“I’m learning to find there’s a yin and a yang to most things.” — Citizen Cope
Citizen Cope — the legendary writer born in Memphis, Tennessee and representing Brooklyn, New York — has combined his lyrical, musical and vocal talent to create poignant, vulnerable and urgent music for two decades.
Heroin and Helicopters — his newest record in nearly seven years — is completely necessary and crafted from the heart of a man tired but turbulent. Cope is consistently inventive in his creative output — exploring his internal process while honoring humanistic reoccurring thematics. Inequality, abuse of power, un/requited love and an eternal optimism stand as pillars of Cope’s career — a prolific and consummate writer, thinker and artist.
Ahead of his upcoming acoustic tour stop in Boston, Massachusetts, Cope took the time to speak about love, authenticity and fatherhood.
ON LOVE
It’s one of our most overused words. When I say in “The River”: “…they say it’s love when it’s not” — that’s what we look at love; it’s an overused word. It’s almost like how we overuse God sometimes or we put it in this pattern of what ‘love’ is. And essentially, love is that inner peace that you hold within yourself. You strive for that. We’re all trying to evolve to get to a higher evolution — away from pettiness, away from confrontation, away from weakness. We have this immense amount of strength that we have within our individual bodies that we don’t even tap into. We use this energy for the negative things without realizing that is the destination; trying to tap into and look at how powerful our bodies are.
Just to beat our hearts, run our minds and to function our muscles; things that we can’t even explain scientifically. There’s something that’s greater — there’s something that’s doing that — than us.
Love is… not necessarily on a romantic level, because even on romantic levels we’re fooled by love as something — especially now in Western society — as an ownership. It comes down to the inner peace, the stillness. The reason why we’re born and the reason why we’re here to figure out. That’s a really difficult challenge — but it’s not. It’s really not if we look inward for a lot of our answers. Self-love — loving your self — is an overused term, too. Like all these clichés that have gone on in all our lives that we’ve heard — there is truth to them. But you have to peel back the layers and be like: well, what does that really mean?
Love does conquer all. But what is love?
We’re confused romantically. We haven’t evolved into a state where it’s not about control or change or coercion; it’s not about finding somebody that is good for you actually spiritually, mentally and physically.
It’s turned into a race toward what somebody has to offer; what you’re missing, what you’re lacking. “OK, I want a pretty girl or guy” or he might want a woman who can take care of him because he can’t take care of himself financially.
We’re just confused because we never had the conversation — the real conversation. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple months: we’ve never had the real conversation about men and women. There’s been a big facade and a big fortress around what that is. It’s like we’ve been born into this Disney-like, princess-meets-the-prince save-the-day kind of thing; a lot of fantasy involved. Because our society is built so much on those types of stories.
And so we’ve failed to have that real conversation between men and women; why is the divorce rate so crazy? Why we seem to not be able to get along? Lust and sex is part of attraction, but then when you’re together it seems like it can taper off in relationships.
I don’t think we’ve had the conversation of culture and race, because we’ve reached a point where the dollar is king. And we’ve lost a lot of ancient wisdom.
You ask anyone the most basic questions — no matter what race, economic field, economic condition, cultural background, religious background or beliefs — if you ask anyone probably five of the most simple questions, they’ll all have the same answer. If you have somebody why isn’t there a cure for cancer? Most people will say, “Well, there’s more money in not having a cure.” To go along in life and have people you know die of that disease and be suffering from it and still to this day it not being cured and to know we’ve taken that stance that it’s just the way it is.
There’s money in war; the things that we eat get us sick. It gets down to things we all universally, but we’ve become blind to.
ON FATHERHOOD
I was seeking that awareness. I’m still trying to evolve to it. And fatherhood was just something that made it more pronounced. Also just actually receiving that sort of love from a child is different from that of a wife or significant other. Although I’m reading this book called The Choice Theory that says that your relationship with your significant other should be the most important. And I’m trying to figure out if I like this book or not.
