For the boys and young men facing increasing isolation and loneliness, it’s all too easy to log on and get lost in the “manosphere,” where toxic influencers like Andrew Tate, Clavicular, and a host of other figures reign supreme.
But for every podcast hack, there is an uncle, coach, teacher, or other male figure in a young boy’s life trying to flip the script by demonstrating a positive representation of masculinity. Pierce Freelon, Grammy Award-winning musician and, in the words of rapper G Yamazawa, a “Durham legend just like Nnenna Freelon,” believes that kind of positive mentorship is especially vital for Black boys and the Black men who nurture them.
For years, Freelon has facilitated the mentorship of Black youth through Blackspace, the Afrofuturist youth center in downtown Durham that hosts “wokeshops” and the Rowdy Summer Cypher, named for former Blackspace Executive Director Kevin Joshua “Rowdy” Rowsey II, who died in 2024.
In recent years, Freelon has also blended his creative gifts and interest in youth empowerment into an award-winning children’s music catalog. His newest record, Black Boy Glow, celebrates kinship and mentorship between Black men; on Juneteenth, he’ll host a CCB Plaza album release party. Ahead of the show, we caught up with him to talk about his children’s music career and how becoming a father shaped his creativity.
INDY: What was the genesis of this new album?
PIERCE FREELON: I don’t think I play a big role in what I create, in a weird way. I just try to listen. In fact, it’s funny—I have this ice cream company [Coco Fro], and I’ve been trying to think of ways to weave the marketing, the values and ideals, around Coco Fro into my music, so early this year I set an intention to make an album about food. I was thinking, “I’m lactose intolerant, so a song about lactose intolerance, a song about eating food that’s powered by the sun, how NASA freeze-dries foods—you know, sciencey stuff—stuff that would tie into Coco Fro. We’re opening up a brick-and-mortar in Durham. I’m working on a book about lactose intolerance; a children’s picture book about eating. This was my intention.
But when I sit down to write, I’m listening to beats, I’m producing music, I’m writing choruses, I’m penning lyrics, and what’s coming out is not ice cream, it’s not food. It’s songs about being an elder, songs about rites of passage. There’s this song, Track 2 on the album, called “Rite of Passage,” which is about how boys ascend into manhood. There are songs about dap. Since I cut my hair, I’ve been rocking durags again, checking out the latest durag brands, and I’m writing “My Smooth and Silky Durag.”
So these songs, I don’t want to say were against my intention, but the music that was moving me had a theme, and those themes were masculinity, care, whimsy, all things that related to boyhood. This is against the backdrop of the manosphere and the male loneliness epidemic and conversations around toxic masculinity, conversations we’re having at NorthStar and Blackspace. It’s in the zeitgeist, and it’s what flowed out of my pen.
How has your writing process changed over the years, especially with the pivot to children’s music?
I’ve been doing music forever; first it was Language Arts for a long time, and then The Beast, and my first children’s music album—these were songs that were 10 years in the making, because I was writing them during the Beast and Language Arts eras, but I wasn’t releasing them because I thought to myself, Language Arts is a hip-hop group. We’re going for OutKast, we’re going for A Tribe Called Quest, we’re not really doing Mr. Rogers, even though I was a dad. Same for The Beast; our North Star creatively was The Roots. It was The Coup and political hip-hop.
When I write a song about picking boogers out of my kid’s nose with the suction—like, make it make sense. Mos Def would never; Common would never. So those songs ended up in the vault. Occasionally, if I would bring it to a songwriting session, it just didn’t make sense in the context of the other body of work that we had released, and so I put them to the side. I pretty much started writing about being a dad and about kids-centered stuff the moment I became a father, which was 2008, when Justice was born.
Fast-forward to 2016, my dad was diagnosed with ALS, and he passed three years later in 2019. That time of grief and slowness and reflection really brought me back to, like, “Wow, there’s this other version of you that isn’t showing up in your creative life, and this version of you is the father, this version of you is the son.” My first children’s album, D.A.D., was about my dad and the lessons he taught me as a kid, and the way that he raised me, and it was about me being a dad.
Bro, I must have had 300 song ideas, not fully fleshed-out stuff, but I’d take out my phone and make a voice note—sometimes the idea is simple, fleeting, emergent. They sat in my archives until about 2019 when I was caregiving with my dad, not really trying to do anything creative, honestly, just looking for nostalgic moments to put a smile on my dad’s face.
If you listen to my children’s music, you will hear OutKast, you will hear Mos Def, you will hear Alchemist and Q-Tip from a production standpoint. There’s an interesting movement in children’s music to take trap beats and put children’s songs over them. But my stuff doesn’t sound like pop; it sounds like really dope jazz-influenced underground hip-hop, and lyrically, I’m asking my audience, as young as they are, to step up to a higher level of metaphor and storytelling than they’re used to with “Ring Around the Rosie.” Do you remember Shel Silverstein and Where the Sidewalk Ends? There’s a body of work in the children’s space that to me elevates the genre, because it doesn’t pander.
Why now? What about this moment brings the essence of Black Boy Glow to the forefront for you?
This is a vital moment where Black men are desperately needed as mentors, as “unc” or as coaches, teachers. There’s just not enough of us in their lives. Culturally speaking, the role of the nurturer is stereotypically, historically seen as the woman’s role, and I think that is shifting now. You see more dads out there pushing strollers; you see more dads out there with the baby backpacks. I think that’s great. We are transforming and shifting narratives around masculinity that create space for us to be nurturers.
This is a vital moment where Black men are desperately needed as mentors, as “unc” or as coaches, teachers. There’s just not enough of us in their lives..”
However, I don’t feel like we have enough cultural commentary on the relationship between Black men and Black boys and the roles that Black men play in helping shape healthy masculinity, healthy values, healthy self-affirmation, and knowledge of self in Black voice. We don’t see enough of it. Coming-of-age rituals are something that Black people, in particular, have lost. Our ancestors had coming-of-age rituals. Some cultures still do it. There are quinceañeras. In the Jewish tradition, there’s a bar mitzvah.
Manhood isn’t something you just stumble into. It’s not something you look at your watch, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m 15 now. I’m a man.” No, it’s a ritual that other men hold with you to usher you into manhood. Something that is earned. [As a teenager] I was a disobedient smartass getting in trouble at Durham School of the Arts, and my dad called my cousin; he was 11 years my senior.
My cousins took me out to climb a mountain and experience physical discomfort, you know, traverse tumultuous terrain and accomplish a goal that requires grit and mental fortitude. It wasn’t the intention, but I recognized it later in life as like, “Oh, that was a rite of passage.” Instilled in my memory is this ritual to connect with a man who was not my father—who could pour into me, who I can talk about things with that I couldn’t raise with my dad. We talked about girls, we talked about drugs, we talked about basketball. He was a mentor. He stood in that gap for me.
You have an altar to your dad at your home that has expanded to include a number of all-time great Black futurists. Who all has made it onto the altar thus far?
I collect Black action figures, and yeah, they sit on the altar. That’s technically my dad’s altar, but he shares it with some other mythological science fiction characters. So, of course, we got Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge and Worf from Star Trek. Captain Sisko from Deep Space Nine is on there; Cyborg from the DC Universe; Bishop, the time-traveling mutant from the X-Men universe, is up there; Lando from Star Wars; Morpheus from The Matrix.
Which futurist do you think your dad most connects to?
Hands down, Morpheus. The Matrix is my dad’s favorite movie. The idea that you can manifest and create your own reality, breaking down the facade of what we perceive to be reality to seize your destiny—he was all about that.
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