“Go Local” with Chris Conde

Track 9 is “Go Local,” and it features Chris Conde.

Who Conde is

An emcee and producer who came up in San Antonio and has been doing this for well over a decade. First full-length Growing Up Gay in 2019, later Engulfed in the Marvelous Decay.

He also wrote for the San Antonio Current as a staff music writer, and picked up an honorable mention for Music Writing at the 2020 Association of Alternative Newsmedia awards. He is Brooklyn-based now, with roots here.

Which makes a track called “Go Local” featuring him slightly funny, and also exactly right. Nobody has done more for this city's scene from inside and outside it at once.

We have worked together a while

I have shot music videos for Chris. This is not a feature arranged by a manager — it is a working relationship that has run for years, in both directions.

That matters for a song about going local. It would be absurd to make that record with a stranger.

The ground we share

Conde is sober, and has been open for years about using hip hop to deal with alcoholism, drug abuse and sexuality — in a genre that has historically not made much room for any of that.

I have written my own version of that here: rehab at twenty-four, a bad relapse in 2020, and a present tense I am not going to tidy up.

We landed in different places. He is sober; I still drink and do not use hard drugs. Neither of us is holding the other up as a model. But there is a specific ease in working with someone who already knows what that terrain is, and you do not have to explain the parts that are hard to explain.

On being an ally, briefly

I am going to keep this short, because allyship announced loudly tends to be about the announcer.

Chris is a queer artist who has spent a career in a genre that was openly hostile to that for a long time, and who kept going anyway. He is on my record because he is excellent and because he is my friend, and those two reasons are the whole list.

If someone has a problem with that, they have correctly identified that we would not get along. That is useful information for both of us and it costs me nothing.

And Wayne

“Go Local” also carries Wayne Holtz, who sings the chorus and has since passed.

A song about this city, with a voice from here that is not here any more, and an artist who left and never stopped being from here. That is more or less what going local actually means.