The Episode:
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The Story:
I started writing a song for Juan Galt’s documentary series about freedom-loving expatriates in Acapulco. I wrote a bunch of verses, a few beats and a few hooks, but nothing really came out right. I asked Juan and he gave me a few concepts, laying out his vision for the song – the idea of people escaping an oppressive regrime, and the parallels to Galt’s Gulch, the refugee for productive people from Ayn Rand’s famous novel “Atlas Shrugged”.
These ideas simmered away in my mind, and in the next few days, while I was out walking, a simple hook bubbled to the surface: “I’m sailing in on a sloop on a Pacific wind/Waiting to start my life again/I don’t know much, y pues, yo no se mucho/Pero, yo se que si voy yendo a Acapulco…” I recorded it on a voice note on my phone. I felt elation, and instantly I knew that I was onto a good thing. After that, it came down to putting in the hard work to write verses which lead to the inevitable and potent conclusion.
When I posted the song in the Anarchapulco group on Facebook, Jeff Berwick heard the song and almost immediately asked me to perform at the event. I said yes, though I didn’t really know what I was going to do. The last time I had done anything resembling a performance was one year before, at Anarchapulco 2015, when Rob Hustle called for MCs to come from the crowd, and I jumped up and spat eight bars with intensity and conviction.
So I spent the next couple of weeks going through some old tracks, digging through audios to find some instrumentals from years ago, to see if I could put together a short set. This is that set.
Many thanks to Dan Dicks of Press For Truth and Doug Scribner of Watchmybit for providing the footage.
The Links:
Don’t Hold Dollars (Q.E.) on YouTube