A conversation with Benny Starr

Transcript from episode twenty five of the Good Folk podcast.

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SPENCER GEORGE: Hello, folks. My name is Spencer George and you're listening to the Good Folk Podcast. 

Just over two years ago, I returned to my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina for the summer to report on rising sea levels and the creative response by artists who were, then and now, focused on generating public understanding even in the midst of collapse. I went into the work feeling hopeless and left feeling inspired to believe in the power of community, art, resistance, and resilience in activist traditions across the Lowcountry, a place full of as much violence and oppression as beauty and history. 

Along the way, I came into contact with hip hop artist and Lowcountry native Benny Starr, who became fundamental to my environmental philosophy. As he said to me all the way back in the summer of 2021, when asked about the artist's role in responding to climate change: “Art is one of the natural predators of power. The goal of art is disruption. It is disruption that inspires joy, freedom and community. You might be able to snuff out one voice, but you can't snuff out the collective.” 

The work we do here at Good Folk—and indeed the core of what I now consider my life's work, both in this project and in my larger academic research—is to organize, unite and empower that collective even against all the odds. At the top of his website, Benny quotes James Baldwin, who writes that “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know and he must let us know that there is nothing stable under heaven.” 

Our role as artists is to reckon with the world around us, which exists in constant flux. But it is also to help us find communal roots amidst flux, something I cannot emphasize the importance of enough when it comes to climate work in the American South, which my academic research now centers around. Both Benny and I consider the South Carolina Lowcountry home, which means we both know how high it is at risk of being lost. There are times where I think it would be easier to let go, to let the water wash it all away and for us to restart in a place with less tumult, violence, and division. Of course, in America, a country founded on colonialism, escaping those legacies becomes impossible. And here again, I turned to what Benny has taught me over the years: to think of the water as a tool. Water reveals as much as it washes away. It shows us the spaces where community activism is needed most. Our work now is to return to those spaces of tension and believe in something better.

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be joined by Benny today on the podcast for a conversation about legacy, environment, and the power of creative practice. Benny’s art reflects the landscape of the Lowcountry, where Black music and Southern culture intersect with deep roots in hip hop, gospel, jazz, blues, and rock, all of which are woven with rich histories of resiliency, eliciting a quest for a higher calling in those who connect with them.

Benny’s most recent solo project, A Water Album, takes up this quest. It was recorded live with his fellow bandmates, The Four20s, at Charleston Music Hall and released on Juneteenth 2019. Following the release of A Water Album, Benny has been featured in The Oxford American’s yearly southern music issue and made history by becoming the first Hip-Hop artist to perform at Spoleto Festival USA, as well as A Water Album being named “South Carolina’s Best Album” in 2019, by the Free Times.

In 2020, Native Son, a duo of Benny Starr and harmonious singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Rodrick Cliche, was formed. Together, they are redefining what it means to be dynamic while remaining highly respected. When merging the comforting allure of Southern breakfast at Grandma’s house with the triumphant command of a revolutionary’s chant, you get the sonic resonance that their sound taunts—decadent and nourishing.

Native Son’s most recent release, “The Land,” is a rallying cry that echoes the injustices of Black Legacy Farmers at the hands of the USDA and is part of an ongoing partnership with The Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund and The Black Farmers Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign. 

As a part of the ongoing collaboration, Native Son screened “Restoration: A Concert Film” on Juneteenth 2020. In the fall, “Restoration” was also released for a limited-time viewing to coincide with the Justice for Black Farmers Act of 2020, introduced by U.S. Senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand on November 30th. To date, “Restoration” has been screened at the Pan African Film Festival, WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, Seattle Black Film Festival, Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival & Lecture Series, Nevada City Film Festival, Rhode Island Black Film Festival, Las Vegas Black Film Festival, Nice International Film Festival, and more.

The U.S. Water Alliance welcomed Benny Starr as their inaugural One Water Artist-in-Residence in October 2020. Through his 18-month residency with the Alliance, Benny worked with staff and the Alliance network to infuse arts and cultural strategies into thinking, problem-solving, and programming. He was named one of Grist’s 50 Fixers of 2021, a list that includes emerging leaders in climate, sustainability, and equity who are creating change nationwide. After serving as Senior Fellow of Arts & Culture with the U.S. Water Alliance, Benny has begun his consultancy, Watercolor Creative, which utilizes creative strategies, artistic processes, and social practice to strengthen the efficacy of arts partnerships and integration.

