While we can appreciate the beauty of growth in its totality, we, much like BigStar Johnson, can also appreciate how there is a humbling pain that changes you and shapes you to be a different person as you grow. Born from an uncomfortable awakening, his relationship with his father, his own journey with fatherhood, prayer, meditation, the right conversations and a supportive community, BigStar Johnson’s latest offering, Caesar, serves as an authentic pill of truth in an otherwise over aspirational cultural climate of the Hip-Hop landscape, reviving the lost art of storytelling.
From a production standpoint, Caesar narrates a proudly South African sonic voice incorporating all the various sounds you hear in East Rand, Thembisa, Soweto, Imbali and all the Kasi that colour the nation’s populace. With influences of gospel, amapiano, jazz and hip-hop interlocked into the audio experience, the cinematic cadences BigStar carries through his album is boosted through the unique tone that assimilates our sense of pride and identity in how we evolve in defining the meat and bones of a typical South African album.
After a heart-warming introduction where BigStar aptly doesn’t know whether he’s “Coming or Going”, we get to the fundamental question of the album with “Khomotsho” – “How do you deal with pain” a question BigStar asks his father, who advises him to confront it before he lays his troubles and the sacrifices he’s willing to make for his family on wax for the duration of the song. As parenthood unravels as one of the central themes on the album, on “Khomotsho”, BigStar takes the time to understand the pressures of being a father in his own right while gaining new perspectives on his father that he never received while growing up.
Filling up the second half of the parenthood conundrum is “Maphefo”, a song BigStar dedicates to his mother, who raised Johnson on her own by the indication of the lyrics. At the same time, the father was absent; despite the album being an ode to his relationship with his father and understanding him better, Johnson takes the time to appreciate his mother for the sacrifices she made for him and how those decisions to raise him to be a good man are shaping his approach to raising his daughter as best as he can.
Watch “Campaign” Here:
Addiction and mental health also come into the fold during the course of this album, with songs like “Drugs” and “Strong Enough” tackling the social ills head-on while hits like “Campaign”, “Fede Sho”, “Dumela”, and “Look Around provide a semi-conscious rouse of vice/party music that accompany those young nights we live to regret the next day just to do it all over again. Through the guise of these deep cuts in the album, we get a closer look into some of the challenges that hinder BigStar from reaching his full potential in his journey to manhood and how he’s in a constant tug of war between pleasure and pain to escape the cycle of what has been normalised as the good times.
Caesar plays into a sacred realm of consciousness without going into the often downside of preaching; Bigstar effortlessly merges with the musical palette he has been provided to bear his soul and purge his thoughts, making for a mature, open, honest and vulnerable listen. Bigstar Johnson invites his audience to evolve with him through repeated listens as he closes the album with the quote, “This is what healing sounds like, this is what growing sounds like.” Caesar is a wind-down, cruise on the highway kind of listen, every day and twice on Sunday kind of listen, and a pathway to holistic healing listen worth every bit of its estimated 49:02 minutes.
