Quick Q&A with Andrew Mbaruk

I ask simple questions about the difficult album, Black Squirrel: A Memoir

Q: Why is the song called Porpoise?
A: There's a lyric, "the porpoise swimming in clouds of spume," in the song, the porpoise being one of "the animals" "Andrew catalogued" "early in the game," but perhaps I'm the porpoise. The thing with poetry is it deals in difficult meanings. So, there isn't really a direct interpretation. It's not like instructions to assemble a piece of furniture or something, it's poetry.

Q: Why is the album called Black Squirrel?
A: I went to a camp in elementary school where we had to make up names for ourselves and write them on pieces of wood, mine was "Black Squirrel." But that fact isn't as important as the title's other possible meanings. It's an autobiography, but it's also poems, and it's poems more than it's autobiography. There is of course the lyric on 'Paperclip' about a squirrel, my thought is a climbing squirrel.

Q: Why is that song called Paperclip?
A: "The unconscious is structured like a paperclip" is a reference to the Lacanian dictum "the unconscious is structured like a language," and within the context of the song, I don't think it's difficult to figure out how I'm using the word paperclip. There are several things going on in that passage and it would be lame to explain it.
"...stuck together / like on a slave ship, / the unconscious is structured like a paperclip / the pages we flip"

Black Squirrel: A Memoir (prod. by me, Th’ Mole) is available to stream freely, and download for $7, at extraordinaryrap.org.