Why a Lion

Three reasons, and the first one is that I was seven.

The second grade play

I played the lion in a production of The Lion and the Mouse.

That is where it starts. Not a carefully chosen brand animal — a kid cast as a lion in a school play, who liked it more than was reasonable and never fully got over it.

It is also a good fable to have been handed early. The lion is enormous and powerful and completely stuck, and the thing that gets him out is a mouse he had previously thought beneath his notice. The strength is not what saves him.

I am a Leo

A summer sign, named after the animal. I did not pick it and I am not going to pretend it means anything, but it did not exactly discourage the fixation a seven-year-old already had.

Sevens turn up a lot around this project anyway — the $72,727 fundraiser, the $7.77 can of coffee, the 07.27.27 release date. At some point you commit to the bit.

Rebel Lion spells Rebellion

Say it out loud and run it together. REBEL LION. REBELLION.

I thought that was cool as shit, and ten years later I still do. It is the kind of thing that either works instantly or does not, and there is no arguing anyone into it.

It also does something useful. A lion on its own is a pretty standard rap signifier — strength, king, crown. Hiding rebellion inside it changes what the animal is doing there. Not the king. The one causing problems.

The 2016 prosthetic

On my 26th birthday in 2016 I wore a full lion prosthetic.

It was to promote 4LE — a song and a mockumentary — and we ran a shot special at the bowling alley I worked at, Oak Hills Lanes, off Fredericksburg Road.

So: full prosthetic lion, in a bowling alley, on my birthday, to promote a mockumentary. That was the job and that was the era.

Which makes the ten thousand dollars of prosthetic lion head in the fundraiser budget less of a strange new idea than it looks. I have done it before, badly, for a fraction of the money, in a building where I was also working the shoe counter.

The plan is to do it properly once, ten years later.

And 4LE came back too

That same name is now track 8 on the album, and the discount code on a four-pack of coffee.

Almost nothing in this project is new. It is the same handful of ideas, circled for a decade, finally getting the version they deserved.