“Black men don’t walk. They just seem to float around.”
That’s the first line on the record, and it’s the whole idea. Black Man Swag is one walk from start to finish. It opens with a strut down a sunset boulevard and ends standing in the London rain. In between, it goes back to where the walk began: a knock on the door on Eviction Day.
The record walks into the boardroom — “turn bricks into budgets” — then cuts straight back to a childhood eviction. You have to see where he started to understand the strut. The ballads close it, because once you’ve proven who you are, you’ve earned the right to be soft.
ACHIS is two men who spent their careers in rooms where they were often the only ones who looked like them — and wrote an album about how they carried themselves through it.
Two policy executives. One hip-hop album.
Off the mic, Jhay and Tai Pan have spent decades in energy policy, government and the boardroom — Duke Energy, Hitachi Energy, Shell, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Brookings Institution. Black Man Swag is what they had to say about the walk that got them there.
Their song “Corporate America (From the Hood)” asks the question the whole record is built on: “If the corner store had a CFO, would it align?”
