Super Empty Threw An Event. It Was Awesome.

Over the time I've been doing this music writing thing (and other things) in Durham, I've been privy to a hip-hop and/or creative community meetup or two. A kickback or three. From the de facto local hip-hop summit that Lute's Goldmouf Garage Dreamville Fest event has become over the past few years, to parties and art show openings at the erstwhile RUNAWAY store downtown before that, to the Rap Portraits screening of the Little Brother documentary, May The Lord Watch, at Carolina Theatre (and subsequent PS37 afterparty), a couple years ago. Point being, in trying to bring people together last Thursday to talk about and celebrate the culture around us, we weren't exactly discovering nuclear fission — we were doing something that had been done many times before.

Still, that context could hardly dampen the sense of joy and gratitude I felt when folks started filtering through the front door of Yours for our screening of Carolina Noise, a documentary about the sound of North Carolina hip-hop by Charlotte producer/rapper/engineer — and now, documentary filmmaker — Nigel Malone. After years of on-and-off commentary about local and regional culture, almost all of it transmitted through a screen, Super Empty was finally playing that role in a far more impactful medium: tactile, physical space.

I had planned conservatively, picking an intimate, low-capacity venue and setting the online RSVPs to 30. Days before the event, that number was expanded to 40. In the end, almost 50 people came through — from down the street in Durham, from Raleigh, or even, in the case of professor and SE contributor Tyler Bunzey, as far as Charlotte.

Amidst the reflective gallery walls and 80s/90s film ephemera of the Yours studio, a mix of faces both familiar and foreign to me caught up with friends, made new connections, and brought previously online-only relationships into the real world for the first time. Photographers, producers, rappers, journalists, visual artists — it was an almost perfect collage of people you'd want in the room for a discussion like the one we were there to have, about the sounds and the creative culture of the place we live.

If you're wondering whether we got to the bottom of the question "Does North Carolina have a sound?" by the end of the night, I think the only truthful answer is no. But this was never going to be a laser-focused investigation as much as a testament to the beautiful, reverberating effects that happen when — and only when — you actually make something, as Nigel did with Carolina Noise, that people can gather around and share the thoughts that would otherwise remain in their heads.

That applies, by the way, not only to the situations in which we're all broadly in agreement and just getting into semantics, but especially those in which we're fundamentally opposed. As a natural skeptic, I appreciated Durham rapper Jooselord's contrarian take during the Q&A — proudly flying in the face of the whole documentary's Carolina-centric premise — that regions like the Triangle and Charlotte should collab here and there, but mostly not concern themselves with one another beyond that. That I'm clearly in a different philosophical camp (*waves hands in the general direction of Super Empty as a whole*) is beside the point — it's that moment of unadorned, mildly provocative honesty that events like the Carolina Noise screening is really all about. From there, we can continue to argue and tease out what's really important and what's not. Without it, we can't do anything.

Talking to my SE colleague Jeyhoun about the event a few days later, he put it smartly and succinctly: "It feels like we didn't find the answers, but we were definitely asking all the right questions."

I don't think I could say it better than that (despite the 700 words I just spent trying to do so). It was an evening of good hangs, some hot takes, and a lot of questions. Which begs yet another one: when are we doing it again?

Ryan Cocca is the founder/editor of Super Empty, a former furniture entrepreneur, and a guy who loves throwback Durham Bulls gear. He (I) can be reached at ryan@superempty.com.