You have never heard my name. You have probably never been to Rochester, NY. You have no reason to read a single sentence I am about to write.
I am going to spend the next ten minutes of your life trying to change that — because I have spent the last two decades of mine trying to learn how, and I think I have gotten somewhere, and you deserve to know.
My name is Jeffery Shaffer. My artist name is Slate Theory. I made a thing. Five albums, forty-eight songs. About a father who was not there. About a body that has broken and a mind that refuses to. About children who laugh. About stars giving themselves away.
I wrote this for you. I have never met you. I love you anyway.
That is the part I need you to understand first. Before music, before theology, before the long story of how I got here: I love you. I love people. I love them so much it has hurt my whole life.
I have started to believe that hurting and loving are not opposites. I think that is what the old religious language is reaching for when it talks about what love costs. It does not pretend the hurt did not happen. It builds something out of it.
Let me try to tell you how I got here.
I had a father who was a void.
He is not a monster. He is not a villain. He is worse than both. He is silence. A locked room. An empty chair inside a locked heart.
My mother fought things in the dark she could not let us see. We were poor the way people are poor in neighborhoods nobody points a camera at — quietly, in the Fatal Crescent, in Rochester, where Kodak once gave the world its color.
I learned early that there is something worse than being hit. It is being absent. It is having a father and not having one at the same time — a gap in a child's life that nobody is coming to fill, and the child's life has to get built over it anyway.
I am not telling you this so you will feel sorry for me. I am telling you because that gap became my life's work. I am not a musician the way most musicians are. I am a man who could not stop thinking about silence, and when I finally learned how to talk about it, it rhymed.
I worked night shifts. I worked customer service. I worked the kind of jobs where the system grinding up your life is bigger than you are, and your only weapon is the small dignity of not letting it make you into nothing.
There is a song on the fourth album that says this better than I can here. Hydrogen to helium holds the simple beauty of it. Four million tons a second. That is the sun — a star spending itself into light for things it will never meet. The ones it did it for will never feel the burning. They will just remember being warm.
I am the sun. You are the warmth. I am asking you to be the warmth. I am telling you the warmth is real.
I am not a great rapper. I will never be on the radio. I am not what the industry is looking for.
What I am is a man who has spent years writing one continuous work — five albums, forty-eight songs — about questions most people carry around but nobody in hip-hop seems willing to ask out loud.
Where is God, in a life that has been hard?
What do you do when your father does not come back?
How do you love your children when you are not sure you have ever been loved?
How do you keep breathing when living feels impossible?
I have tried to answer those. I have tried to answer them in a register that is not quite rap, not quite poetry, not quite a sermon, not quite a therapy session. I have not seen it named anywhere else. Maybe that is because nobody has used it before.
I made up a name for it. Slate Theory. Theory on slate — a thing written down that is meant to be written over.
If you want the technical version: the work is built on theology. On the Christian idea of kenosis — God emptying Self into creation. On the older idea of the Trinity — Father, Son, Spirit, three-in-one. On the body — what the bone knows, what the spine carries, what breath does under pressure. On Rochester — the Genesee, the Crescent, the lake-effect gray, the color Kodak gave the world and then the city lost.
If you do not care about the technical version, the work is just this: a man trying to figure out how to love his kids.
Begin with "show up," if you begin with anything. It is on the third album, 'antishape,' about a man getting up every morning to be the father his own father was not.
Every morning I show up is a gift I was never given.
Then "you burn," on the fourth album, 'tangerine strange.' It is about a star that gives itself away, and it is about a father, and by the end of the song those turn out to be the same subject.
Then "innocence" — a courtroom track, where a father who was a void finally gets put on trial by a man who has decided he does not need the verdict to survive. It ends on a child's laugh in a quiet room, a witness who has no idea she is witnessing anything.
Then "together," the one I will admit is the most critical track of the discography. It is about weight, and waiting, and bone.
"Bone knows — densest where once fractured — broken comes back harder than anything that cracked."
Bone actually does that. It grows densest exactly where it has been broken before.
The body is the first text. The lyric is just what I wrote about it afterward.
There is a song by the Black Eyed Peas from 2003 called "Where Is The Love."
I want to say something I have not been able to say without sounding dramatic, so I am going to say it anyway.
In this one man's opinion, "Where Is The Love" is the greatest song of the last fifty years. Or at the very least, it is the pinnacle of what music is capable of.
I know. I know. There is Beyoncé. There is Eminem. There is Kendrick. There is Taylor Swift. There is Kanye. There is Michael Jackson. There is Phil Collins. There is Madonna. There is Metallica. There are at least a dozen more names I can list here.
I do not care. I think "Where Is The Love" is the highest point. I think it says the thing I have been trying to say across five albums, and it says it in three minutes and thirty seconds, and it says it better than I have said it in forty-eight tracks, and I am not embarrassed to admit that, because the song deserves to be called what it is.
