Alphabet Soup: A Conversation with Topaz Jones and rubberband.

Interviews—

Dec 3, 2021

What do amphetamines, intellectual property, and Sour Belts have in common? They all correspond to a letter of the alphabet that structures the world of Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, the short-film companion to musician and filmmaker Topaz Jones’s funk-infused hip-hop album of the same name. Inspired by the Black ABCs, an educational resource created in the ’70s to give Black students a letter chart more reflective of their experiences, the film pairs letters with subjects drawn from Jones’s memories of growing up in Montclair, New Jersey, as well as insights from members of his community. The result is a propulsive and kaleidoscopic portrait of Black life composed of twenty-six vignettes that vary in length, style, and mood—including galvanizing interviews with local activists, intimate home-video footage, and whimsical and at times otherworldly scenes depicting young people hanging out in their neighborhoods.

Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, which Jones codirected with his regular collaborators Jason Sondock and Simon Davis (the directing duo known as rubberband.), is currently available on the Criterion Channel. To celebrate its premiere, I chatted with Jones, Sondock, and Davis about their approach to filmmaking and the challenges of making the project’s many moving parts cohere and sing.

How did your creative partnership begin, and what was it like for the three of you to work together?: Jones: I’ve known Simon and Jason for about ten years now. We met our first year of college and immediately began working together on creative projects. So our discussions on how to visually express the album flowed organically. When the pandemic hit, we found ourselves not only needing but wanting to think outside the box. We decided we wanted to make something more abstract that captured the spirit of the album, rather than a one-note visualization of a single song.

Davis: Often Topaz will play us his music when it’s still in its early stages, and we’re comfortable chatting about it. So we’re used to working together and kicking ideas back and forth. With Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, our intentions were aligned. We have the luxury of being able to spend a lot of time together, and because we’re all such close friends, there’s no ego involved.

The film defies easy categorization. Documentary elements come through with the interviews. Some sections are fantastical, like one in which a boy is teleported home when his curfew hits. I’m curious what you looked to for inspiration.: Sondock: Our practice isn’t particularly rooted in film. The project functions more like jazz than a regular film, in that it has a structure that allows for improvisation. But in terms of cinematic inspirations, we’re all big fans of Terence Nance and An Oversimplification of Her Beauty [2012], which changed the way I thought about what a film is supposed to look like and how it’s supposed to function on a formal level.

Davis: I feel like the film was inspired unconsciously by art we’ve encountered in our lives that’s had a formative effect on us. For example, for the section on the letter Z, Topaz shouts out the names of a few DJs from this genre of electronic music called Jersey club. A lot of these DJs played at our school dances.

Jones: With this album, I was trying to capture my own life in a bottle and resynthesize it with the spirit of my own personal zeitgeist of the late nineties and early aughts. I revisited a lot of movies and books that I loved as a child. The goal was to convey this feeling of swimming around in a hearty soup.

When did you decide you wanted to use the Black ABCs, and how did you go about reconceiving them and coming up with what word would go with each letter?: Jones: We collectively settled on using the Black ABCs early on, because we felt it was in line with the educational component we wanted the film to have. For the letters, I sat down and started thinking about the various ways that I came to understand myself outside of school. We had this enormous Google doc that we started using to brainstorm ideas. So there are a million alternate universes that could have existed for each letter. Eventually we whittled the options down when we got a better sense of the tone, energy, and flow of the film.

Sondock: Right before we started cutting the film, Topaz had to clean out his family storage unit. Serendipitously, he found a bunch of home videos, many parts of which we use in the film. We didn’t initially intend to use these videos, but they fell into our laps! I think it makes Topaz a little uncomfortable every time he watches the film, but I think that discomfort means that he pushed himself into difficult territory. The late arrival of those elements also influenced how we structured the letters.

I’m impressed by how well the film balances so many disparate elements. It swings easily from serious subjects like code-switching and intellectual property to something as playful as sour rope candy, which also feels very specific and personal.: Jones: The sour ropes come from a late-adolescent acid trip that I’ve been reckoning with ever since. I’m not sure that it comes across as an LSD scene, but I like that it’s ambiguous.

Davis: The clip that precedes “Sour Belts” is an actual iPhone video that was shot during that acid trip. We obviously don’t spell it out, but we were very attracted to this idea of blending the real and the fictional to create something totally different and abstract that nevertheless conveys a very specific feeling.

Sondock: In college I took a class called Documentary Fiction taught by Nilita Vachani, which was incredible. One day she showed us Chronicle of a Summer, and afterward she discussed a concept that resonates with me to this day, this idea that there’s always fiction in nonfiction or what we perceive as “the truth,” and there’s always an element of truth in fiction. Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma can be labeled “surreal,” but I think it’s also an honest representation of reality refracted through memory.

I was touched by the interview you conducted with your former history teacher. Did you know all the people you interviewed in the film beforehand?: Jones: Everyone I spoke to has some connection to my extended community. Keith White is my lawyer, and he also happens to be involved in grassroots activism. My history teacher was perhaps the first radical Black man I encountered in my life. Our team discovered Kaity Rodriguez. I had no idea there was a Black woman who owned her own therapy business in my hometown. It was ultimately a matter of casting a small net over a community that was right in front of me.

Can each of you talk about what you’re working on next?: Sondock: I’m working on scripts for two features, and I’ve written a pilot for a television show that is dreamlike and touches on love, which is a subject I’m sort of obsessed with.

Davis: I’m writing a feature with my brother, and I’m also in postproduction for a music video project I’ve been working on with Topaz.

Jones: I’m back in the studio working on new music and figuring out ways to build out the world that we’ve created in Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma. I’m always in the process of figuring out my place in the world and what my next calling is. I don’t know what my next big project is going to look or sound like, but for me that’s actually the most anxiety-free and exciting part of being an artist.

Alphabet Soup: A Conversation with Topaz Jones and rubberband.

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