It’s a different type of love; it’s one love that leads to the other kind-of-thing. But what we end up doing with children is sometimes figuring out that they’re the most important. Then we get in this cycle and we forget about our significant other. And then it happens all the time: you split up and you’re not working on the relationship. I say working on it like working to support each other and be loving to each other and do all the positive things; not try to change somebody, not try to control them, not try to control them. One thing about this book: it says coercing. We’ve been taught that’s what it’s about.
Then you lose the relationship. And then after everything was just about your children, you’re running around trying to fall in love with a partner again! And then you fall in love with another partner and have children with them, and so therefore the question I want to know is: do you really love your children, or you’re just using them as the next stepping stone? Because then you run off and have another. I’ve seen it a million times: people run off and have another family and another family. And it doesn’t take anything away from…I’m not trying to by any means say anything bad about that, I’m just saying that relationships do fail for a reason.i
It’s like, “Well, it’s all about my children.” But then somebody will put their next significant other number one. And then they have children and then that significant other’s new children become number one. It can be a cycle.
People have a great capacity to love, but the relationships that go along with them are… essentially everyone’s trying to find some companionship and somebody to understand them.
But going back to romantic love, we’re just barking up the wrong tree a lot of times. There might be an inkling of a reason why we’re with them, but we’re so addicted to conflict that we jump into that path, because it’s something that we’re used to, unfortunately.
It goes back to how everyone says they love their children. It’s more like having a child is one of the most selfish things you can do. And people say, “Why’s that?” Well, this little thing that loves you unconditionally — especially at first — and that you’re able to feed them and take care of them and do all the things that you want to do in life.
It’s an amazing gift from the universe to have a child, but sometimes people do it in lieu of going after what they could actually do with their life and give to humanity, as well.
Because it’s easy to have children and be like, “You know what? If I had everything in the world that was given to me, I’m going to have a child and it’s just going to be about them.” But a lot of times, people don’t realize it’s about the relationship that surrounds them, as well.
And also, what you contribute so you can help raise your child. We don’t even want to raise our children to be able to survive anymore. We haven’t figured that one out.
ON WORLD TRAVEL
There’s definitely a lot of truth to (people are people). Although I’ve never been to Bali or Vietnam or India; places that don’t have some of that Western philosophy — but I think it’s corrupted a lot of those places already. So it’s hard to escape that. I wonder a lot of times, and I don’t know which one it really is: if it’s a dog-eat-dog society, survival of the fittest, get what you can get. Because I know that there’s acts of kindness; I know there’s acts of caring.
I know there’s acts of these on a daily basis individually. But as a group, it’s been a very bloody hundred-plus years throughout this world.
Power has alot to do with it. And you don’t know what you will have until you have that power. Anybody could say, “I wouldn’t do that” or “If I was a billionaire, I would do that.” And it’s like: the fact is most people wouldn’t do all the things they said they would do if they had billions of dollars; they’d probably be doing the same shit the billionaire does. That’s just the unfortunate thing to it. People are people, but people also come from different conditions and people have different beliefs.
There’s two sides to it. I’m learning to find there’s a yin and a yang to most things.
ON AUTHENTICITY
Obviously there has to be an amount of ego that comes with being an artist; an ego that you have to burn down to create. And then there’s also part of that thing like, “OK, I would like to achieve this” or “I would like to get myself out of this circumstance” when you’re thinking about it. But the actual doing or being in that artistic moment: it comes from a very genuine place. The other part about it is how do you live within the context of doing something that you feel is genuine?
With my shit: my shit is just words, lyrics and heart. Those are the powers I was given.
I don’t have a great voice. I can sing; I can hold a tune. But probably it’s not multi-octave, it doesn’t have a huge range. I’m not really pitchy, but it’s not super… I mean, it’s got character, but it’s not like a Otis Redding-type of character. When I think of a voice and singers: Gladys Knight, Robert Plant, Aaron Neville, Freddie Mercury.
My superpower’s really just heart.
