“I hold Deep Ellum kind of near and dear to my heart,” says Jackson, who moved to Dallas from Los Angeles to go to school in 2011. “Most people think of Deep Ellum as Bottled Blonde, Blum, the gentrification. Or they think, ‘Oh, now I don’t want to go over there cause they’re shooting over there’ or ‘I don’t want to get robbed.’ But I still see the potential. ... The Deep Ellum Block Party just happened where people were able to see the beauty of Deep Ellum again. Since I wrote the song last year, so much has happened that’s bringing Deep Ellum back to what I envisioned.”
At Creators Don’t Die (320 Regal Row) local artists host a variety of music, art and fashion events. But making his own music and performing in the local scene are what earned him as spot as a featured artist at the block party on Nov. 23.
Known already for throwing events and parties at UT-Arlington, Jackson began making music after graduation and coming to Dallas to party for a night or weekend. He and his crew at first were regulars downtown or in Uptown, but he eventually found his creative home in Deep Ellum, which welcomed Jackson as an artist.
“I was doing the real estate thing, the corporate thing, but I was like, nah, this isn’t really what I want to do,” he says. “I had a home studio I built, started producing and then kind of engineering for homies out there in school that were rapping. But then I started rapping myself. When it was time to perform, I found a scene in Deep Ellum and found a group of people, like, they’re super creative like us, there’s no dress code to get in and there were open mics.
“That was my introduction to it — I’m seeing live art. I’m seeing just the whole,” he says. “The artists performing too. My music was super lyrical, and they were also lyrical, and that was different than what was going on the radio, like the boogie music and all that. And then we all dressed alike too. They were just hipsters and I was a hipster, too, so I was like, wow, what is this place? I never even heard of Deep Ellum. From there, I just never left.”
Jackson became known around Deep Ellum after that for throwing events, DJing and hosting, and eventually throwing underground concerts for larger names like Playboi Carti and Lul Uzi Vert.
His recent track, “Deep Ellum,” released Nov. 29, brings the listener out for a night in the neighborhood. Jackson narrates the journey like a movie, telling the story of a night out from start to finish.
“After a fun night in Deep Ellum, the hook just kept ringing in my head for whatever reason and I just kind of chronicled what really happened in real life,” he says. “You know, you park in Deep Ellum. You go to the 7-Eleven. Then I tried to get into Blum, and these are things I chronicled in the song: ‘Hit the 7-Eleven and get me some juice / Pull up a deuce then we’re off to the moon.’
“I couldn’t get into Blum because dress code, then that night there was a show at Ruins and they always let me in at Ruins, so I’m like: ‘Go where you’re celebrated / not where you're tolerated.’”
“Deep Ellum” enters the mind and perspective of a visitor to Dallas. As an artist, introducing someone new to the Deep Ellum scene brought about a new light to the experience he’d had in his backyard.
“In that night there was a girl with us who’d never been to Deep Ellum at all, so it was super surreal to her,” he says. “That whole night, which is just normal for us, it was such a movie to her. She had never seen nothing like Deep Ellum before. She had a blast and nothing but great things to say about Deep Ellum. But here people have such bad things to say about it. It was one of those things that put the perspective in my head of the outside looking in.”"They were just hipsters and I was a hipster, too, so I was like, wow, what is this place? I never even heard of Deep Ellum." – Meka Jackson
tweet this
Jackson brings light to Deep Ellum's history as a refuge and mecca for Black art and culture. He says he felt a need for deeper significance, opening up the track and video with historical shots and references.
“That’s another element to it, the history of Deep Ellum, from how it first started with jazz and blues musicians and everything it’s gone through,” he says. “The accent on the name itself, the ‘country-ness’ of it. It’s really deep Elm [Street]. The early jazz musicians, they couldn’t find anywhere to play downtown so they got pushed down to deep ‘Ellum’ and made it their hub musically and artistically. It became a hub in Dallas for Black culture, Black renaissance.”
More than homage through a song, Jackson partners the track with a full-length music video, a sort of “Deep Ellum” movie.
“Before I started filming, for whatever reason I had this idea of galloping with a white horse through Deep Ellum,” Jackson says. “When I shoot a lot of my videos or visuals, it’s pretty much abstract, but I’m known for being crazy and just out the box. It just stuck with me and I wasn’t letting it go, galloping through peak Deep Ellum, Saturday night.”
Finding a white horse that could be around many people and hazards proved more difficult than expected. Once the horse owner arrived at Deep Ellum, more factors came into play, like where to park the trailer, then how to keep the 70-plus people he’d invited for the shoot from upsetting police.
“Everybody wanted to be in the shoot, and they had to park the trailer far away, so by then cops were blocking off certain areas, and they were on me, saying some shit about inciting a riot,” he says. “It was one cop in particular trying to be a dick. It almost didn’t happen, but when there’s a will there’s a way.
“Another cop was intrigued by what was going on. I had a joker out there, a Batman, then I had girls with the festival carnival wings, so they were just intrigued by what the hell this dude got going on. It’s the middle of the summer, I’m in a whole fur coat, Tims on, and they had just not seen nothing like that. He was like ‘I’ll let y’all shoot for an hour,’ and he let us rock.”
Another crazy idea Jackson had for the video was that he wanted to be dropped down into Deep Ellum by a helicopter.
“I was teasing it as a movie, because it’s technically a short film, music video-esque,” he says, “but nomadically, how we shoot it, the lyrics are going along with what I’m saying in the song, so it’s kind of like its own film with a soundtrack. Everything goes verbatim with what I say in the song. It’s like a mini movie but not a long-format movie theatrically and cinematically.”
Though the video content these days seems to get the views, it’s the sound that carries music through the time. With a hit track chanting the words, “I’m in Deep Ellum,” Jackson hopes to give the neighborhood the anthem it deserves.
“It’s a fun record for us to celebrate Deep Ellum, and I feel a resurgence where it’s getting back to its creativity, from the Deep Ellum Block Party there’s going to be a new resurgence to Deep Ellum and I’m just adding this to the pot.”
