Kadeen Brown was listening to “Can You See the Pride in the Panther” by by Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, when she started thinking about her father. Not Tupac, whose poem inspired the track. Not the Black Panther Party, whose legacy runs through both versions. Her father. A first generation Jamaican Brit and Rastafarian—who told her stories about the Britain he grew up in, which wasn’t always welcoming. Yet what stayed with her wasn’t the hardship itself, but the way he carried it.
“He went through some horrible stuff in the UK,” Brown says. “But despite that, he held his head up high and he just did his thing.” She also thought of the people she’d grown up alongside in Kilburn, north-west London, who were now becoming dentists, teachers, artists. She thought of the musicians she watched at grassroots jam nights around the city. “I see them becoming maybe the next Mos Def, the next Tupac in the future,” she says. “I wanted to uplift their current, and have them in the story.”