Ubi sunt - this Latin phrase meaning "Where are they?" was often used as an opening in medieval poems on mortality which sought to ask, where are they who have passed? Questioning the fate of those who had such a strong presence but have now left, and what becomes of the mighty kings, the strong, the beautiful? Where have they gone? that profound question seems embodied in the title of this album, Elysian alluding to the afterlife Elysian Fields of Greek mythology, but also the word is an adjective, the atmosphere of this record is elysian in that it's a posthumous work communing with the realm of the dead. Elysian finds Bronze Nazareth on the mic, with his late brother Kevlaar 7 providing the soundscape. The emotional core of the album is the track "You've Been There" which is a response to that question, where are they? met with the realization that you've been there the whole time.
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| album cover for Elysian (2026) by Bronze Nazareth & Kevlaar 7 (RIP) |
The new album from Bronze Nazareth, Elysian, is fully produced by his brother, the late Kevlaar 7 who passed away in December 2014 from a rare blood disorder. Since the early days of this website you're reading, we've been posting about the music of Bronze and Kevlaar. Back in 2010 upon the release of their group the Wisemen's second album, Children of a Lesser God, I interviewed the two brothers. Last summer, I spent some time with Bronze at his studio in Detroit. This was right after he dropped an album produced by longtime friend Apollo Brown, called Funeral for a Dream. In fact, Bronze, Apollo Brown, and Kevlaar 7 used to all be roommates in Detroit for some time, all three of them honing their craft as hip hop producers making beats under the same roof.
We talked about the inspiration, ideas, meaning behind each track on the album Funeral for a Dream, how much goes into a Bronze track, or a verse, or just one line. He's got a way of writing that inspires one to want to step up their writing craft. Spending time with Bronze the person, I was curious where he got his artistic gift from. He's a prolific artist who's been putting out genuine gritty blues/Motown-infused rap music for over 20 years now, including but not limited to his work as an official Wu-Tang affiliate in collabs with virtually the entire Wu-Tang family. He mentioned how he got his determined work ethic from his dad, and his artistic gift comes from his mom. (I was reminded of a line from Kevlaar who once rapped, "father was militant, mother was vigilant/ peace-maker, the Beatles she favored.") He talked about the song "Lavender" from the Funeral for a Dream album produced by Apollo, and how that song was dedicated to his mom and the inspiration she gave him, as she makes art and had always been an artist who painted with intricate details and designs in her craft. Also in talking about his family, he discussed the impact of losing his brother, who was his musical collaborator from their earliest days, even originally introducing Bronze to hip hop when they were young. I saw the mic booth in the studio, with a picture of Kev in his youth perched above the mic. Kevlaar was a leader in their group the Wisemen, the oldest member in their crew, and also a cherished son, and Bronze talked about the shared grief with his family upon having Kev taken away from them. He only had one sibling, his parents have two sons, so when Bronze on "You've Been There" laments that, "Mom and pop go, I'm alone, my blood curdles" with extra affect added, it's that sense of existential dread, after his parents go, he'll be the last one left from his family, having lost his brother. Then in the next line, "She told me, look for the Cardinals" is his mom's suggestion. The saying is usually something like: "When a cardinal appears, a loved one is near." And butterflies carry a similar feeling: "A butterfly landing near you is a soul stopping by."
He told me a story about how his mom, a light-hearted and creative person with a tendency to interpret signs in the simple things in life, how she would tell him, when he was missing Kev the most, to look for cardinals or look for butterflies, as they can be a sign that a departed loved one is nearby. Bronze would brush it off, or be like yea sure mom, until he actually did encounter a cardinal in a moment when he needed a sign, or a monarch butterfly appeared when he was wondering if Kev was nearby. Then Bronze played me this new song from his upcoming album Elysian, called "You've Been There." He was proud of this track and played it over again a few times, pausing and isolating parts of it to break down its message and what it meant to him. That was more than a year ago, but it still stands out to me as a memorable part of that day in the studio.
This song "You've Been There" is Bronze writing about his older brother Kevlaar more than a decade after he passed, having continued on with his life and career, rocked shows across the globe, ups and downs with the Wisemen group after losing Kev, and raising a family. While thru it all, still feeling that void of the loss of his brother. When looking at the broader sweep of his career path, Bronze pointed out how he went thru a seven-year period of silence after Kev passed, he couldn't write an album anymore from 2014 to 2021, seven years in the desert. He broke out of that quiet period with a trilogy of albums starting in 2021 with Bundle Raps, then Ekphrasis, and If You're Worried You Should Be. Each album features a song that pays homage to Kevlaar in some way. With Elysian it's a full album collaboration with Kevlaar. "You've Been There" is the heartbeat, the soundtrack of looking for a sign, even the slightest glimmer in the phenomena of life that Kev is out there somewhere.
