Interview: Where Poetry and Music Meet with Chucky Blk

In light of Scorpio season, Afterglow revisits an interview with a proud Scorpion. 

Written by Katie Karp

Image courtesy of Chucky Blk

A gentle light shone on Epoch on a  gray and rainy April Monday when Charles Dwain Stephens walked in, sporting a yellow cardigan he’d plucked from the back of his car. With a calm and thoughtful demeanor, the Austin rapper better known as Chucky Blk spent the latter half of his morning discussing musical and poetic influences, astrology, and Black identity over coffee.

Afterglow: I’m so happy you could join me. What’ve you been listening to lately?

Chucky Blk: I’ve been listening to a lot of Alicia Keys and D’Angelo lately. It’s comforting music because it’s the stuff I would listen to growing up. Alicia’s Keys’… Diary of Alicia Keys: all the songs are so good and it was one of her first albums. D’angelo’s Voodoo as well, it’s amazing. My favorite songs are “You Don’t Know My Name” by Alicia Keys’ and “How Does it Feel?” for D’Angelo. I just remember being a child and watching the music video of her working as a waitress at a diner. She likes this guy, but they never really meet, but she calls him in the middle of the song and kind of asks him out during a minute long interlude. 

Do you resonate with being a Scorpio?

I think I do, I like its whole mysterious, dark secretive side — the reservedness of it. When I was doing “Scorpio SZN,” I figured I should maybe learn something about astrology more than what’s on the surface level. I learned that Scorpio is actually three signs: it’s a scorpion, eagle and phoenix. So there’s this progression of getting through the underworld to get back to the light, which resonates with me.

Scorpios definitely get a bad rap, but it’s my moon sign. What are your moon and rising signs?

I’m a Capricorn moon and Sagittarius rising. It makes sense to me because I am philosophical in the sense that I like getting to the roots of things and deep thinking like a Scorpio, but I’m like a Capricorn in the sense that I work really hard. I’m generally really personable and honest (Sagittarius), so it all makes sense and that’s where I’ll believe in horoscopes. And I look at the Zodiac as a useful metaphor, like maybe — I don’t want to be too woowoo about it — but it kind of feels like being in an ocean. Where there’s water flowing in a certain way it can influence you. If you’re a strong enough swimmer, though, Mercury Retrograde may not mess you up as much as someone who’s just floundering.

Do you tend to flounder or hold your own?

It’s a mix of everything. Sometimes I’ll be good, and other times I can forget how to swim at all and sink to the bottom. It kind of depends on what mood I’m in. Some days I may have good footings and other days I won’t, but I’m trying to learn how to accept whatever state I’m in rather than beating myself up and being like, “Oh, I’m floundering right now and only yesterday I was swimming.” I don’t know if that’ll make any sense.

It does, some days I’ll be hard on myself for feeling bad or not working hard enough, but you need to be kind to yourself to pick yourself up. On another note, what came first for you: music or poetry?

It's really a mixed bag. I've always had a super intense interest in music growing up, but a lot of my training is from doing poetry actually, and my writing is one of my strongest abilities because I've put a lot of time into it. I'm always thankful for where doing poetry has taken me, and it was my first example of how to get good at something. I compare that to everything else. Like, if I want to play piano, I know the steps where I'm gonna be copying people for a really long time until I find my own voice. Also, the progression helped me with rapping, it also helped me find my own voice.

So who are some of your biggest musical influences?

Honestly, a lot of the people I came up with doing poetry with here in Austin, some of my closest friends who I'm just in the trenches with, they inspire me poetically. When it comes to music, one of my favorite rappers is R.A.P. Ferreira, who showed me that you can use big words, you can be nerdy, you can do all that and still have swag. Oh and Lupe Fiasco — the moment I got into him in early high school influenced more of my philosophy on rap than on my music or writing.

Photo courtesy of Chucky Blk Facebook

What is your philosophy on rap music?

I like the certain craftsmanship that comes with it. I feel like a wordsmith. The way a blacksmith will forge a hammer, I just do that with words. I feel like Lupe Fiasco could weave stories so well and expertly make rhyme schemes that still blow my mind now and still add a sense of his own bounce, his own cadence, his own self to it. I feel like that's something I’m lacking a lot of, or not even lacking. I just feel like my own sort of my own school of thought is that rap is important to me, and I think it's a very powerful craft that again, taps into people sitting around a fire telling stories. I think rap is the most relevant art form right now; I don't see anything moving and shaking like it is. 

In Austin, it seems like the spotlight doesn’t shine as much on rap musicians as they do on other predominantly white genres. What is it like being a Black musician in Austin?

It's like there’s fear of hip hop here in Austin. I have homies who make rap music, and they'll try to book shows, and then people, events, venues will be like we're afraid of the crowd. What do you mean when you say that? As a Black artist here in Austin, especially in hip-hop, I feel like I’m relegated to a corner. I don't play with a live band, which is a political choice for me. I could do that. I feel like rap groups are often only deemed as viable if they're playing with a live band. I played with a live band when I first started rapping, but now there's something about justice that's like a core aspect of hip hop of the MC, the DJ, or me and my sampler, to me that's like the relationship I'm trying to form. The lead singer of Nane passed away recently, and that's something that really struck me as a person because he was one of the few branching out and would always show love and respect. Generally though, the Austin community has all this drama and they don’t care what I have to say, which is why I feel like I'm relegated to my corner. So I'm gonna make my corner dope as fuck. When it pops off, they can’t say they’ve been there since the beginning.

How did you decide on the name Chucky Blk?

Oh, this is a really funny story. I just moved to Texas in 2008 from Southern Illinois in a small town Lawrenceville. I hated it. I mean, I had formative memories, but yeah I hated it. When we moved here my parents told me to join the marching band in high school, and on my first or second day, this upperclassman, a white dude, said “So your name is Charles? And your brown?” I was like, yeah. So he goes “We're calling you Charlie Brown.” The name is stuck from all of high school. It's great marketing, it’s just iconic, but I kind of hate it because I think to me that kind of represents this kind of projection of what people wanted me to be as far as like the friendly, jovial black man without like, give me room for all of my humanity. As a junior, this friend who knew how much I hated the name was like, “Yo, so I was watching this episode of Fairly Oddparents. And they were trying to make a reference to Charlie Brown, but don't have the rights to Charlie Brown. So they called him Chucky black.” And so I made my poetry name Chucky Blk.

What do you hope listeners will take away from your music? 

I'm trying to rap as closely to my emotional state as I can because a lot of times wrapping for me lets me gain clarity on a situation that I'm trying to figure out in my head. Especially now, my life is kind of everywhere, like a maelstrom and it feels like change is around every corner. I just try to be okay with it, and I just want people to feel what I'm saying. I want to make music where people listen to it once and think, oh, that's cool but on the 17th time, they're like, I'm just now getting this bar.

You can follow  Golden Days on Instagram, and stream their newest EP on Spotify and Apple Music. 

This interview has been minimally edited for clarity and length.