Words by Art Jefferson
Photography by Jan Wagner
Birth…life…resurrection without death. Who is truly the alchemist of identity? What is belonging? Polish-born but raised in the concrete jungle, New York City. Educated in the most illmatic of boroughs, Queens – the place where “stars are born”, fostering emcees that had to lyrically fight it out with titans in the Bronx. The borough of tribes, mobbs, and a trio that wore three striped sneakers and commanded the world to walk this way. Long days and nights of reasoning, cyphers, understanding. Walking the trails shoveled by Beats, Nuyorican wordsmiths, The Last Poets of a never dying breed, reborn in every generation. I am. Prepped to be one of the best deliverers of the word. Macro-lensed vision, razor tongue, painting pictures of the most beautiful and grim whilst constantly building ideological towers, even through the slow chipping of reality’s teeth. What doesn’t kill makes one stronger. The stronger one gets, the more killers keep gunning. And escapism is only a detour around the longer, shell ridden streets of life’s cynicism. Stand firm. Documentation through the medium of music, underground rooting, blossoming above the soil. Sharing stages with the likes of giants. Another chapter written. These words are meant to travel. NYC imprinted, Berlin re-rooted. Cultural exchanges, the crafting of the new and now. Family extensions. Heaven is on earth. Listening to angels sing of protection. The story continues.
Birth…life…resurrection without death. I will always be. I will never be the same. Who am I? Love. Humility. Balance. Born Lukasz Polowczyk. Born human.
You’ve mentioned that this album is a letter to those who are close to you. Would you say that it is also introspective as much as observational?
Aint About Me – This is actually something that only occurred to me after I had sent out the master to a few heads from my inner circle, family and friends. It’s a really personal record that cuts to the bone! With stories that I mined directly from my life, moving across time, sometimes back to places and spaces that I’ve long ago abandoned. So, hearing it through the ears of the people who know me really well made me aware of the fact that they can read between the lines, and what might sound like a metaphor to some, will be grounded in facts for them. Making this record took roughly 5 months, the whole recording and production, but the spiritual work that informs it is easily clocking in at about 12 years.
With the track ‘Happiness Is A Long Equation’, the words can be interpreted as a conversation between you and God. Perhaps it’s a profound understanding that this idea of God is within, therefore maybe this is just a long, overdue conversation with yourself. How do you see the correlation between the two, or is there?
Aint About Me – That’s an interesting take on it, thank you. I don’t know where these songs come from. The act of writing them is spontaneous, they just come or I let the words arrange themselves, so I don’t always know, while writing and performing something, what this thing is really about. Until I hear it back and sit on it for a while.
The wild thing about this particular song is that while recording it I felt like I was somehow speaking to a lot of dear friends of mine, whom I haven’t seen in ages, some of them for many years or even decades! And the week after I had recorded it, my childhood best friend, CAGEY aka Reggie Reggie, had passed away. So now this song is about him. With his passing I’ve come to realise how precious these connections we have people really are, and how relentless and ruthless time can be. I know it’s a cliche already, when people say: don’t wait till tomorrow with something! But it’s true! Because I didn’t check in with him, often enough, I fell for the oldest trick in the book: that there is always a later! I didn’t regret anything in my life, but his passing is a regret.
What you mentioned with this being about God, though, there is a line in there where I say something to the effect of “I don’t believe in that word, but this right here – meaning this experience and this world – this is it!” That’s how I see life. It’s a fucking miracle. It’s mind blowing! The fact that it is, and that we are. And that we’re on this blue rock riding around a gigantic ball of fire. You really don’t need any entertainment to get your mind blown if you start to see life like this!
Being a byproduct of NYC, can you talk about how the city has and continues to manifest in your art regardless of where you are located?
Aint About Me – New York raised me! Everything that I know about life is rooted in some experience that I’ve had there. Synchronicity, the energetic responsiveness of life – I learned all of that there. It’s so electric that place, so intense! Or at least, it used to be. The hustle, the magick of perpetual self-re-invention. Dealing with the eclecticism of life. The rawness of it all. Obviously, how I experience music is also thoroughly informed by New York. And rooted in 90s Hip Hop and that Lyricist Lounge bubble that followed it. I got to experience Hip Hop as a culture and a spiritual practice, foremost! I wasn’t consuming it. I was hitting up cyphers, going to the Black August events, Rock Steady reunionst. If you can survive in New York, on the street, not by living in some safe bubble, but being out and about, eating it all up, dealing with the elements head on, you’re good! You’re good for life! Your instincts will be sharp and your love bottomless!