As Bronze once rapped about Kev, "So if you hear me…send a note!" in the song "Heart Full of Misery"—desperate for a sign, an epiphany from the beyond. On "You've Been There" with its heartfelt sung chorus by Antonia Marquee singing "I could never see it happen thru my cluttered eye," it's that his eyes are too cluttered with tears and a lack of faith to be able to see a sign of something he could not believe (see this wrestling with faith on the tracks "Somebody better help me with my faith" and "I don't need my faith" off the Instrumental Mourning album from Bronze, released in 2016). The song "Meeting in the Clouds" (off the Funeral for a Dream album), also about Kevlaar, further adds to this context of what Bronze was going thru during this time, where he rapped: "Honestly, y'all, I just hopеd I saw a glimpse/ A flicker from a plane I could channеl in a pinch…My grind kept me grounded when my faith couldn't swim" and then "Honestly, my dog, I'm just scrambling for a sign/ A shimmer in the dark I could channel into rhyme."
In "You've Been There", Bronze's initial response to his mom's advice of "Look for the cardinals" is "I'm not concerned tho/ cause superstition just don’t fit into/ my brain's journal." He was unable to take these sayings with any kind of seriousness, but his mom is a person with spirit and levity and repeatedly insisted: the lyric in verse two goes, "Mom said butterflies is them giving a visit/ but superstition isn't enough to pique my interest." Skeptical, laughing it off, you can hear him on the song say, "Shit's crazy, but maybe." The lyric ending the first verse says "I doubt Allah would send a bird thru, then it occurred, one flew around my porch in a circle." The emphasis on "then it occurred" feels powerful here. It really did happen to him, that kind of breakthrough to the subjective world of a meaningful connection to the numinous quality underlying the objective world, spoken in something so small as a cardinal floating to your porch.
The patterns and repetitions, symmetry in the verses make for a sound structure underlying the song. Bronze has this knack for structural integrity to his songs, another great example from the Elysian album being the song "Jacob's Ladder" with three verses where the themes and structure parallel across each. On "You've Been There" the second verse structurally parallels and re-emphasizes the themes of the first one, describing the life he's lived since losing Kev, turning his visions into music that flew him out to Lisbon moving crowds, continuing to master the art form of rap, at work in the kitchen "seasoning my vision." Killing it with such precision, "the shell case it went missing." Both verses deploy metaphors of birds or butterflies. Through it all though, he's always instinctually looking for Kev, wishing he could just see his brother smile once more, "cheesing even for an intermission" and then as he ponders whether Kev has been there the whole time, watching as his kids grow up and graduate, he gets a visit from a monarch butterfly. "They graduate, you watch from inches? / huh, I doubt that heaven sent us insects/ what's next a monarch landed on my window inlet."
The album Elysian has a number of reprisal songs for example the track "All I could do (I'm Open 2)" is a sequel, being Bronze's take on a notable Kevlaar track "I'm Open", and then the song "Kevlaar 2" brings us back to the interlude track "Kevlaar" off the Ekphrasis album (a track cited as a favorite in the Hip Hop is History book by Questlove), and to my ears "You've Been There" with its composite emotional weight, the singer's evocative vocals on the chorus, and positioning on the album it feels like a return to, or a sort of redemptive reprisal of the heavy grief track, "Heart Full of Misery" off Bronze's 2022 album If You're Worried You Should Be. That song had featured Bronze's daughter singing the chorus, while here on the Elysian album right after "You've Been There" (amplified by the vocals of singer Antonia Marquee on the chorus) the next track introduces Kevlaar's son Solomon rapping as So7o or Solo 7. Kevlaar was a deep thinker and writer who often rhymed about return and resurrection, "That's life, we'll only live it twice" he said once, so it's very satisfying to hear Kevlaar return to shine on this album thru his production (and a brief speaking appearance at the end of "Kevlaar 2").
Thinking about the different songs Bronze has dedicated to Kev over the years, how the song "Heart Full of Misery" (2022) is the raw grief and mourning, then "Survivor's Vow" (2021) is the promise to live it up for Kev, and "Meeting in the Clouds" (2025) imagines talking with Kev in dreams and in paradise, and then "You've Been There" (2026) actually feels redemptive, even triumphant, with the realization that his brother is, in some way thru the music he made and thru the subtle mysteries of reality, Kev is always there. Listen close to the beat and you'll hear the sample saying "You've been there" weaved in. The whole album though it is elegiac and elysian as the title says, it also feels triumphant throughout, a celebration of the artist K7 otherwise known as King Perfect, thru manifesting his beats into triumphant songs, the best example of this might be on "House of Legends" with Salute da Kidd.
Go listen to this album, it's a serious work of art in Motown blues-infused lyrical hip hop form, then pair this with another posthumous collab between these two brothers, the 2016 album A Beautiful Soul, with Kevlaar rapping over Bronze beats. It was the RZA who spoke at the "Sunset" outro of that album, discussing how Kev, just like Ason Unique, lives on through his music and how we get to experience him thru his art.