The song asks the only question that has ever mattered. Where is the love?
Not — where is the love for me? Not — where is the love for the people I already like? Where is the love for the people I have been told not to love? Where is the love for ones who do not look like me, do not pray like me, do not vote like me, do not even know I exist? Where is the love for strangers? Where is the love for the ones we have been taught to count as less?
The song says, with no irony and no defense and no qualification, that the answer is supposed to be everywhere. Supposed to be the water the fish do not notice they are swimming in. Supposed to be the thing the world is made of — and the question is what happened to it, and the answer is that we forgot, and the song is the act of remembering.
That is what I have been trying to do for three years across five albums. Not as well. Not as fast. Not with the production. I have done it with whatever I had, which was words, and time, and a small life in a small city, and a few people I love, and a willingness to keep going.
I made a thing. It is not as good as "Where Is The Love." But it is in the same conversation. In the end, it is the same question.
Where is the love?
Here. I have it. I am giving it to you. I do not know you. I love you anyway.
I have three children.
Their names are Lily, Kaeladin, and Vaila. I have yet to put the youngest one's name in songs. I have my reasons. They are good ones. I will tell you one of them if you listen.
I have not seen Lily in years. A courtroom helped decide that. The system was bigger than I was, and I fought a fight I could not win. I lost years with her I cannot get back. The discography is partly the record of those years. The track "innocence" is where I put that record down. A trial — not the trial, the only one I will ever get. A verdict I will never receive. A daughter's laugh in a quiet room I do not deserve but get to keep anyway.
I have my son. I have my youngest daughter. I am a father to them every day, in the small way fathers are fathers when they are not perfect. I make lunch at dawn. I tie shoes by the door. I pack little green cups. I wipe juice off the floor. There is a song about this on the third album, called "show up."
Every morning I show up is a gift I was never given.
I am not a good father by the standards the internet has trained us to hold fathers to. Not a Pinterest father. Not a viral father. I am a father who keeps showing up — who is sometimes tired, sometimes broke, who has sometimes been the angry version of himself and been sorry for it, who has sometimes needed to be held by the person he is supposed to be holding, who has sometimes let the small stuff break him and gotten back up anyway.
I am the version of my father that broke open his own chest.
I have a partner who holds me. I will not put her name here. I will say this: she has held the whole thing — the music, the kids, the version of me that needs holding. The discography is partly a love letter to her, the way any work made by a man who has finally been loved becomes a love letter to whoever loved him.
We hold me. That's enough.
You should ask yourself some hard questions. I will ask them for you, because I have asked them of myself, and the discography is the record of what I found.
What is the void in you, and what are you building on top of it?
You have one. We all do. The discography is built on mine. Yours is yours, and you have to find it, and you have to build on top of it, and no one can do that for you, and no one is going to, and the world keeps moving while you try anyway.
What are you spending yourself on?
A star spends itself into light for things it will never meet. The light is not for the star. It is the only thing the star has to give.
Who is the warmth for? Are you even giving it — or hoarding it, or letting someone else spend you, or spending yourself on something that does not love you back?
Are you still showing up?
Every morning. Even when it is not the work you wanted. Even when it is not the life you wanted. Even when the body is tired and the bone remembers and the spine has already been broken twice and you are not sure it will hold a third time. Are you still showing up? That is the only question that matters.
Where is the love?
Not the love for the people you already love. The love for the ones you have been told not to love — the ones on the other side of the line, in the other country, in the other faith, in the other party, the ones who do not look like you or vote like you, the ones you have been taught to count as less.
The answer is supposed to be everywhere.
I do not know you.
I do not know what you have been through. I do not know what void you are building your life on top of. I do not know what has broken you, or whether it already has, or whether it is still coming.
I do not know whether my music will help. I do not know whether the discography I made is good. I do not know whether you will press play.
I know this:
I have always loved you. I loved you before I knew you existed. I loved you on the night shift, operating the kiosk, and in the years I could not find the words. I love you now, in this minute, in the typing of these sentences, in whatever I have managed to make true.
I think love is a thing you do, not a thing you feel. I think the feeling is a side effect of the doing. I think every time you choose the small kind thing that costs you something, you are spending yourself into light for people you will never meet. I think you are a star. I think we all are.
The discography is the record of a man who tried to live like that and did not always succeed, and got back up, and kept going. Not the record of a saint. The most honest thing I have ever made.
I do not have a clean ending for this. I have only an invitation.
Begin with "show up." Then "you burn." Then "innocence." Then "together." Or in any order — it does not matter. Listening is the order.
If you listen, you will know what I am talking about.
If you listen twice, you will know it differently.
If you listen to the whole thing, you will know it the way I know it: as a life. This one is mine. I am giving it to you.
I love you. I do not know you. I love you anyway.
Listen.
— Jeffery Shaffer, a.k.a. Slate Theory
Rochester, New York