Macon Magazine

June/July 2024 | maconmagazine.com 111 INTERVIEW BY SIERRA STARK STEVENS | PHOTO BY DSTO MOORE Macon Chose Me is a photo series by DSTO Moore highlighting residents who weren't born in Macon but actively chose to move here and enjoy positively representing the community. ommy Superior – in addition to having the baddest given name I've ever heard – shreds a mean guitar, has a flame-thrower at hand, and is about as passionate about Macon's music as anyone I've met. He was so enthralled with Macon music, in fact, that he ditched New York City music's upper echelons (a father at MTV, a mother at Sony, playing with Salt-n-Pepa's daughters as a kid) to take a chance on a fulfilling life as an artist in the home of Southern Rock in 2011. Introduced to the local scene through his godfather (Macon's one and only Dean Brown), he swiftly got rock and rolling here, forming his band with Twiggs County- born Alexander Wrath. The duo's been creating as African Americana ever since, sometimes welcoming new members but always maintaining their core pas de deux. They seek to blur the lines between rock and hip hop, blending also with Japanese otaku culture through music video animations by Nigerian-American Dreamworks/ Adult Swim/Louis Vuitton animator Chibu Okere. 13 years in, and there's no stopping Superior now. 2023 brought three new singles. The latest, "Stranger Things (Remix)", features fellow Maconite Bob Lennon. Follow @aaforever on Instagram or check Spotify for updates. So, Tommy, can you tell our readers, "Why Macon?" I just saw so much fortitude in the indie scene here. It was grassroots, you know? Eclectic. Everybody was always recording. I could just hop into Starlight Studios with Rob Evans. I could record a track with Floco Torres. I could get in on a big music festival like Bragg Jam as a relatively new artist. Coming from a corporate music background, I was really attracted to that. And once I got here, I realized that when people are creating something for themselves, so o en from scratch, they become more qualified than anyone would think because they've had to learn how to do everything themselves. We had to be our own sound engineer, our own tech crew, all that stuff. And anyone would jump in and teach you, and you could help each other out like that. So when we record with people from the big city now – like in Los Angeles last year – we were playing with musicians who didn't know how to mix their own tracks or set up their studio mics. In Macon, we're in the booth, we're at the board, we're doing so much. The guys there were like, 'Wow, how do you know how to do all this?" And we said, "Well, we're from Macon." People around here take it for granted, but it's really our superpower. With a grassroots scene, you learn how to do it all. Another thing is the idea of our band: African Americana. So, it's playing on the idea that you can't have Americana without the African. You can't have Elvis without Otis Blackwell. Is it really bluegrass without any banjos, an African instrument? I'm proud we're seeing more of that these days. I can't tell you how excited I was about Beyonce's album, to see her claiming that space that has always belonged to her. If her album had dropped first, maybe Lil' Nas X would have won one of his five Grammy nominations. But Macon has a long history of people claiming who they are and what's theirs – the African in the Americana. It's melded together, and it's about more than genre. Otis Redding, Little Richard, and all these people that we revere as Macon's cultural icons – they made music that spoke to everyone and pulled from everything, and they weren't afraid to work with all kinds of people. And the Allman Brothers did that. With Little Richard and Otis Redding, they had to play the Chitlin' Circuit a lot of the time, but they were still making music for everyone. Even during segregation, they brought everyone together with the power of their music. And that's what I've always wanted – to make music to bring the world together, starting with our hometown. Tommy Sup erior M A C O N C H O S E M E T o f A f r i c a n A m e r i c a n a

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