Track 7 off my continuous compilation album, iMAKE GOLD!

Gotta time travel a bit. This joint was born in 2020—a year of madness, pain, protest, and profound racial reckoning. Amid COVID’s chaos, we mourned George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and carried the weight of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner’s tragedies a decade ago. Creating music felt heavy for me. Many ideas I began from that time period remain unreleased because I wasn’t in a good head space. Yet from that grief, art emerged. This is one of those records.

I made the beat back in 2018. I remember there was an album cover sitting in my studio that had the face of a black man that kept staring at me while I was working on the beat. I took it as a sign to make the beat tell the story of those eyes. I had someone in mind that I knew could bring the feel more to life. I sent a demo beat to my Playlist Retreat brother, Philly legend Rich Medina (DJ, poet, educator)—not just for his iconic voice, but I needed to hear his perspective on our fractured world. His line “Black Codes in Stealth Mode” hit me and that’s what inspired the song title. It speaks to the resilience of Black and Brown communities navigating decades of systemic trauma… and to our unbroken spirit.