Made You A Mix
Weekly Virtual Mix Tape: February 7th, 2025
We're celebrating the upcoming 5th anniversary of the Weekly Virtual Mix Tape at Red Chuck Productions!
For nearly half a decade, we've been bringing you collections of great music from near and far, from artists on stages large and small. Now it's time for Justin to step aside and hand over the reins to a few of those artists and friends.
To celebrate, we've invited a series of guests curators to share some favorites tunes of their own. We'll be checking in with past Anywhere The Needle Drops guests and old friends of Red Chuck Productions!
rebel noire of rebel noire & the accomplices is jumping in on the fun!
rebel noire and the accomplices are mixologists of music, blending jazz, R&B/soul, rock and a hint of hip hop influences for a distinct evocative sound. Together, they create original songs exploring themes of power, resistance, and the complex textures of human love. Check out their latest, LOVEVOLVE, on Bandcamp. They're teaming up with the Elkhart County Symphony for an epic event, rebelSYMPHnoire on May 18th! Check out info on that and more at the links below.
rebel's playlist is a love letter to music and art. Find the playlists on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, & YouTube. See rebel's thoughts below:
LOVE, NOIRE – A Playlist
There are certain tasks that inadvertently bring back really good memories. Ones that got buried with time and age. Being asked to curate a playlist for Red Chuck Productions was one of those tasks. The joy I had after saying yes quickly became elation to the tune of me submitting my selections way earlier than I thought I would — a miracle in and of itself.
Back in the day, a rebel was notorious for making mixtapes. Back in the day, this was also waaaaay more painstaking than the cool kids who have only streamed music can fathom. I still have the box of tapes — yes, actual cassette tapes — that I made while sitting next to the radio, pressing record and pause over and over — not only over hours or days, but over weeeeks at a time. Back then, you had to write down the songs you already recorded, have ideas for the songs you wanted to capture, and be ready to leap like Flash Gordon to hit record when the song came on the radio. In an ideal world, your friend might have the songs you wanted on their tape (or CD when things really got advanced) so you could copy it to your collection. Creating this playlist brought back that feeling of deep satisfaction of getting the right song in the right order with the right vibe and the right theme: but a heck of a lot faster and without the workout.
Because I’m also a bit of a nerd, I asked Justin if I could not only share the playlist itself, but also offer a breakdown of my choices. That led to this two part narrative: 1) The Big Picture and 2) The Nitty Gritty, for all y’all who want to get all up in the weeds. Please note: It’s all Justin’s fault for how long this thing is.
The Big Picture: So why “LOVE, NOIRE”?
For several months, I’ve had more trouble than usual listening to mainstream radio. To me, it feels harder than ever to tell the “love songs” apart from other songs, especially those about violence, within the R&B, Hip Hop and Rap genres I enjoy so much. If I like you, I want to beat you. If I want to talk to you, I’m gonna slide. If I love you, it’s an addiction. If I want you around, it’s to hit it. The metaphors for love proliferating sound systems these days, feels synonymous with everything but. I kept asking myself: What does it mean when 99.99% of what is easily accessible to this generation’s ear are songs about my people begging each other to stay, cheating on each other when they do, “smacking” each other, and associating romance not with joyful desire but with pain, apathy and miuse. Where are the songs about Black people, treating each other’s hearts with tenderness, valuing each other’s souls, seeing each other as precious Beings worthy of adoration and awe? Where are the songs where love brings peace to your core and is rich with mutual cherishing of each other’s minds, spirits, emotions and melanated flesh and bones?
To be clear, I know that these “lemme fuck you up” songs have existed for a long time. They were around when I was a kid and before. But I also remember when you could catch Boyz II Men on the same dial as LL Cool J and Six Mix A Lot. And a couple stations over, you could find Luther and Marvin trading spots. There was a time when you could get a more well-rounded picture than the constant barrage of the single Black Love = Black Pain that we have now.