This is a two part question: Is desire the devil of human nature? Also, is the idea that desire is a form of suffering simply a leash to control our own victim of it or can we reverse that idea and look at desire as a motivational tool?
Aint About Me – That’s a tough one! I think you would be better off asking the Dalai Lama about this! (laughter). What I can say from my observations is that there is a huge disconnect between what we think of and how we see and experience reality and what reality truly is. Language is already a problem, it distorts that which it tries to emulate. So our experience of reality is somehow rooted in illusion by default.
As far as desire is concerned, I think we should be weary of where that desire comes from. Is it rooted in your biology or in culture or was it planted in you by advertising or some pop-cultural messaging in smuggled through the subtext. If you can figure out where a desire comes from, you can choose to indulge in it or not, and that implies some level of freedom. Otherwise, you might doing things and pursuing things that you were programmed to pursue, and didn’t want or need, in the first place.
Our culture is full of ideas about what we should be, one of them is follow your dreams, right? Become who you want to be. But most of the time that just translates to get a good job and spend the money on stuff which is being sold to you. What I love about meditation is that it’s a tool that allows you to put your desires, your motivations, your personal beliefs under a microscope. It allows you to verify them, so that you can keep what’s truly yours and edit out what’s been forced on you in some way.
What I’ve been really fascinated by in recent years is this idea in Buddhism of the “suchness” of things, that everything at least formally, is its own unique thing. That there is something very specific about every single thing in this world, which makes it different from every other thing in the world. This applies to people, as well. And I think figuring this out and also accepting who you are is a rather worthy direction to be taken in life. It all goes back to the Oracle of Delphi: “know thyself.” It’s a fucking bottomless well, and exploring it is perpetual ecstasy.
Is there a space of beauty that exists even whilst trapped in the darkest of moments?
Aint About Me – I think there’s a beauty in everything, even in some of the darkest spaces/places. However, a lot of the times you’ll only see it in hindsight. Some experiences are too overwhelming and sometimes you don’t have the psycho-emotional resilience or the sense of perspective, to see it, because you’re going through something so overwhelming. Depression is definitely like that! If you’re really depressed, you’re basically drowning. You are paralysed. You are off-line for the world. You are inhabiting the life in negative, as in the reverse, the absence of vitality. However, if you are blessed to know how to work through depression, you will eventually get to the other side! You will turn this darkness into gold, and start to live a fulfilling life. Along the way, you might discover your spirituality, unravel your personal history and maybe come to some sense of wholeness or resolution. The hardest, darkest bits of my life were definitely my greatest teachers, as ruthless and brutal as they were. Thanks to them I came out a better human. The lessons that I’ve learned through them are literally in my bones now, for life, they cannot be reversed or overwritten. My sense of empathy has been amplified, because now I understand what others are going through, you know, the real shit. This stuff is what makes you a three-dimensional human being.
Is losing one’s mind truly the ultimate freedom or is it a defeat by normality?
Aint About Me – That’s a good one! I don’t know! I wouldn’t want to generalise, but for me, personally, whether it was the experiences with psychedelics when I was younger – taking acid is literally like losing your mind – or the continuous practice of meditation, they shake up the foundation of yourself ie. the matrix of ideas that you have about life and yourself. They destroy them and, as a consequence, bring you a bit closer to raw reality and the true nature of yourself. If you’re not attached to your ideas about life, if you’re agile intellectually, if you’re open to change, if you’re about exploration, if you embrace the unknown – I think you get to live a more fulfilling life. You make more space for others, you adapt to this constant onslaught of change quicker. You’re more free, definitely! And it all starts with the realisation that I am not what I think I am and neither is this world.
Revolution in its simplistic meaning is just change. Many people struggle to participate in the act of revolution of the self. Are expectations sometimes placed too high for a collective change or is true revolution not necessarily a voluntary act but the force of circumstance?
