“I don’t know if it feels like it’s been one year or 30,” laughs James Dukes, aka Nemo, aka IMAKEMADBEATS, or just MAD, the producer/composer/entrepreneur who founded UNAPOLOGETIC. While he’s more prone to looking forward than backward, this summer is prompting thoughts of a more historical nature as the grassroots music, media, and apparel collective celebrates its first decade. “Some days it feels like I’ve been doing this since the ’80s, but other days, it feels like we just got started, you know?”
Either way, the days and years are going to be toasted most heartily this Saturday, August 16th, at the free event simply titled UNAPOLOGETIC.10, hosted at Memphis Made Brewing Co. from 5 to 10 p.m. It’s sure to be big, with a list of sponsors as long as your arm (including the city of Memphis), but what actually will go down is more to be discovered than announced. The collective’s statement on the event says only to “Expect the unexpected. Pop-ups. Performances. Games. Burning things.” But, given that the group now has over a dozen performers in their stable, there will surely be music.
In the case of Unapologetic, the more appropriate word might be “musics,” plural. Rarely has any label or collective stretched so far in so many directions, from hip-hop to neo-soul to folk rock. The global reach of the group thus prompts me to ask MAD, “If there was a book about the first decade of Unapologetic, how many chapters would there be and where would the chapter breaks fall?” And with a sly grin, MAD begins to answer …
Chapter One: The First Three
When MAD moved back to Memphis after building his career as a producer/engineer in New York, he had to learn the Bluff City landscape all over again. “Chapter One would be the six months leading up to Unapologetic, so it would probably start at the end of 2014,” he says. “That’s when I met Kid Maestro, not knowing who he was, but being impressed by him immediately. And at the same time, maybe a few weeks before that, in February, Cameron Bethany reaches out to me and says he wants me to produce a song for him. All of that happened in a three or four month span, and that really gave me the confidence to be like, ‘I have to build something here.’”
Chapter Two: Culture Creation
“Chapter Two would be from 2015 up to 2018, which was a time of culture creation. Bringing in AWFM in 2016 lit one of the biggest bombs inside of Unapologetic. Before then, we had Cameron Bethany as an artist, the silkiest, most enchanting singer you’ll ever hear. Adding AWFM was like adding, you know, Old Dirty Bastard, multiplied by Sticky Fingaz from Onyx, you know what I’m saying? So I had told Kid, ‘I need a rapper, one that will do anything and say anything, who will naturally make you uncomfortable with how authentic he is.’ A couple weeks later, Kid came back and told me he had found him. He’d seen some dude rapping on top of a chair who called himself A Weirdo From Memphis.”
A few one-off sessions with AWFM followed. And, as MAD says, “Now, if I’m interested in you, I don’t knock on your door. I kind of just let time tell me the truth. You know, character over everything. I want to see who and what you are over time.
“So when AWFM called me and said, ‘Hey, I want to record an EP there,’ I’m looking at Kid Maestro again, like, ‘You see, this guy keeps coming back, right? Yo, man, why don’t you two just lock in for the summer.’ And they did, and at the end of the summer, Kid and AWFM had done, like, 60 or 70 songs. I said to AWFM, ‘Hey, man, you wanna be part of Unapologetic? And he said yes. We took a photo of that moment. When AWFM joined Unapologetic, it created the North and the South Pole. Cameron was the North Pole, and I could literally create every scheme for AWFM by just inversing whatever I would do with Cameron, right? And there was further development of the culture of Unapologetic, with critical members joining like CmaJor, Aaron James, PreauXX, and Cat Patton, who created our visual aesthetic. And we were building Dirty Socks Studios [in two rooms in MAD’s home].”
Chapter Three: The Rise
“Chapter Three, at the end of 2018 and throughout 2019, I call that ‘The Rise.’ Our visibility changed trajectory to a steeper north,” says MAD. Indeed, that’s when Unapologetic appeared on the cover of the Memphis Flyer. “We were running around doing crazy stuff. The Red Show, my TEDx talk, the Main Street/Mane Street petition, the Unapologetic Youth Scholarship. It was the era of turning up Unapologetic Garments and our merchandise releases. Everything just kind of went upward.”
Chapter Four: Turmoil
“Chapter Four would be ‘Turmoil,’” says MAD of an era when he faced some debilitating health issues. “2020 was just dedicated to, like, ‘Can I hold a cup?’” he recalls. “But also Kid being elevated in leadership, when I made him president. So he was already in place, and he held us down [during MAD’s illness]. I had a whole year to figure out what the hell I was doing. And in 2021 I had a relapse, and then that put me into a deeper depression. But also, you know, 2022 was the height of the Orange Mound Tower development, and being featured in The New York Times. We threw huge celebrations on the tower grounds. So there was a sense of, like, ‘Okay, if we can just get through this, there are some other things working in our favor.’”
Chapter Five: Outerspace
“Chapter Five would be moving into Outerspace here,” he says, as we sit in the fantastical Afrofuturist alien décor of Unapologetic’s custom-made studios. “It was in June of 2022,” MAD recalls, savoring the moment. “We were completely out of my home, and it also began a new era of talent: Nubia Yasin, Eillo, now Uni’q. There have been new brand partnerships, a different company structure, and all of that is affecting how and what we’re doing creatively, like making movies. When we moved in here, we changed from being a label to being a storytelling label.” A case in point: MAD’s multimedia album, WANDS, and its planetarium premiere.
Having brought us up to the present, MAD reflects on what comes next, sensing a page turning just over the horizon. “I think we’re still in Chapter Five,” he muses. “In fact, I think we’re ending it. A lot of the things that we pulled off this year are going to get to work in our favor,” he adds with a faraway look in his eyes. “I think at the start of next year, we’ll be in Chapter Six.”