By Karen Elliott Greisdorf

Growing up in Roxbury “character was everywhere,” explained artist Moe Pope at last month’s CreativeMornings Boston where we gathered around September’s global topic, MUSE. “If you are in the projects it’s a little bit of a box, everyone is packed in together. The music is kind of colliding. You have Latin music on your lefthand side. You’ve got the cat with the turntables playing music upstairs from you. You’ve got reggae downstairs and somewhere in between you are in there catching a little bit of the elements of everything.”

These early musical influences bleeding through the walls laid the foundation for the creative portfolio he has built today as an indie hip-hop artist, songwriter and contemporary artist.  But the neighborhood as a whole shaped him too, not just its soundtrack. “If you are from Roxbury you are like family.  You’ve been through the storm a little bit and if you are from Roxbury you know what that means.”  

Moe shared with CMBoston host Sophia Moon that his personal playlist grew when his aunts from Rockland on the South Shore would pick him up and be listening to a range of music - one played jazz like Coltrane and Miles Davis, another aunt would be playing The Smiths, The Cure, and a third would have on Marvin Gaye or Al Green.  And his uncles expanded his backseat musical education too by adding punk music into young Moe’s ear when they were the ones behind the wheel.

At 13, when “there’s lots to put your hands into as a kid,” Moe’s mom decided he should move to Rockland. “On the South Shore I only had to think about the small things that kids should worry about, not who’s been shot,” Moe remembered. “I had a pretty good life where I was like good grades, but she thought I’d get up to trouble.”

As he learned to navigate a new school and faced a culture shock, Moe discovered that the possibility of “better is a strange thing.” The early days of standing out in ways that had only blended him in before eventually gave way to teen years in which he “got Nirvana, keggers in the woods and riding my bike freely without my mom worrying what was happening to me.”

In the end, Moe says he had the best of both worlds and spending his youth in Rockland meant learning from his grandfather’s legacy of social justice work and his aunt’s legal career. “I had all these really cool elements of what it was to be brown in America during that time and we were poor and so you have to be creative.”

His creativity was also fueled by late night foreign films on PBS and he started drawing the images he saw on screen. He turned to Disney for inspiration, but when he didn’t find characters that looked like him, his Grandfather said, “Be better than Disney.”

Today Moe is heeding his grandfather’s advice across mediums. He and his recording partners The Arcitype, Christopher Talken and Jonathan Ulman, known as STLGLD, were named “Live Artist of the Year” at the 2018 Boston Music Awards. Earlier this year, they released The New Normal. As he closed out the event with the title track and another titled Action, he asked the CMBoston audience to raise peace signs high reminding us that we each have a choice to strive for peace.

Asked what he’d like his legacy to be, he replied, “Being a good dude, trying to grow, being a good dad, listening to what people taught me. At this point in my life, creating to make the world better is where I’m at.”

Karen Elliott Greisdorf partners with non-profit, educational, business & arts leaders to nurture change through photography, multimedia, writing & design. Visit her at  www.kegphotography.com