COLORADO ARTISTS RECORD SONGS FOR SOUNDTRACK
Fast-growing company imagines a heroic black history — with the help of Colorado musicians
Manuel Godoy usually ignores emails soliciting his interest in a new music project.
“At first I was like, ‘Oh, another person throwing a song at me,’ “Godoy, 34, said over the phone from Brooklyn, where his Black Sands Entertainment company is based. “But this email had an actual track on it and all of the manager’s information, so it looked legit. When I heard ‘Kings and Queens’ I was like, ‘Yo, this sounds straight-up from the Black Sands universe.’ It was pretty hot.”
“Kings and Queens” is a song by Colorado hip-hop/R&B artist Ramond, a.k.a. 28-year-old Aurora native and Colorado State University grad Ramond Murphy. He emailed the track to Godoy after seeing Black Sands’ eye-catching graphic novels and comics advertised on Instagram. The books, which have independently sold more than 25,000 copies, imagine an alternate, ancient history of African royalty that hews closer to the fantasy and sci-fi themes of “Black Panther” than the material that populates most classrooms.
“I founded it to create an African history before slavery,” Godoy said. “African-American kids mostly hear about slavery and the civil rights movement, but how much more can you grow up to be when your ancestor is a slave? I thought it was important for kids of color to see stories about legends that don’t involve European nations.”
Murphy agreed. “(Godoy) told me, ‘I think your message is similar to what we’re trying to portray,’ ” he remembered. “And that’s how our collaboration began.”
Now, after months of work, Murphy
has submitted a full-length album of original music to Go doy to accompany Black Sands’ first animated feature, based on its “Seven Kingdoms” book. Having already met its $50,000 Kickstarter goal for a DVD pilot, Black Sands is hoping to raise $250,000 to fund a full-length feature film — with a cast of Colorado musicians providing the soundtrack.
“Just from the graphics alone, you can see how empowering the books are,” Murphy said as he listened to mixes for the album at Aurora-based Bright Future Media studios, where it was produced. “Black kids don’t usually get to see themselves in cartoon-hero form, so I really just gravitated toward this company and wanted to create music with the same energy.”
As a performer, Murphy has shared stages with touring hiphop artists and worked with producer Jon-John Robinson, a Grammy-winner with Denver ties whose collaborators include Diana Ross and TLC. The making of Murphy’s 2018 solo album, “Seeds,” offered a test run for the executive-producing work for Black Sands’ first musical release.
Murphy enlisted lots of help forthe-as-yet-untitled album, including producer DJ Zenas, engineer Stevie Buggz (who founded and runs Bright Future Media), Kayla Marque, Akilbeatsdenver, Mic Coats, Air Dubai spin-off Kid Astronaut, and more. Murphy and his collaborators think the project has the potential to shift national attention to Colorado’s perpetually under-the-radar hip-hop scene.
“Denver doesn’t really have a hip-hop identity,” Zenas said as the delicate, contemplative track “Reign” played through Bright Future’s speakers. “Our individual artists do, but we don’t have that regional sound like the coasts or the South does. Trev Rich is probably the biggest name in Denver hip-hop at the moment, but that’s about it.”
Despite making a soundtrack with all-Colorado artists, it’s not just a “local” release, Zenas and Murphy said. Listeners might access it online, downloading individual songs from Black Sands’ forthcoming smartphone and tablet app. They might hear it passively as aural wallpaper in the Black Sands film, then decide they want to know more about the people who made it (discovering only then that it all comes from Colorado).
Marketing the music to potentially far-flung fans isn’t just an abstract concept, it’s a plan, Godoy said. With $500,000 in sales over the last three years and hundreds of thousands more in online fundraising, Black Sands is looking to become an international brand, he said.
“We’re developing a platform exclusively for African-American and Latino comics and mangas,” Godoy said. “There’s a lot of great content out there but it gets pushed down by the algorithms for (popular comics), so we need to create our own, and we’ve already got the proof of concept.”
After Denver, Godoy plans to roll out his Black Sands app to regions with “a large pan-African diaspora” — or cultures filled with people of African descent, such as in Brazil.
The success of the 2018 Marvel film “Black Panther,” which earned more than $700 million in the United States and nearly $1.4 billion worldwide, has not been replicated yet because Hollywood and most investors are still too afraid to commit to all-black projects, Godoy said — despite the demonstrated hunger for more content.
Murphy likely won’t make it rich from his Black Sands soundtrack, he acknowledged. His deal with the company calls for physical and digital revenue sharing, as well as having Black Sands pay some of his producer fees. But he can still dream.
“I’ve done a lot of traveling, man, and we’ve got artists here who can compete with anybody I’ve ever heard,” he said.
“We’ve gotten a lot of ‘nos’ over the years,” said Murphy’s manager, Tim Gelt, a former and longtime publicist for the Denver Nuggets. “But we’ve also gotten some wins, and our mindset is just to celebrate those and keep going.”
Between the dream and reality stands a world of challenges, from publicity and distribution of Murphy’s record to hitting that sweet, indefinable spot in pop-culture where art, entertainment and socially conscious ac- tivism meet. And while there are no guarantees, Murphy and his collaborators feel they’ve shown that Colorado artists can create a national-quality hip-hop release on par with Kendrick Lamar’ s “Black Panther” soundtrack. They just need the rest of the world to hearit.
“We’d be great at comic cons,” Murphy said as he rattled off ideas for publicizing the music. “But just getting recognition would be huge. At this point it matters less where you’re from — Drake could be from Australia (instead of Canada) for all we know — and it’s more about the quality of what you’re putting out. That kind of quality can come from anywhere, even Denver.”