I’ll leave you with Benny’s own words, from his artist statement, which I think say it best: “My work is spiritual. It’s ritual, improvisation, repetition, and imperfection. It is a space for dreaming, but equally important, a space to fail, reflect, refine, and improve. And I hope that when people engage with my creations and process, it moves them to engage deeply with their creativity in everything they do.” 

Yes. Here’s to engaging deeply. I hope you enjoy this conversation. 

SPENCER GEORGE: Benny, thank you for being here and joining us. We'll have your bio at the beginning so everyone will get to hear about all of the incredible work you do and art and things that you make. You are truly just one of the coolest people. But I would love to start, since we are both people of the Carolinas, where is home to you? How do you think about the Lowcountry and your position to that? 

BENNY STARR: Home to me is Pineville, South Carolina. It's a small town in the northern part of Berkeley County, and it’s actually positioned between where Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion kind of converge. So, you know, the impact of water, growing up, whether I was conscious of it. It's always been really, really influential in that I just remember—you know, you can't drive too many miles this way or that way or another way without crossing some body of water. So that is where I call home. Pineville, South Carolina, where those two lakes in South Carolina converge. 

SG: And where are you these days? 

BS: These days, I'm in Charlotte, North Carolina, so not too far from South Carolina. I like staying close enough, but I love the South. I think I'm going to most likely always call the South my home. You know, it still allows me to get back to South Carolina. Like, you know, one to three hours back and forth, see my family, connect with friends and fellow artists.

SG: As someone who also went from South Carolina to North Carolina, I'm like, I don't want to be more than—I'm five hours from Charleston, which is where I'm from, but I don't want to be more than a six hour drive max. There’s something about when I—and I don't know if you relate to this—but sometimes I just need to see the water. Knowing that I can drive to it and see it. I can't put that feeling really into words. But I think for people who grew up around water, I realized at times when I was living in very landlocked places, how the water has always been something that I've grown up around and has always felt like home more than anything else, and not having access to it is a really disconcerting feeling, I think. When it's something that you're used to and you learn how to grow up and live with... Just like you're saying, the water is constantly moving in and out, and it's not something that is always there in the background of a lot of places, especially in the Carolina Lowcountry. It is something that you really learn to live alongside and live with. And that to me, feels like home. 

BS: Yes, Yes. I relate to that 100%. I mean, even where I live now, I live like, less than five minutes from a lake in North Carolina, Lake Wylie. I'm not really far from Lake Norman. Everything you just said I relate to greatly because I really need to be close to water. I need to feel that, growing up with that, you take it for granted sometimes. Then, as I've become an adult, I realized how much I need to be in synergy with that. So yeah, I relate to that. 

SG: When you think about water and your childhood and the work that you do now, how would you draw that line or make that connection? Because obviously water is very influential in a lot of your work and of course I want to talk about that more in depth, but thinking about the experience of growing up around water, when did it start to become something that you felt like you wanted to pull into your work? 

BS: You know what I think? I graduated high school in the Lowountry, and then I went on to USC Upstate. Did about a year and a half, kind of two years. And then I walked away from school to pursue being an artist. I started on that journey and I remained in the upstate of South Carolina for a while as that journey kept progressing and, you know, put out these projects and mixtapes and all these things and trying to build not only my profile and continue to put out quality work in South Carolina, but also trying to contribute to helping to build alongside a lot of my contemporaries an infrastructure for artists, hip hop artists, musical artists who are independent, who value staying independent for them to be able to thrive.

There came a point when I was in the upstate still maybe, after about ten years had passed. I was doing all this work alongside so many other brilliant artists who were doing that work across the state of South Carolina that I thought,I have to leave now and go back home. There's something calling me back home. There was this energy at that time in the Lowcountry, with all these new artists with different disciplines, multi-hyphenate, they were just—it was a beautiful energy happening and I felt like somehow my work wasn't done where I was from.

And once I came back to the Lowcountry, of course now climate change is staring us in the face, rising sea levels, and the way that all exacerbates already deeply entrenched inequities and injustices, and you already know who ends up suffering the most and who become displaced and who becomes victims in that process. And while I'm back in the Lowcountry, after I came back down to the Lowcountry, there was something I wanted to do. Whatever I was going to create—and I think in a way, this was the beginning of me becoming more conscious of social practice, so to speak—while I'm in this place here was now trying to be very present with it, and also trying to connect with the history that has led us to where we are presently in the way that the present and history will affect where we end up in the future. I wanted to connect with something very honest, connect with something very real, immerse myself in the community, be able to listen, be able to learn, be able to collaborate with people across different sectors—whether education, whether it was the church, whether folks in the community, other artists, activists, scientists, engineers—and create something that was honest. By living, I guess, living and creating to my highest and best use as an artist. Right? And it ended up being water. 

