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4:59
”Say the Name”, released on August 26, 2020, is the lead single from clipping.’s 2020 album Visions of Bodies Being Burned, the second half of the horrorcore-homage diptych which began with 2019’s There Existed An Addiction to Blood. Like the songs of the preceding album, Say the Name views the elements and themes of 90s horror films and horrorcore through an “antiracist, antipatriarchal, anticolonial” lens, to “address the struggles of our current era.”
This song refers to the urban legend of the Candyman, a hook-handed supernatural being who can be summoned by repeating his name in a mirror, originated by Clive Barker’s 1985 short story, The Forbidden, and further expounded upon in the 1990s Candyman horror film series. The official album release of Visions of Bodies Being Burned describes him as “a certain mirror-bound, bee-keeping, hook-handed former-slave/urban legend," all aspects of which are referenced throughout the song.
In the Candyman story, the eponymous character was a black painter, who has a child with a white woman and is subsequently lynched by her father. Here, clipping. expertly retells this story of racial violence and interracial love.
William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about Candyman. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.”
Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it’s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That’s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there’s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, Candyman already does that for you. It’s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.”
From the Apple Music Track-By-Track
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