All These People Are Me

Hook, David; Samson, Andrew; Duffy, Declan

Abstract

‘All These People Are Me’ is a 14-track album concerned with identity, expression and contradiction.

The aim in creating the album was to attempt to portray the writer as an individual, while championing inconsistencies and conflicts in human nature, challenging the need for identity to be pigeonholed or categorised and the subsequent denial of fully expressing yourself as a result. “All These People Are Me” focuses on the idea that identity is complex and contradictory, and that this should be celebrated rather than criticised.

The songs cover themes such as daily identity construction (Reconstruction), code-switching (All These People Are Me), outsiderdom and isolation (Mr Margins), mental health, immigration and asylum (Shutter Island), hedonism and aging (Some Buzz), parenthood (A Day Aff Wi the Wee Man), social commentary (Klepto & Sons), cultural gatekeeping (Hatekeeprz), self-critique and self-growth (Deconstruction), while also embodying the elements of global hip-hop culture such as wordplay, complex rhyme construction and local interpretations of established genre tropes.

The project embodies concepts of hybridised identity, transmission, reception and hip-hop’s magpie-like love for syncretism and bricolage. Many of the themes across the album are drawn from my PhD researching into hip-hop, culture, society and the individual. These themes include: a didactic element of teaching or informing; displaying technical dexterity; dual meaning and wordplay; amalgamation; with an underlying message of change and fluidity.

The objective for this album was to reflect the contradictory, the conflicted and the constructed in a hip-hop form through the idiosyncratic, representing the ever more rapid morphing, mutating and blending of culture that makes up 21st century identity. Author, Ian Rankin, described the record as '“a stunning album… The great contemporary Scottish novel in rap form”.

• Physical Artefact Type: Artefact
• Deposit Date: Aug 14, 2019
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2052713
• Additional Information: Full album available here: ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiRTl7HtPQM