Soulaan Featured In Billboard, Shaderoom, etc. All In The Same Week. My Thoughts

When Billboard reached out to me for comment on Monaleo’s new single, Sexy Soulaan, I knew immediately what was at stake.  The moment a Soulaan word crosses into the mainstream, it’s not just a song title, t’s a test of comprehension.  Can the wider world hold what that word actually means without trying to dilute it?

 

Soulaan was never just a hashtag or a slogan.  It was born out of the memory of a people who refused to vanish.  In 2020, T-Roy Parks, Dwayne Coleman, and I called it forth as an ethnonym for Black Americans who are of the soil itself: Soul + Land = Soulaan.  We are the inheritors of a continuum older than any shipping manifest, older than every border line drawn to rewrite where we began.  To be Soulaan is to know that your ancestry doesn’t start with the crime it starts with the soil under your feet.

That truth has always made people uncomfortable, not because it’s radical but because it’s self-evident.  I told Billboard, “I don’t prove anymore, because once you prove, they invert your truth and debate it as if it were an opinion.”  I meant every syllable.  Proof is a ritual demanded by the guilty.  We already live the evidence.

When Music Becomes Testimony

Monaleo’s Sexy Soulaan doesn’t just slap sonically it testifies.  The Houston MC tapped into something ancestral: a way of speaking rhythm as remembrance.  The song folds Southern drawl, Hoodoo humor, and church-house wisdom into a field chant of self-possession.  “I need my reparations … these b—es my kids,” she spits, merging survival and sovereignty in one breath.

 

 

The Flag and the Frame

Yes, Monaleo did not include the Soulaan flag, saying (paraphrase) “That some dont mess with the American flag” in her Breakfast Club interview. That may be true, but in my experience in reading countless remarks on Beyonce and Soulaan using the American flag frame, many are not even Soulaan to begin with. Opinions on my ancestors creations on our soil matter not to me. That was the point of us choosing the American flag framing, because we created it and too often do we allow our creativity to be hijacked. 

 

 

The Panic of Recognition

Predictably, the backlash came fast.  Accusations of “Black supremacy.”  Think-pieces about flag misuse.  Commenters demanding to know “who gets to claim Soulaan.”  It’s an old pattern: whenever Black Americans center their own narrative, the world calls it divisive.  Whenever we name ourselves, someone demands a permit. But the noise is its own proof.  It reveals how terrified mimic systems are of an identity that doesn’t depend on them for validation.  The Soulaan idea upsets the colonial order precisely because it withdraws the need for permission.  Once you name yourself as native to the soil, empire loses its jurisdiction.

From Hashtag to Heritage

 

What makes Sexy Soulaan historic is not just its catchiness, it’s that it introduces the term into the mainstream lexicon.  It moves Soulaan from quiet study rooms and online think-threads into living sound.  When a crowd sings that word out loud, even without full understanding, they participate in a linguistic homecoming.  Every mouth that speaks it becomes an instrument of return. That’s why precision matters.  The more visibility Soulaan gains, the more tempting it becomes for institutions to sanitize it, and turn it into brand aesthetic instead of bloodline truth.  Our job now is to build context faster than the culture machine can consume it.  To make sure Soulaan remains a lineage of sovereign Amorocco soil, not a costume.

 

The End of Proof, the Beginning of Presence

We are in the age of proof fatigue.  Every historical record, every genetic study, every DNA swab has been turned into a court exhibit to decide whether Black Americans are “really from here.”  Meanwhile, the land already knows our names.  You can’t carbon-date a soul. That’s why I’ve stopped trying to convince.  Convincing is a colonial sport.  Living truth is a Soulaan practice.  The soil speaks back when you stand in it long enough.

 

Where We Go from Here

Monaleo’s song is a portal, not a period.  It signals the re-entry of Soulaan consciousness into popular art.  Other artists will follow some with sincerity, others chasing virality.  That’s inevitable.  What matters is how we guard the meaning as it travels. The conversation is no longer about who gets invited to the cookout, it’s about who remembers the recipe.

 

 

Soulaan isn’t a movement; it’s a return.  And return is always revolutionary.