It’s not out of the ordinary to see people making music videos around Nashville. One telltale sign is the crew on hand, blocking off and lighting up the area they’ve secured permission to use.
That’s not at all how things were when Quez Cantrell and his videographer filmed the clip for his song “Grand Nu Opry.” They shot it guerilla-style, while rolling down Lower Broadway among the revelers and joining tourists on the backstage tour of the Grand Ole Opry House. But the most memorable scene is the one they captured on the east bank of the Cumberland River, directly downhill from Nissan Stadium.
In the song, Cantrell raps in a resolute, hard-edged Southern flow about feeling his city’s indifference to music-makers like him, who’ve spent their lives striving in the shadow of the country music machine and its powerful tourist draw. He doesn’t play guitar in the video, but he does…destroy one.
“Just put lighter fluid inside the whole thing,” he explained, at the very spot where he pulled off the stunt. “It was actually pretty hard to set on fire.”
Not easy to smash either, it turned out. He couldn’t manage on the first try.
“So the take on the video was the second smash, because whoever made that guitar, it’s sturdy.”
That burning guitar holds up as a symbol too, one that, Cantrell specified, was “supposed to make somebody uncomfortable.”
“We have to try to figure out where we stand in this land of country music,” he said, gesturing around him, the sweep of his hands taking in the honky-tonks across the river. “It’s so overwhelming, I would say, especially if it’s something that you don’t partake in. And you have to try to find those spaces that look like you or feel like you or that represent you. So really, the guitar on fire symbolized to me the frustration of a lot of people who don’t have a place here.”
Cantrell actually counts himself a country fan, noting that he recently got to meet one of his contemporary faves, Sam Hunt. While Cantrell grew up hearing Nashville’s standard narratives — the success stories about musicians who move here to pursue their dreams, and land the right industry connections and opportunities to make them happen — he knew they were incomplete. And to him, that was reason to dig into the city’s track record with Black Nashville, and excavate the stories that have been perpetually overlooked.
“I see why people are flocking here,” he said. “I even understand the science. In college, I actually minored in African-American studies, and that’s when I learned about white flight, redlining, gentrification.”
He began to develop his own perspective, informed by how Black commerce thrived along Jefferson Street until the district was disrupted by the interstate, and how the city’s concentration of historically Black colleges set it apart.
“All of these things probably would have made me feel more empowered being in this place that is predominantly white, and being Black,” he reflected. “Coming from the inner city, coming from poverty, to see everything around you thriving and [you’re watching] from this place of struggle, it puts something in your heart that doesn’t align with it.”
It was grief, to be sure, but combined with a desire to see change in Nashville, the home he chose to return to after college.
“I love this city, but I don’t love the opportunities that it brings people that looks like me.”
Over the last decade, Cantrell’s been working to build a career utilizing his computer science degree.
Though he wrote lyrics at home as a kid and freestyled in the school lunch room, he didn’t put himself out there as a rapper until he was a grown man dealing with profound loss. “When my brother passed in 2019, the first verse of ‘The Black Today,’ I actually rapped that at his funeral in front of everybody. So that’s the first time that everybody got to see me in that light.”
As a kid, Cantrell played on sports teams with a guy who went on to become a hometown hip-hop hero, known as Petty. And Petty’s one of the first people who hired Cantrell to do music-adjacent work, building and maintaining his artist website. And one of the first to encourage Cantrell to make his own music.
Cantrell’s independently released a pair EPs. But he’s the rare rapper who’s not interested in fleshing out a persona that’s distinct from how he presents himself IRL. “My rap name is my actual name,” he pointed out. “So it’s like I’m standing in front of this as myself. It wouldn’t make sense for me to rap about a life that isn’t mine or my experience.”
Cantrell’s first full-length album, New Is Never Easy, is on the way, delayed by the sort of logistical challenges that plague many self-sufficient artists. It features numerous guest verses from fellow Nashville rappers that he looks up to — not only Petty, but Gee Slab and Starlito too — and beats from producers based all over, including one based in the UK who reached out to Cantrell after learning of him from a roundup I wrote for NPR Music.
“Grand Nu Opry” will be on there, a statement number. But on several other tracks, Cantrell taps into his inner dialogue.
“I felt like I had gotten tied up in the weeds of trying to promote change here, and it was making me bitter,” he said. “And I see the city’s moving forward and it’s moving on, and where do we fit in it? That made me turn internally to myself.”
But it’s not like he’s going to stop thinking about his community. The people he’s lost to natural and unnatural causes. The ones who are still very much here. He carries their needs, desires and ambitions next to his own. He’s not just planning for the launch of an album, but a nonprofit to mentor local youth a little further down the line.
“I feel like if my focus was all on my success up to this point, I’d probably be where I technically feel like I’m supposed to, in those ways,” he reflected. “But, I don’t want to be successful alone, you know?”