Small Eyez synthesizes passions with futuristic digi-jam ‘3000’
And the future has never sounded so bouncy
Though it’s been a couple of months since Emman “Small Eyez” Twe and his Digital Good Times podcast crew were featured on the cover of Creative Loafing things have hardly slowed down. The podcast — which bridges Atlanta’s tech, music and arts scenes — was the centerpiece of a CBS 46 feature earlier this week that posed the question: “Could Atlanta be the Silicon Valley of the South?”
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“You can be a rapper and a programmer, ’cause we’re doing it,” Small Eyez says in the segment. While his techie bona fides have flourished via Digital Good Times over the past two years, he still harbors passion for his first love: music. And he’s showcasing it today with a new song he’s been sitting on titled “3000,” released to coincide with the aforementioned CBS 46 interview reaching 3,000 views.
“I honestly stopped doing so much rapping, cause I put just as much intensity and craft into my lyrics as I do with everything else in my life,” Small Eyez tells me. It shows here, as he spits lyrics that synthesize his mutual interests.
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“How he sick with the raps cuz he mad verbal / Black nerd so you knowing that I’m half Urkel,” he raps at the top of a singular verse that finds him flowing extra loose yet intricate af with the wordplay over a bouncy, self-produced beat. The digital innuendo is thick, but he juxtaposes it against allusions to Africa’s exalted past — and even comic-book references and sexual predilections — that lend funky credence to his vision of the future. Midway though, he gives his nerdier credentials some grounding: “Really give two fucks about whose really cool or popular / What are you contributing? / Digitally distributing that crack rock, black rock, like Bo Diddly, oh really.”
Small Eyez has already taken time to annotate the bars on Genius, so you don’t have to.
Blerd references aside, ain’t a damn thing geeky about this “3000” jawn. Not even the digitized vocal sample Small Eyez sourced from a super-cheesy 1997 instructional video called “The Kids’ Guide to the Internet.”
“Riding on the Internet, cyberspace, set free / Riding on the Internet, hello virtual reality,” the chopped up voiceover melodically sings. No doubt it required some digital sorcery to properly flip and integrate the sample into this virtual soul-tech jam.
The song’s title is a sly nod to Andre of OutKast, but it’s more of a metaphorical reference than an homage to the artist. “Just keeping it Andre 3000 / refreshing like browsers,” Small Eyez repeats to close out the verse before an interview audio snippet of the man himself plays to clarify the meaning behind his moniker. “The ‘3000’ part is the part that looks ahead, that looks toward the future,” Andre tells the interviewer, “you know, as in the year 3000.”
That sounds about right.