Aint About Me – I suppose that it depends on how you define a revolution or choose to contextualise the word. On the one hand, life, history, society they’re all in constant flux. Even if you don’t do anything, change, in some way, will occur regardless. Now the question is: do we have some influence over the outcome or not? Do we have free will? Entire schools of philosophy were dedicated to exploring these questions. And there is no conclusive answer or, rather, there are several and they’re contradictory. So, ultimately, it’s really down to your own personal value system and how you decide to carry yourself through life. I think taking responsibility for yourself in regards to your relationship with others and with the world, tilling your little plot daily, just doing the work – it’s a path for you to figure it out for yourself.
What are some ways that spoken word can co-exist with the technological platforms which involve short bits of text and rapidly changing ideas?
Aint About Me – I think that there is space for both reduction and maximalism in art. In Japan people write novels and poetry on their phones, to be consumed on these tiny screens, as well. But then they also had the haiku tradition like forever! So it’s not really new. Arguably, pop music is also less dense lyrically than it has ever been before, with songs reduced to these catchy phrases, which are repeated. But alongside this shift, I also see a lot of thoughtful music that is more novelistic by design.
This is also true for the media. Yes, some media are all about punchy headlines and condensed packets of information, but there are also some great long-form articles being written, as well. And they both serve a purpose, and are consumed in different ways for different reasons, and possibly at different times. Clearly, for the purposes of social media, the short form is perfect, and I have to say that love some of these new formats, like these thorough articles written in a string of hyper-condensed, interlinked tweets, with a lot of hyperlinks to other media. They’re great! But I also still enjoy The New Yorker. It’s like that whole debate about the record being dead and it all being about the singles now. From the point of view of Spotify, that might be true. But it’s not true from the point of view of Bandcamp. A single song to me is like a poem or a short movie, but a well designed full-length is a novel or a full feature. Sometimes, I only have time for a poem, but I also love to get my mind blown out by a great novel. In terms of music, I still can’t get enough of Kendrick’s Good Kid m.A.A.d. City.
When are you the most content?
Aint About Me – When I’m present. Sometimes when I meditate I reach this place where I feel my entire body inside-out. My senses are sharpened and my mind is clear. I don’t want anything then, I am just happy to be. On a day like that trees appear to be dancing, leaves sound like high hats or ride cymbals. Even with my fucked up hearing, I can hear the different sounds that different trees make. A day like this is the perfect day to take pictures, because you are really there and you really see it!
What does love look like through your eyes?
Aint About Me – Wow! That’s a tough one, family! This popular idea of romantic love, that thing died on me a looooong time ago! After a gruesome break up, as I was piecing things together, or rather piecing myself together, I realised that my mind was just filled with all these ideas that weren’t mine. That what I was looking for in relationships and what I was projecting on other people, it just wasn’t real! It was taught to me, I absorbed it from second-hand sources and held it true. I was a consumer. I was looking for the next best, without being able to enjoy what I had. I couldn’t rest in love I spent my time and, of course, the time of those with whom I was in intimate relations with then, trying to make them fit into some idea of a person / lover that I believed in at that time. No wonder every single one of these relationships failed! I suppose nowadays love means being there for someone. Seeing them and accepting them for who they really are, and nourishing and empowering them as such. Ultimately, it’s about spending a beautiful day with someone, and then waking up the next day and doing it again. Step by step. Keep it simple!
Aint About Me is the project of poet / lyricist Lukasz Polowczyk, and produced / arranged by Jan Wagner. The album features Petter Eldh, Tobias Preisig, Simon Spiess, Ramón Oliveras and Benedikt Wieland.
Aint About Me is out November 22nd digitally exclusive to Bandcamp and via a series of capsule physical editions.
As an artist Lukasz Polowczyk has shared the stage with Missy Eliott, M.I.A, El-P and more. He has worked with acts including Robot Koch, Skinnerbox, aUtOdiDakT and the list continues. Raised in Queens, NY, Lukasz Polowczyk is currently based in Berlin.
Jan Wagner is a musician, producer, engineer and artist. He released his LP Nummern in 2018 followed by Kapitel in 2020. Wagner has worked with Luke Slater, Rosa Anschütz, Judith Holofernes, Tobias Preisig, Marcel Dettmann and more.
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