Anniversaries: Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma by Topaz Jones
Topaz Jones vanished after a viral hit and resurfaced with his dad’s funk guitar and every ugly truth about Montclair. None of it was supposed to leave home.
Montclair, New Jersey, is the kind of town where you can walk from a block with Jason Kidd’s mini-mansion to the blacker, less affluent South End and never leave the same zip code. You grow up in a place like that, you absorb two Americas before you can name either one. Topaz Jones grew up right in the middle, born George David Brandon Jones in 1993, son of Curt Jones, a funk guitarist who’d played in Slave and Aurra through the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Grandmother and her siblings had a Motown group. Mother was a Harvard scholar and a doctor. Music on one side of the house, high expectations on the other. His first concert was James Brown at Asbury Park. He was seven. Five years after Arcade, which Pitchfork called “affecting” and “the work of an empathetic writer,” and after a viral single that scared him half to death, Jones came back at 27 with Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma and basically tried to account for every year he’d been alive up to that point.
On “D.I.A.L.” (“Dying Is a Lifestyle”) he’s rapping about a school fight where he swung on someone after a cafeteria threat and got shoved through a desk. Second verse, he’s talking about missing class, the teacher failing him, Bloods pulling kids in. Then he stops rapping around it and just says it plain:
“They packaged it to sell to you
Waiting on your birthday
Practically got a cell for you
And paid for it all with your taxes.”
He’s saying somebody budgeted this. On “Who?,” Phonte gets even more specific, talking about a child born into a permanent underclass, dish soaps for bubble baths, Black businesses understaffed, odds that never add up. And Jones, on “Amphetamines,” quieter about it but no less blunt: “Why they treatin’ my skin tone like a syndrome?” He also calls out a dude’s tough-guy rap persona point blank. “You think you masculine because of rap? I know you a pacifist, it’s just an act.”
His grandmother Emma Janice Jones is on “Herringbone,” mid-cookout, talking about family. “You have a rich man’s family—you got the boy first and the girl second.” She’s on the closer, “Buggin’,” too, passing along what her own mother told her about being a good listener. And in the film, she’s telling the story of Jones’s great-great-grandfather Marshall Jones, a cotton farmer who watched a full season’s crop get washed out by rain. Jones’s father doesn’t actually speak anywhere on the album. But the funk guitar threaded through Jack Hallenbeck and Alissia Benveniste’s production? That’s him. You hear Curt Jones whether they credit him or not. “Black Tame” gets at what that fatherly presence meant without ever saying so directly. Men raised to be hunters and providers when their own fathers didn’t love them. Running through women for fun. Trying to figure out when settling down stops being a trap. “This the culture I was accustomed with/We tried adjustin’ but we couldn’t get the cuffs to fit.”
On “Mirror,” Jones admits he’d been cycling through personas for years (”gangsta, geek, or guerilla”) and none of ‘em stuck. Too pop, too polished, or too Pac in his policies, depending on who was in the room. That kind of shapeshifting wears on a person, and you can hear it on “Amphetamines” when he sings, real flat, “I’m addicted to the nostalgia, bittersweet,” then says he moved to the city and got slicker with his speech and now everybody around him is in a costume anyway. The album’s title comes off a line on “Baba 70s”—”This grown man talking/Don’t go tellin’ your momma.” Works two ways. A father telling his kid something the kid’s not supposed to repeat. And a 27-year-old putting family business on wax that was supposed to stay in the house.
In 1970, the Society for Visual Education in Chicago published a set of 26 poster-sized flashcards called the Black ABCs, photos taken at the Harold Ickes Homes, a public housing project on the Near South Side, designed to give Black kids teaching materials that actually looked like them. “A” was for “Afro.” “C” was for “Cool.” Jones found the flashcards while putting together a digital moodboard, showed them to the directing duo rubberband., and the whole thing became the skeleton of the album and a companion short film. He flipped ‘em: “A” is “Amphetamines” now, “C” is “Code-switching.” The film, shot on Kodak by Chayse Irvin (same guy who shot Lemonade), won the Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction at Sundance and picked up a special jury nod at SXSW. The New York Times bought it for Op-Docs. You don’t need the movie to understand the album. But the two together make it obvious why Jones took half a decade on this. He wasn’t just making songs. He was trying to build a whole new alphabet for where he came from.
“D.O.A.” runs about 94 seconds on this eerie electronic beat that doesn’t sound like anything else he’s ever done. Half dreamy, half jolted awake. “Sourbelts” strips down to a bare chord progression and Jones singing in this Prince-adjacent falsetto that floats above everything. “Gold” is the longest song on here, slower, Floyd Fuji filling the space. And then “Buggin’” shows up at the end on ‘90s boom-bap drums and Jones is spitting abstract, dense bars with real pen behind them. The whole closer has a different gravity to it than the rest of the album, like he’d been saving the best handwriting for the last page.
Jones had good reason to drop off the map. “Tropicana,” off Arcade, had racked up 11 million Spotify streams and it freaked him out. “I was petrified of being labeled as the ‘Tropicana’ guy,” he said later. Wouldn’t even shoot a video for it. Called his own decision “self-saboteur” behavior. “I decided not to put gas on that fire because I was afraid it would eat me alive.” What he made instead of a sequel or a cash-in was Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma—a 27-year-old going back through the fights, the cookouts, the pills, his grandmother’s kitchen, the funk guitar his father played harder when the set list finally got to something he actually cared about. All of it crammed in tight and none of it polite.