I had a conversation with a friend who was an educator and I was like, you know, I don't know what I need to be creating right now, but I need to be creating something. And, you know, I'm a water sign. You know, I'm a water sign. So she was like—

SG: I am too! Maybe there's a parallel now that I'm thinking about it. I'm like, all of us who work in climate work tend to often be water signs. 

BS: There you go. That's all. I did not know that you're a water sign. But she was like, you know, be like water. And I don't think she realized what she sparked, but it sparked that connection to everything that I was experiencing. If it rains for fifteen or twenty minutes, sometimes it stops traffic because people are knee deep in water. And now at that time I was living in the Lowcountry and water was going to be that centralizing theme that I could create around to live to the highest and best use and create an album or create a body of work that of course functions as music in the body of work. But the capacity for it to function as much more than that was really important. 

SG: I'm thinking about when I first met you a couple of years back, which is when I got into work in climate and climate change and sea level rise. I grew up actually outside of Lake Norman before I lived in Charleston, so we've kind of made the opposite path, which is really funny now that I'm thinking about it.

For a long time I remember thinking that the way in which everything floods in Charleston is just part of life on the coast. It had never been presented to me as anything that was a larger issue. I remember my high school campus flooding and we'd get out of school for days on end every year for hurricane season. I remember kayaking down streets that have turned into rivers and constantly having to be moving my car looking for higher ground and all of these things seeming very normal and that that was just part of life on the coast. I never stopped to think about it as these are things that are symptomatic of a larger issue.

I remember when I went to college, I was taking an ecocriticism course, and that was the first time I actually started to look at the data and it blew my mind. And I think it really ignited something to me that I was like, I spent my whole life in South Carolina not feeling like it was home and wanting to leave, and now that I've left, I'm staring down the idea that we might actually lose this place. And for a long time I think there was a part of me that was okay with that, and then I realized once it became a reality that, you know, you're looking at the data and you're saying, by 2040, my home might not exist. And realizing that that was not something I was ready to just let go. That even though—I mean, Charleston specifically is a super complicated city with a really violent past, but there are things about it that I think are worth looking at. And the question I set out when I started this research years back was, is this a place worth saving?

For people who don't know, that's how I initially got in contact with you, Benny. And I was writing for Bitter Southerner about this. It was a piece that had come out of that college course, and I later went back to Charleston and adapted it by talking to artists who actually were trying to answer some of these similar questions and think about questions like, what do we do with the city that we might lose in a region that is so complicated? To look at it right now through a Southern Studies lens, I think a lot of the country is really okay with losing the South, in ways that have not entirely sat right with me.

I, of course, want to talk about climate migration and the fact that the South faces undoubtedly the worst effects of climate change, and that's still the work I think both of us are doing. But when I talk to people who are not from the South about that, everyone's like, “Well, good luck. You know, you're all just going to have to leave.” And like, there's people who are like, okay. I think the way we see the South painted is as a not great place, and so everyone's fine to lose that. And I think what I've been grappling with for such a long time is the question of, can we lose these places? And what is lost if we do?

Which is how I got in contact with you and ended up writing this piece that, thanks to your wisdom, kind of took the shape of; can we learn to work with the water? Can we see the water is something that is capable of damage but also capable of reveal and of showing us where these cracks are, but at the same time, bringing communities together and igniting people around a common cause? Because water is a life force. And if we can learn to live with it, we could really do some amazing things with this. It's been amazing to see since the two-and-a-half years since that piece came out, I guess. Yeah, almost two years now to see the work that you've continued to do and the way this conversation has grown. 

But I am very interested in the idea that even still we see floodwater and it is happening more and more often in this place and it is something that people still think of as just an everyday effect of living on the coast. Especially with South Carolina, and Charleston County specifically, getting so many people moving there during Covid that have not lived through hurricanes. We haven't had a bad hurricane in a few years, which we're very, very lucky for. But I think it's not quite a lived reality for a lot of people and they don't see climate change the way it is playing out in the South as something that is a genuine threat.

I think your work has always put it in people's face in a way they can't look away from. But it's also not painting water as this thing we have to be afraid of; it's painting water as a tool in our quest for collective liberation. 

So that's my long history of how Bennie and I know each other and our story. But I yeah, I'm interested for sure in your experience of water, both as this tool, but also as this kind of force of fear and everyday effect, and then also how you've seen it change in the last few years, even since we've just last spoken. 

