, "But I feel if I had kids, I don't know that I would want them to just listen to Christian radio because how are they going to know what a really good bass line sounds like? How are they going to know what an amazing horn section could sound like? How are they going to know about harmonies and really good background vocalist? Or a very well written song? So I hope that if I have kids, they get to listen to Stevie Wonder, or The Jackson 5, or some of those old Motown records, I hope they get to hear some Run DMC and some other stuff so that they know what good music sounds like."
Amena Brown:
Because that's the one thing I feel Christian radio is missing is actually good music. And you all, some of you all are picking up on the fact that maybe I should have picked up on the fact that I was totally offending this man, because this was clearly how he makes his money. He's making the music that I was basically saying, it's not good music. But I really didn't pick up on it, because I just thought like, "Shouldn't he know that. Shouldn't he know. Shouldn't he know that," but he didn't and he huffed and puffed, and he was very offended, but I never saw him again. And I really couldn't tell you his government name to this day, to be honest, but I still stand by what I said. Even though my mom, I don't know, I have to ask her because I know she listens to the podcast sometimes. How she feels about how her own spiritual journey impacted me as her kid, because I experienced both eras of her.
Amena Brown:
I experienced my mom before she was going back to church, and I experienced her afterwards. But what I love about that is that I got to experience a wide variety of music, and that's how I like to listen to music to this day. I'm not, I will be honest with you all, I'm not a super eclectic music listener. I like what I like. Inside the genres I like, I can get interested in being eclectic, but I like what I like. I like the type of hip hop where the MCs are lyricists, where they are poets, where they are good writers, that's the type of hip hop I like. I like soul music. A lot of the hip hop I like would also technically fall in the category of being soul music on a level. I still love gospel music. I still love Tramaine Hawkins, and some of those old formative songs for me. I still love a good classic Kirk Franklin song.
Amena Brown:
And there's some new music that I love, I totally fell in love with Cardi B and I did not think that I would love her music like I do. I love Cardi B. I love seeing Kendrick Lamar come onto the scene as a new MC. I find different artists that I fall in love with all the time, but I love that there's a lot of music out there that we are not just only into this one genre. I love that there's a lot of music to hear. I love that music has the power to express a lot of things to us. And I love that I think music is sacred, but I don't necessarily categorize it as secular. I think music is sacred. I think it's human. I think it's beautiful. Well, and I don't really want to go a day without listening to music.
Amena Brown:
I was dating a guy once who, one of my questions I would ask guys when I was dating them is, if they could pick a song that they would want to wake up to everyday. Or if they pick a song that was a motivator to them, what would they pick? And I dated this guy once, he literally got quiet and he was like, "Man, I don't know. I don't really listen to music very much." And I was like, "Wow. This date's over. This date is over." I literally married a musician. What are we talking about? That is one of the things that bonded my husband and I is our love for music is one of the things that bonds us to this day. All of the DJs we've had opportunities to see together. All of the live music acts we've had the chance to see. So that's my story you all, the music I threw away and found again. I would love to get DMs from you if you too threw away your music.
Amena Brown:
And another thing that I love about right now about all the access we have to music is there's so much music that you can find again. There's so much music that maybe you were never even exposed to that you can find. So I hope you do that. Talk soon you all. HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.