Descrizione
Shall Not Fade welcome the France based artist Jaymie Silk to the family with his EP ‘The
Legend of Jack Johnson’’.
As a true modern nomad, born in France to an Italian mother and a father from West Africa,
as a French and Canadian citizen, Jaymie has quickly attracted attention to his music being
immensely prolific through a number of remixes, EPs and albums.
This EP follows up on his video clip “Brain Dead”, depicting the daily life of marginalized
people, and his article for DJ Mag highlighting the relationship between racism and mental
health for a black artist in the electronic music scene. Following a year 2020 marked by
social movements, the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, the
discussions around racism, the place of Black people and POC in the electronic music scene
and the cultural appropriation, for Jaymie, Jack Johnson was to be the theme of this new
opus.
Jack Johnson became the first African American to be able to compete against white men,
and to win the world heavyweight boxing title between 1908 and 1915, in a country where
segregation was strongly present, where interracial love were forbidden and black people
were hanged daily. Based on period recordings by Jack Johnson, interviews with
Mohammed Ali and radio broadcasts, Jaymie recounts the life of the boxer as he explores
club rhythms mixing breakbeat and 808 (Knock You Down) and sounds reminiscent of late
1910s jazz, as in the track Jack Johnson, remixed by Byron The Aquarius. The B side
approaches the life of the boxer under a more melancholic aspect with the song Illegal Love,
evoking the illegality of interracial marriages, and the track Unforgivable Blackness, where
Jaymie lets himself sing on guitar samples supported by tribal percussions that have made
his musical trademark.