Pulling together LOVE, NOIRE gave me an opportunity to find some answers to the question: Where are the healthy/healthier Black love songs? It also gave me a chance to expand on the theme of my and the accomplices’ latest EP, LOVEVOLVE. As the name suggests, that project explores love and its evolution through its complexities: from two people being “just out of reach” to an awakening of self to a love letter of self and Black community. Toward the end of the last track on the EP, “Black Make Stars,” I wrote and sang in earnest, “I want Black Love!”—and I really mean this from the depths of my soul. I move in the desire for Black Love, not only in the Love I am giving myself more fully and the Love I have for US in a world where all things darker are feared. But I also move in a desire for the Black agape and eros love I want for my actual life. I’ve said it before that what I write as an artist is attached to my experiences and that is no less the case in that sentence.
And so, LOVE, NOIRE the playlist starts with “Black Make Stars”. And if you listen to the playlist the whole way through and on repeat, it creates a circle with “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun” by Rotary Connection with Minnie Ripperton. This nod brings me to the second part of the narrative breakdown: The Nitty Gritty. Keep reading if you like bunny trails and rabbit holes and spoilers :)
The Nitty Gritty: Selection and Flow
If you’re into seeing what you notice about someone else’s playlist without any advance warnings, I beg of you—please, do not pass this sentence! Otherwise, I carefully curated the flow and selection to have the following features:
1. Songs that relate Black Love to cosmic/sky themes especially through the first four songs and circling back to the end.
2. Songs that tell a loose story from “wanting Black Love” to discovering it to cherishing it to zooming back out to Blackness as beautiful and cosmic.
3. Artists who are known for some of the most recognizable love songs — D’Angelo, Musiq Soulchild, Bilal, The Isley Brothers — while showcasing love songs people wouldn’t usually select from their catalogs. This allowed me to:
4. (Re)Introduce and celebrate their relatively odd love songs as a subtle insistence that Black Love is more than stereo-typical. It is also Afrofuturist, intergalactic, weird and good.
5. Have a mix of past and present voices from Stevie Wonder to Mos Def.
6. I also made it my mission to include a non-English track specifically from the African continent, the roots of not only Black Love and music but of all music, and went with a favorite from Blxckie, with beautiful lyrics like, “Your spirit is your own… Hey, I'm saying I won't find another one like you.”
7. And because it’s a playlist about Love I made sure to include two tracks from me and the accomplices with hopes they reach new audiences.
If you listen closely to each song and between songs, you’ll catch some sweet nuances that make me smile every time I listen to this playlist! There’s a move from “Ain’t no dark like mine” repeated in Black Make Stars to, “You are the beauty in the dark” in the second track by Mos Def. There’s the juxtaposition between “I think beauty’s overrated” in “Ah Yeah” by Musiq and Chrisette Michelle just before JoshButlerTV coos about “Your pretty brown, pretty brown, brown skin.” I’m a big fan of making sure there’s almost no space between songs on a playlist. So when there is that teeny little break, know that they are there to signal a shift in tempo and a new chapter in that loose overall story the playlist creates.
I could go on and on (and on) about all the subtleties. That’s just like me: almost everything I do is layered and handled with intention. But instead, I’ll close by saying I had the BEST time pulling LOVE, NOIRE together for fun — and to satisfy my need for something more than what I hear on the airwaves and elsewhere: that Black Love must be toxic, that Black Love must be damaging, that Black Love must be deeply unsatisfying, that Black Love is annihilation of our partners, our communities and ourselves. It isn’t.
I feel more joy than I expected from the opportunity to put these ten tracks together — and from listening to the playlist, which I do now, almost every day. I offer it for your ears with hope that it will also open your imagination and make you smile.
So here it is, from me to you,
Love, Noire
links:
Facebook: @rebelnoire
Instagram: @rebel.noire
YouTube: @rebelnoirexaccomplices
The Red Chuck Weekly Virtual Mix Tape playlists are a collection of ten songs I've been listening to this week, crossing genre, era, and taste. No themes, just the tunes I've been sticking in my ears lately.
Available on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, & YouTube.
Made You A Mix is a weekly virtual mix tape playlist (available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, & YouTube) of ten songs I've been listening to this week, crossing genre, era, and taste.
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