Knox Hill - Not 4 Sale (Initial Thoughts)

Just finished hearing & watching Knox's Not 4 Sale for the first time.

I liked it, it's a pretty good song. Message is clear: he is not for sale. The video was a one take of him walking on the street, mostly backwards, and interacting with a few people on his way. I liked the video - the quality was great and it was laid back and simple, but yet engaging. And positive. My taste in music tends to be a bit dark, it's nice to see positive messages like this. I was a bit nervous for him when he crossed the street on a red light, walking backwards, though 😄I hope they had a third person in the shoot that day to make sure he doesn't get hit by a car... Because Knox is looking at the camera, and the cameraman is looking through his lense at Knox, so neither of them are looking at the traffic.

I don't know where the video was shot (I'm thinking his home town? in the lyrics he says something about the place he grew up in, and gestures around himself), but it's interesting how different it looks compared to where I live. I haven't traveled much in my life, so people living in a completely different culture and country from my own is like they're living in an alternate dimension... Everything is familiar, but there's something off, you know? Obviously everything is in English and not Finnish. But then there's stuff like lighting, because the climate/weather is so different in some places, such as England or Maryland, compared to Finland. Buildings are a different size. People dress differently - Americans are a bit more flashy and colorful than Finns (in general, not necessarily in this video - I mean, I have the exact Knox Hill merch shirt that one guy is wearing on the video, for example). Traffic lights and road signs are different. There's a lot less graffities... like, we do have them, but not on busy streets like that, even the alleys. But then again, if you ignore small details, the street in the video could easily be from the center of Turku, Finland. Buildings look about the same (time period, architecture, size), there's some trees lining the streets, some shops, not too many people. Then it feels familiar, and then you look around then you start staring at a minor detail like a red light and wonder why it has a red hand instead of a red pedestrian standing still and then you realize you're not in Turku. Reminds me of playing Geoguessr with my best friend. He's really good at it.

Knox said on the live that he has submitted lyrics to Spotify and they're hopefully there. The single cover is a drawing of a pissed off looking gorilla in a hat, smoking a cigar. And there's also another cigar on his ear. Not in the ear, not behind the ear, but poking right off the lobe it's glued there or something. It's a bit confusing...

I opened the song on Spotify and there are no lyrics. Sometimes it takes them a while to add them there, so if they appear later, I'm gonna look into them then. I'm feeling a bit sick/tired, but we'll see if I can catch some of the bars and have something to say about them:

- Hes' used the same sample in all his songs recently, the male voice singing "someone could get up, yeah" or however the lyrics of that song go.

- "Product of a corner where the suburbs meet the streets" - see? to me, that's a central street in a rather big town/city (like Turku, the 6th biggest town in Finland, with about 200 000 people), but where he's from, that's not downtown, that's suburbs. So, I'm assuming the town is a lot bigger. Idk enough about the American lifestyle to comment on the bar further, though. If I think about American suburbs, I think of Desperate Housewives or Donnie Darko. Single family homes, quiet streets, white picket fences and mowed lawns. "The streets" I think of 8 Mile or Gotham (for some strange reason, even though it's a fictional city). Concrete, graffiti, trash laying around, steam coming from sewer vents, dark alleyways, dodgy looking people staring at you as you try to keep a safe distance from them. I guess the alleys with the graffiti in the video are "the streets" and the road that to me looks like a downtown road of a big town, is "the suburbs"?

- "Stay away from six and the big leagues, even though I played for teams in my mid-teens, I never tipped the lane, still I stay - me" or something like that. I don't understand all of that and I feel like googling won't take me far either 'cause I'm not 100% sure I got the lyrics right... But he's talking about how there was a lot of drug dealing and gangs and such where he grew up, and he could have ended up dealing drugs for a gang as well, but then being talented in sports saved him - he got a scholarship playing soccer, went to a university and built a different kind of life for himself. (Then he suffered a knee injury and switched to rapping.)

- "But I stayed independent and I held my soul" - Yup. Good for you, Knox. I appreciate the grind these independent artists do. When you're working with a label, you have a bunch of people, all trained in their field, who do their part of pushing your brand and your music. When you're independent, you have to do EVERYTHING or pay someone else to do it. Not just making the beat/instrumentals and the lyrics and calling it a day, you have to do the editing of the song after you've recorded it, promote the song, download the song on streaming platforms, script and film the video (not in this order though, haha), and god knows what else, I don't even know! That's A LOT. And you might not even gain a single fan for a while, make a single dime, and still if you plan to make music your career, you have to do this over and over again, and keep trusting yourself. Massive respect to Knox, Ian, Ren, Banshee, BAYBE, 000, Arankai, Nik Nocturnal, the guys from Bloodywood, Asa, Chinchilla, venbee, Peachkka, Zand, Zheani etc, EVERYONE doing this completely on their own, without a label. That's the message of this song - Knox is his own boss and does this for the love he feels for hiphop, not the fame and fortune. You can't pay him to do anything, as he doesn't work for you and is not bribable. 

- There's some bars about haters on the internet. Fuck 'em.