DENVER — Responsive Arts & STEAM Academy FNE (RASA) students participated in a music video that was shot on Wednesday morning with counterculture hip hop artist Saxon Kincy, also known as Old Man Saxon.
The music video, which was produced by DCI Tour, was for Kincy’s song called "We Are Enough."
“It's a song I made a while ago, but it was good to have these kids, they've been singing it for, like, a couple of years. And it's good to have a music video be made for it,” Saxon said.
Watch more of our conversation with Saxon Kincy in the video player below:
Saxon, who was featured in the Netflix series Rhythm + Flow, said the song was inspired by his childhood and relationship with hip-hop.
“When I was growing up, there were songs that I would listen to in hip-hop. They were always kind of making me worry about my future. A couple of them were Ice Cube ‘Today Was a Good Day’, right? He said ‘hooked it up later, as I hit the door, thinking, will I live another 24?’ I thought, as a kid, he meant… 24 years. He just meant living to the next day. Coolio, a couple years later, Gangsta’s Paradise, he says ‘I'm 23 now, will I live to see 24 the way things are going? I don't know’,” Saxon said. “I remember being like, 8 years old and being like, Man, that's not a long time.”
Saxon said he decided he wanted to make music that helped kids think more positively about the future.
“I started to think about the importance of imagination in songwriting. And I made a lot of songs for kids, and then this one specifically is talking to children to get them to say that, ‘Hey, you don’t have to worry about your future; right now, you're enough,’” Saxon said.
First grader Nasir Jefferson said participating in the music video was fun.
"We were practicing this song... it's a song about saying we are enough, and it's true, because we are all enough," Nasir said.
Two years ago RASA 1st Grade ELA-E Teacher Angela Govig invited Saxon and professional harpist Calvin Arsenia to mentor students. They took first and fifth graders to a recording studio to record "We Are Enough" and it became the school’s theme song.
Responsive Arts & STEAM Academy FNE is a new Denver public school that focuses on arts-integrated, STEAM-based learning for diverse students. The school serves students from preschool to second grade, and students from every grade participated in the music video.
