How introspective hip-hop artist Roy Kinsey turned trauma into triumph
When Roy Kinsey lost his grandmother in 2016, he was too paralyzed with grief to speak at her service. Kinsey couldn’t exalt her the way he wanted — by recounting stories of staying up late with her, sharing beers, the hard lessons she had passed on or the many memories he had.
So he opted to make her an offering — through music.
“If I could make something to show her that I appreciate her and our time,” the 32-yearold thought, “then that’s what I was going to do.”
The result is “Blackie: A Story by Roy Kinsey,” an impressive collection of introspective hip-hop. The work eulogizes his beloved grandmother and offers the rapper’s testimony on personal hardships as well as meditations on life as a black queer man in America.
Released this year, “Blackie” is the fourth record from the Chicago native, who puts out his music independently.
The project was informed by work Kinsey did in search of healing from great loss — revisiting his upbringing, learning about his ancestry, confronting past traumas — and further shaped when the rapper traced the story of his family and did some much-needed self-examination.
“I needed to do some alchemy,” he said. “I wanted to find myself. Who are you? Why are you here? What’s your purpose? I felt like I looked really good on paper, but I wasn’t feeling it. I wasn’t happy, (and) I was trying to get down to the bottom of me, and my family.”
Inspired by “The Warmth of Other Suns,” a book exploring the Great Migration, when millions of black families left the Jim Crow South and sought refuge up North, Kinsey, who works as a librarian for the Chicago Public Library, wondered how his family members’ migration to Chicago from Mississippi affected their lives and, by extension, his own.
Moved by his reading as well as by Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” and Beyonce’s “Lemonade,” Kinsey sought out to create a message-oriented project, one that tackled the effects of racism, addiction, violence, mental illness and sexuality.
Kinsey was born in Chicago to parents who stressed education (they actually met at a library), and music was never at the forefront of his ambitions.
His first exposure to hiphop came from hearing Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Thuggish Ruggish Bone,” and he fell in love with the genre in middle school with the arrival of DMX and Eve.
Being a hip-hop fan as a gay man isn’t easy, by any means, and it’s only tougher as a performer — just look at the dearth of mainstream LGBTQ acts across mainstream rap, or all of pop, for that matter.
Even though Kinsey has been out for a decade, his first albums completely evaded his sexuality. He had grown accustomed to masking himself, and he was doing the same in his music, something he reconciled with 2013’s “Beautiful Only” — the album he came out on.
“Although I never lied about who I liked or what I liked, I felt like since I was omitting something very important from the story, I was a fraud,” he said. “I’ve always looked at rap as the most honest art form. I didn’t feel comfortable not addressing it.”
“Blackie” is deeply autobiographical, but it’s also thick with Kinsey’s observations as a queer black man in America trying to connect the past of the generations before him with today.
Trauma is a constant here — whether experienced through oppression, the loss of a loved one or current events.
“I was feeling very distraught every time I watched the news or listened to the radio,” he said. “I was feeling a certain way, and I knew I had to say something.”
The album’s stark cover, with the artist teary-eyed with his hand over his mouth, is his reaction to black people who have been persecuted and killed. Ultimately, “Blackie” is about looking inward and backward in hopes that maybe Kinsey could find himself in the present.
“I looked at myself and all of the stress and trauma I’ve been through and thought, ‘Imagine what our ancestors went through,’” he said. “Doing this, I was able to ground myself, find purpose and start to feel healed.”