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Paul:
When you feel a sense of responsibility to your community, to your art, to your family, you tend to evaluate and invest more in those things. And our guest today says, he's all in. Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call this podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. Today, Stephen Brown, aka 5th Child, talks making music in Jackson, and how a pandemic eyesore has turned into a mission in his North Jackson neighborhood.

I think the first time that I kind of encountered you in person was we both did that MPB interview about the City With Soul song that you've got a verse on. I think I told you in the studio that day, the first time I heard your verse, I choked up.

Stephen:
That is awesome.

(music)

It was a really, really cool experience when Teneia reached out to me about doing it. It was a no-brainer. She and I have gotten to work together a couple of times over the years, but anything Jackson related, or in this case Teneia related, I'm like, "Sure, let's do it."

Paul:
I want to introduce you to our audience, to people who may not know who Stephen Brown is. They may know who 5th Child is, that's your alter ego as a hip hop artist, yeah?

Stephen:
Yeah. And you know what? I used to definitely differentiate between the two, but later in life it's been a blessing to be able to kind of blend where they're both coexisting as opposed to Steve Urkel and Stephan Urkel.

Paul:
Yeah, so much of what you do kind of overlaps the music, the arts, the community itself. How did you get to where you are today? What's the Stephen Brown story in a nutshell?

Stephen:
There really isn't a brief synopsis. What I can say though is that seeds were planted really early. I come from a family of educators. I came from a household, both parents, where there was an enormous record collection. And I grew up as a younger brother, wanted to be his big brother who was about seven years older. So I got introduced to music really early. I got introduced to writing and performing in my early teens. I wouldn't say I come from a musical family. My parents weren't musically inclined in that regard. My brother was rapping at one point and me following him to different clubs to go freestyle, that really piqued my interest.

Paul:
We've talked before, and I know you consider yourself 100% a musician, a rapper, you have a great appreciation for the craft. But I also know you're a community guy and you've taken that to a whole new level with your neighbor. I'm talking about Briarwood Art Center. Tell me more about that.

Stephen:
Yeah, Briarwood Arts Center is an arts and community center in the Briarwood neighborhood in Jackson, where our main focus is helping aspiring artists become artisans. So yeah, we want to help you celebrate and display the craft, but we also want to help people learn how to turn these things into a livelihood. And part of that comes with just taking people who have a genuine curiosity and putting them around mentors and putting them in front of people who can show them that it's possible to do what you love for a living. And to do that, I have to be a living example of that.

Paul:
And I say, your neighbor, because during the pandemic, you're staring at this building across the street from your house on Briarwood and saying, "I could do something with that."

Stephen:
Yeah, it had been abandoned for years, but over the pandemic, that's when we started seeing grocery carts and people just sleeping and camping out on the awning. There was trash throughout the parking lot, and it was like, "Okay, what can we do about this?" Fortunately, there's a company that is next door to this building, that purchased the property so that they could keep it clean, keep the grass cut, keep people from trashing it. Once they acquired it, they put it up for lease.

I was walking through the neighborhood picking up trash as I normally did, and I saw the For Lease sign. I was like, "Well, let me just swing for the fence. Let me just call and see. I've never had a brick and mortar business before, but let me just see what they would want." Had a conversation with them. Had a conversation with my family. And even in this dilapidated state when we first did the walkthrough and there was rust and mold and old refrigerators and ceiling tiles falling in and insulation all over the floor, but I could already see the possibilities. I was like, "Oh, this can be here and this can be here. And if we put this here," my wheels are already turning. So it's been great to see it take shape.

Paul:
I know you mentioned the seed planting metaphor earlier, but what you were doing is literally planting seeds at Briarwood Arts Center. You've got plant classes, but you are impacting and investing in the lives of young people in this community.

Stephen:
You know who I don't remember? My high school biology teacher. You know who I do remember though? My kindergarten teacher. My first grade teacher. My mom taught kindergarten for 41 years and I always asked her why would she never have wanted to teach older kids? And she was like, "Well, with me teaching kindergarten, I'm their introduction to education. I'm able to set the foundation for them. That's important to me to get in that ground level and help shape their perception of how they could possibly view education from here on out." And so I think that there are a lot of amazing venues in the city and organizations in place to help people display their art and just exhibit their expertise, but I wanted to make sure that we had a space where beginners and people who were afraid to even show people the sketch that they did, had a place where they could come and learn in a judgment free environment how to grow.

Paul:
What a mission. I mean, to help make your community a better place because we've got problems in Jackson. But it takes people like you who say, "You know what? They got to do something. I'm 'they."'

Stephen:
Yeah, absolutely, man. I remember being in my teens and even seeing some of the troubles that Jackson had even back then in the nineties and early two thousands, and me being like, "Somebody really needs to do this. Jackson would be better if somebody did this." And then when I turned 30, I was looking around, I'm like, "Oh wait, we're the somebodies that are supposed to be doing this." So now it's time to just put our efforts where our mouth is. We don't have to ask permission. We don't need government to give us permission. We don't need any entity to allow us to curate and solve the problems of Jackson through the arts and culture.

Paul:
And what a way to solve it, because it's a lifelong education, a lifelong passion, when you are an artist. And everybody's an artist.

Stephen:
That's part of our mission. That's one of our beliefs, our core beliefs at BAC. That we believe everybody is an artist in some capacity.

Paul:
All right. So let's shift gears just a moment and talk about your music. Anything new on that front?

Stephen:
Yeah, absolutely. So I have album number 10, Juneteenth 2023 is the release date.

Paul:
Oh, so that's out now. What are some of the themes? What are some the things you're talking about in your new music?

Stephen:
I talk a lot about my son. I talk a lot about where I am now, mentally, being in this space, having somewhat a financial ... or not even just financial, but career freedom. Freedom to create the art that I want to create, just being more self-defined. There's a song, for example, called Icarus. And if you know the story of Icarus, Icarus is with his dad, Daedalus, and he's flying really close to the sun. His dad's like, "Hey, don't fly so high because the sun can melt the wax on your wings and you'll plummet." And there have been times in this process of BAC where I would think so small. If you had asked me two years ago if I was going to quit my full-time job and run an arts and community center, I'd be like, "Well, yeah, I mean one day that'd be really nice." But not the way it's taken shape and to have grown the way we have in just a short period of time, just a couple of months.
So it's about ambition. It's about my passion for my family, for my wife, my son, and it's celebratory. It is about my relationship with God and really being covered, really being anointed.

Paul:
That's Stephen Brown, 5th Child, talking to us about his Briarwood Arts Center and his latest musical project. We'll put links to the album and a chance for you to donate to the Briarwood Arts Foundation through his fund at the Community Foundation for Mississippi in the show notes.

Soul Sessions is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. You want to know more about Jackson? What in the heck is Visit Jackson anyway? Well, you can find out at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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