I have watched an episode of a podcast called Song Exploder, where the particular episode was about a music artist named Michael Kiwanuka and his song Black Man In A White World. He talks about how he came to create this song through his mood for the time he created it.
In the beginning, he describes that he came to create the song, specifically the chorus “I’m a black man in a white world,” because of how he felt during the time from his sadness, to where he started singing the chorus while he was playing the guitar, and his producer heard it and told him that it sounded good and that they would help him create the full song. What interested me was that in the audio, he mentions going from a different genre than playing the guitar in a country-music manner. He explains that usually, it’s a white man that creates music in country form, so he decided that, to reach out to black people, to do it in another genre. I wondered about this, especially since most country artists are, in fact, of white or Caucasian origin. (I have only seen one black country artist in this day.) So it got my attention when he decided to get the producer’s help to turn it into another genre, just to reach out to people of his race.
After he explains this, he goes on to talk about how he decides to add in lyrics to this so that the white people who listen to this will not think that he wrote this to hate on white people, but just explain that he feels left out in a world not made for him. It reminds me of my own feelings when it comes to word choice and not wanting to offend anybody when I make my writings, etc.
This podcast was interesting to me about what it takes to reach out and appeal to people through sound and word choices, and what it takes to make a song, especially about isolation, successful rather than separation-oriented.