BS: Yeah. So much of what you said resonates with me. Especially over the past few years when I've had the opportunity during Covid to not—I use the word retreat, for lack of a better phrase, but to take time to actually think about and process my own experiences in life in order to decide how I feel about them and what I want to do with how I feel. What I want to create, how I'm going to use those experiences as it bleeds into or influences my work and where I consistently come back to is—there's this photo. I love John Coltrane. I'm a hip hop artist and I love hip hop and I love soul. I love this wide black canon of genius in the way that we have historically displayed it relative to our existence and positionality within this country, and the jazz artists, they’re just so deep on a level where that really appeals to me. And Coltrane has been one of those artists who's been a big influence on me or influence for me over the past few years. But he has a quote that is one of my favorite quotes from him. He talks about all the musicians being able to get closer to sources of nature so that you feel like you are in communion with the natural laws. And when you talk about working with the water and working with nature, that really resonates with me.

Over the last two years, as I've been thinking about my own life and my own experiences and where I grew up and how I've engaged with others and how I encountered the world that brings me back to this fundamental need for a shift in narrative around creativity and what creativity actually is and how we utilize it, its real function, and the role that it could have in us working together to solve these problems, not just from an innovation and collaboration standpoint, definitely those as well, but also in the way that creativity on a very foundational level is this innate need in us as human beings that we have to create. If we change, if we are willing to accept a change or shift in the definition of what creativity and creative process means. 

And by that I'm talking about—creativity is not just a thing, but a process that you engage in—an experience of this encounter with the world around you. It is an extremely or an intensely conscious human experience that thrusts you into some process to bring something new into the world about you. It’s not just a thing in a moment, but it is based on that encounter, that collision, that experience with the world around you as a conscious human being that says, Huh? This has sent me into a journey or into a process where I need to bring something new to the world of value, and that could be a new idea. That could be a new approach. That could then be creativity taking form as one of the many variations of art as we know it. That is where innovation then becomes born.

But we have to shift the importance of creativity in this work away from the way society has told us creativity functions. Like it's only for the “weird” folks or only for the extremely eccentric folks. That is a lie. That is one of the great lies. And it allows us to, in many ways, other artists or other ideas and the importance of creative process in and of itself to the end of us being able to say, just do what we tell you to do. Keep this machine going, even if we realize that this machine in and of itself is stripping us away, stripping our humanity away from us and ultimately killing us, killing so many of us, displacing so many of us and killing the planet. This world which shows us creativity, the very creativity that we mirror, the very creative process that we are.

So it brings you back to that quote about being an artist. I'm not a scientist. I'm not an engineer. You know, there are people who know a lot more than me in specific areas of concentration. But as an artist, I’m trying to live up to my highest and best use. Like Coltrane says, how does my work bring me closer to the sources of nature, that communion with natural laws, working with water? It comes back to creativity and the creative process. I know that was a lot. 

SG: No, you're speaking straight to my soul right there. Part of my creative process as I've gotten older and come back South and just learned a lot of things as an artist has really been learning that I think creativity has to come first and foremost from paying attention to the world around you. You know, I went to New York to be an artist, right? I went to be in this art world and be part of a community, and I think in a place like New York, at least for me personally, all that happened is I became so detached from the world around me and myself that I could not make art at all. I just had no idea what I was writing or saying.

I notice now that when I am writing things here, the very first thing I always do is I just sit and pay attention to the world around me and I try to be in tune with that. And I think it has to come from that—and I am someone who I really do believe that art has to be responsive to culture, and I don't think they're separate at all—but so much of that in my mind is, you know, Mary Oliver writes that attention is the beginning of devotion—

BS: I just said that quote to someone on the phone a couple day ago! I’m sorry for interrupting you. Carry on. I love that quote. 

SG: Go for it. Because I could talk about Mary Oliver all day. 

BS: That's serendipity. I literally just said that quote to someone because I saw it on the platform that I follow, this writer that I follow. God, I can't remember her name at the moment, but she is a brilliant writer and she has these daily or weekly articles that she puts out around all things creativity, all things art, all things culture. And she posted that quote. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but. Yes. Serendipitous.

SG: No, no, you're fine. Attention is the beginning. I really believe that. Let me backtrack and say that I think attention is not something that's innate to our experience as humans. I think the world and even the creative process that you're talking about kind of programs us to not pay attention, to be so worried about the output and the production, that we're not slowing down enough to really be in the process.

