Darian Wigfall: music of the movement

Below is an excerpt from an interview with Darian Wigfall, listen to the full audio of the interview here.

How did you become a musician?

I was introduced to music as a young kid. My dad has an amazing record collection and I used to just go down there and listen to all these amazing artists. I wrote my first rap at six years old and it was about this Black businessman named Ralph Bunche and then I was in choir in church. In High School I got into more singing and listening to music which got me into DJing. I bought turntables when I was a senior in high school and carried around these crates of records. I always loved music, but your parents tell you to be a doctor or lawyer. So I studied biology in college instead of music and I was a scientist for 7 years. I still DJ-ed and made beats. When my lab closed in 2013, I took that as a blessing in disguise to pursue music. As an undergraduate at WashU I had started my own label called Verseutility media group and through that met my current business partner Damon Davis who was running FarFetched. I eventually combined forces in FarFetched and in 2014 was unemployed and just doing music. I had some savings and didn’t want to go back to a lab, that sort of tumbled into be being able to be in Ferguson and start a tutoring program. Damon and I decided that one person needed to do activism and the other needed to do Farfetched because we had both dropped the ball on Farfetched and it was starting to show. Since Damon already working on a documentary we decided that I would run FarFetched and he would go on the road and do that. I’ve become the music mogul for FarFetched and helped me get my current job at KDHX.

What is the intersection between music (or the arts) and activism?

It’s all summed up by this quote from Cornel West who said that “artist’s are the vanguard of any movement” and I truly believe that. I think that in any movement throughout history there has always some kind of art or music associated with it or that was expressing the experience of the time. A lot of times artists are the people that see what’s happening before everybody else and reflect [what they see] back to society.

Is there a specific example or project that you have in mind?

We put out a Blues-Soul album called The Revolution Has Come with Reverend Sekou and The Holy Ghost. That particular album I think captures what happened in Ferguson. I think of songs like Curtis Mayfield “People Get Ready” or Marvin Gaye “Inner City Blues”. I feel like those kind of songs made people think about what was going on at the time. Even though there was a lot of activism in the 60’s those songs reached the masses in a way that activist’s couldn’t. Activists tend to be radical and far ahead of what people want to do at that point of time, but music can build that bridge in between.

What are some areas that you feel activists need more support?

Activists always need more money. We also need more people to listen. A lot of times when an activist speaks up, because of the nature of them being sort of polarizing or controversial, people are automatically defensive. If you sit down and listen to what they’re saying, even pick it apart, they’re not asking for anything that anyone else doesn’t already want. It may just be a little bit more forceful because we need this done now. We’ve been denied this for many many years and I don’t have time to be nice anymore. We’re not asking for anything other than human rights.

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Darian Wigfall is the event coordinator at KDHX, radio host on Thursday’s from 7–9pm, Director of Operations for the music collective FarFetched, author of a series of children’s books, a DJ, and an activist.

Darian runs a couple of discussion groups that people can join such as:

• Heal the Divide, a grassroots place for people to unpack their lived experience with race
• A men’s group that unpacks patriarchy and sexism in collaboration with Safe Connections

Support’s Darian’s work by subscribing to FarFetched and check out their latest album Prologue VII.