It’s just putting heart and my lyrics and emotion. There’s a truth to that that people identify with. Back to the basketball analogy: some people like… it’s just the way that whatever interests (them), you know? Everyone has their own unique kind of gameplay. When Len Bias died, I thought that’s just the way really good basketball players played. And then watching tape on him, I realized that he had a completely dynamic game, a different type of game. Because that’s the way a lot of guys in D.C. played at the time — he was from the D.C. area. And he was the height of that and obviously the best. But he developed his game into something and it would’ve gotten even more amazing when he went to the pro’s.
Most professional athletes had to beat a lot of odds. I’m not really one to think, “Oh, this person was born 6’9” and could run fast and jump; he was given God’s talent.” There’s a lot more to somebody achieving at a high level of professional, whether it’s a musician or an athlete. Obviously you have to be gracious for the gifts you have, but it’s also…
God gives you talent; your gift to God is what you do with it.
There’s guys in the NFL that I know — look at Julian Edelman, Danny Amendola, even Tom Brady; people that basically work really hard. DeAndre Hopkins. There’s other guys that have their physical attributes — and sometimes they have a lot more physical attributes than those guys — and at the end of the day, they’re still playing pro football.
Same in music. It’s not enough just to want it. You got to ask yourself why you want it.
ON WORK ETHIC
I haven’t gotten my break yet, so that’s how I feel. I feel like I haven’t gotten my shot at the race. The universe has given me so many gifts, but I’ve never had a radio-chart single or… It’s crazy: The Clarence Greenwood Recordings was certified Gold — it’s been Gold for a little while — but it’s sold several hundred thousand. And there’s three songs on that album that are singles that are Gold — and not one of them charted on the Billboard Charts, on the Radio charts. Not one of them off the whole record didn’t spend one week on the Billboard 200. Which might be… I don’t know that it’s ever been done before; I’m sure there’s some artists over time that have gone Gold that have never charted — but it’s pretty amazing.
I’ve had some unfortunate situations with record companies and management and all these kinds of things; I have to take responsibility for it because I made those choices. Kind of like I got myself into it. And I’m like: OK, how do I continue doing what I want to do? How do I continue going into the studio and writing records?
The touring stuff has been almost super-detrimental at certain times of my life, one of which is now. But it’s something that keeps me able to go into the studio and all that kind of stuff.
At the end of the day, it depends what your make-up is spiritually; how much you want to give? You don’t want to give up. That’s pretty much what it is.
ON VALIDATION
That’s the ego, right? Part of it’s the ego that needs to be constantly put in check. But then part of it’s survival. And then part of it’s like absolute love for what you do. When people say, “I gotta eat” — I don’t like that term. Because there’s people that do some really foul shit under that precedent, under that term. “I gotta feed my family.” And it’s like, well, at the cost of a lot of other people, and you’re doing a lot more than feeding them.
We live in this society where as people, we want more. There’s parts in life that that works for you, and then there’s times in the life where it doesn’t work for you. Because you can only reach to a certain stature unless you realize that it’s about something else. The biggest thing I’ve learned from my musical journey when I thought it was about, “Oh, I want a record deal” or “Oh, I want to tour” or “Oh, I want to have a hit radio song”. It’s a dog-eat-dog kind of business; if you don’t sell records, you don’t get to make another record. It’s not a real nice business. Like eighty groups will get signed by a label, maybe seven of them will come out. And then out of those seven, maybe one will have a career.
When I signed with DreamWorks, they probably signed eighty to a hundred acts over the course of their thing. There’s a couple groups that had hit records, but for the most part there’s not many still standing — even if they had hits.
Going back to what I was saying about loving what you do and then being a part of something greater: as humans, we want more and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But sometimes it takes you where you got to get. And then you’re like, “Alright, well, what is my point in doing this?”
It’s not to make a bunch of money. It’s to evolve spiritually and to grow spiritually. It’s about human growth.
That’s something I came to this year. And also the realization that there have been a number of blocks in my own development — not just inside, but within me — that I needed to address. At the end of the day, I definitely know that I’ve written some songs and made some records that’ll last longer than I will, but at the end of the day it’s been about personal growth and giving to others.
If you can’t persevere on something… I mean, that’s what they say luck is: perseverance meets opportunity. Always positive things: talent, perseverance and a little bit of luck.
