DAVID MILLS. OUR ANCHOR.

Down to the bottom, Underneath all currents
And drop my anchor
This is where I’m staying, This is my home- The Anchor Song

Jesus died for our sins, David just died.  No better way to start than understanding our shared blackness, and its impact. All of us zebras who struggle with our American White stripes (that separate the blackness from me) know how tough it is to feel true to yourself and your art some days.  We are children of production, all touched by the Funk, David wrote about it, loved it, lived it.

Mothership Connection

More than love and life, David was able to bring the light to Funkadelic, and our funkadelic lives as reflected in his sublime portrayal of our existence in the shadows.  Easy to crank some hero music and do the happy dance.  But people didn’t watch the Wire, Kingpin, or The Corner because drug dealing and murder was attractive.  Nope, it was due in a large part to the manifested vision of our brother David, who made our lives the poetry, the art that they are, even when the judgment is thumbs down on the lifestyle, and the sentence is a fragile lifetime of material, indulgent delusion.

David never got too much, or so much that we question how real he was.  Don’t question whether success sold him out, like Snoop, Jay, or Fiddy. David loved blackness above everything else, so he plied his art in its representation.  Even to criticizing Obama whohimbe, generating mad comments and  calling us out  for being jive haters on his last blog post. If you watch or read his art, he kept it real. And it  was appreciated last, kinda like the way we eat every color tootsie pop leaving the chocolate for last, we eat the grape and the cherry first, the orange when no other color is left and the chocolate last.  David ate the chocolate first. Among another things, but that’s another story. 

THE CORNER TRAILER

David Mills had the career, no, the life we all wanted.   Props and proper recognition for FUBU (for us by us).  No disrespect but droppin dead on the set of the Nawlin’s version of the Wire, that’s poetry, as live as any verse that could be written.  David is gone, and we miss him.  When we think back, we loved him for dropping his anchor in our culture.   And making the home of his talent our experiences good and bad, foul and famous as our reality could make us.   Particularly as I am characterized as being too” insider” for America, I can realize that folk like David inspired me to talk to you, but maybe not to you all.   It is with the greatest admiration and respect that I remember Saint D Mills, what he contributed to us, about us.  God bless us, having a Genius making the bottom his home. Really. Impressed. Personally. Amen.

Bjork-The Anchor Song