I think true creativity starts with that idea of attention and that leads to care and that leads to empathy. And that's where what I find so interesting, when I started doing climate work is, of course, yes, there are incredible scientists and engineers doing a lot of this, and I've now become friends with many of them and I respect them deeply. But the people I found who are doing the work first and foremost, at least in a way that was communicative to the communities it affects, were artists. And I mean, that's my master's thesis now, is how artists have kind of been the ones to take up a lot of the charge for the creative practice reflecting climate change and to be the ones who are saying, here's this data. How can we get it into the hands of the communities?

You're such an incredible example of that. I, of course, want to talk about A Water Album, and I really want to talk about your work with One Water, which is so exemplary of this exactly. But… yeah, it's really just thinking about this idea that creativity is not about the output and it's not about the process. It is, in my mind, so much more about learning to pay attention to the world around you, finding what it's trying to say to you, and doing that in community.

Because you know, we all need isolation, we need individual practice, but I think our art is made so much stronger when it is placed alongside the voices of others. And that is what really makes it into a movement, right? That's what we're seeing happen right now with climate artists across the Lowcountry. And it's a really incredible thing to witness and be even a small part of. 

BS: Yes. Yes, I agree with that 100%. It challenges the idea of who are the experts and what kind of knowledge or expertise we really value as it pertains to that. And I think especially with A Water Album, I knew I wanted to talk about—water is something incredibly important to the Lowcountry and in almost every way. And how do we talk about something that is so complex, that is equal parts life giving and equal parts terrifying in the world that we currently live in? I was very young, I was a baby when Hurricane Hugo happened. But I've always heard about the impact Hurricane Hugo had on the Lowcountry. 

The week that we recorded A Water Album, which was five years ago yesterday, September 22nd, 2018, was the last day of summer. It was a week after Hurricane Florence just dodged a direct hit of the Lowcountry. And even at that time, Hurricane Florence was three times the size of Hurricane Hugo. So it would have been a catastrophic event had it hit the Lowcountry.

How do we talk about something like water that is, again, life bringing, life giving, equal parts, scary and terrifying as we grapple with the realities of climate change. It has also shaped us culturally. You know, what we grow, the things that we eat, our spirituality and all these things, in a place that has also displaced black folk and continues to be one of the final vestiges of white supremacy that dates back for centuries. How do we do that in a way that is not just me as an artist, witness me do something, but participate in it?

When we are consciously engaging our world and consciously engaging with community and consciously engaging with history, we're able to utilize and to honor cultural touchpoints, one of them being the call and response. Like, yes, this is going to be a concert, but we're going to ground this in this contextualizing theme of water. And within that, we're going to talk about all the many streams that are born out of that. We're going to talk about love. We're going to talk about justice. We're going to talk about care. We want to talk about uncertainty in a time of uncertainty. And we're going to be very, very intentional to do it in a place that we have the right to be at. That we've always had the right to be at. Not only that, we have the right to be at a place we've actually built. A place that's culturally important to so many people who are still with us, who have already transitioned and who are yet to come… And we're going to do that together. We're going to leave room for spontaneity and improvisation. We're going to synergize amongst each other. We're going to call the spirit in to do that with each other.

And when we leave, when everyone leaves, they'll be able to remember this moment in history, but also take something with them to say, you know what? Maybe I have thought of water in this way, but maybe this moment in this communal space has given me permission to activate myself in a way that I probably wasn't able to be activated before because I have my own hierarchy of needs. And, you know, I got to make my own ends meet. But this is a collective challenge that we have to face and we can't solve it but by doing it collectively.

So I think that's for me as an artist, that was one of the things that I tried to do with A Water Album. Be very conscious of place, be very conscious of the subject matter, all the cultural elements, and still being on stage with a lot of artists who are brilliant. I'm talking about brilliant musicians and creators and lyricists and vocalists—some of which still, even at that point, had struggled being able to book shows in the city without a white proxy.

In 2018, you know, these brilliant musicians who have toured nationally and internationally and things like that can’t book shows. So I just think, it all comes back to this for me, that root of what is actually driving the problems. This route of racial capitalism ultimately, creating a profit by any means, which results in overdevelopment, which results in the exploitation of people, exploitation of people's labor, displacement of people. It discards us as human beings for profit, for wider profit margins, for profit for profit for profit. And it is stripping us of our humanity and our ability to actually be in concert, in a community, not only with each other but with nature. We're going against nature and stifling our creativity, suppressing it, depressing it. It is a part of that plan. I think we have to rage against that.