Slush Pile #6: Plato III Makes Art About Love Growing Up
Along with personal updates and travel anecdotes, I will be introducing pieces that never got published but I thought were really worth a fuck (no disrespect to editors, running a magazine is a multifaceted endeavor and most of y’all I have worked with have truly been great) . It will probably be mostly musings that are too raw to pitch but I have to put out because that’s the only thing we can do in these crazy times where the most talented half of media outlets get axed on a regular basis.
This week’s piece is a feature that I wrote on Plato III and making art about growing up in love. Big props to Donna C for the editing work.
Photo by Lora Lee
Rap Is the Art of Storytelling. Everyone Has a Love Story
Abilene, Texas-born rapper Plato III, born Ryan Silva, has made a name for himself by crafting emotionally realistic records highlighting personal growth and relationship struggles. His latest release, 2019’s 9 Love Songs, takes listeners through the cracking and mending of his six-year relationship with his college sweetheart Lora, who moved with him to LA after the pair graduated.
Seven years ago, Silva met his muse in a UTSA dorm hall. He knew her dorm mate and thought she was fly, and she noticed he asked interesting questions in class. Lora initially pegged hip-hop as ignorance and misogyny over a trap beat, but the besotted Silva was dedicated to changing her mind. Hip-hop was part of him, and he wanted her to be, too.
“We used to do this thing, called ‘hip-hop coffee shop,’ where we would go to a coffee shop at night and I would drink coffee and have her listen to hip-hop,” Silva reminisces. The first CD he played for her was Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s conscious classic, “Black Star.”
The two made their first adult life decisions together, transferring from UTSA to UT, and then moving to LA, where Silva worked delivering groceries while Lora continued her modeling career.
In LA, they learned that everybody has to grow up. Their relationship suffered growing pains, but ultimately mended like it began, through hip-hop. 9 Love Songs emerged as a result, an album with an acoustic-rap feel and presented almost like a multi-act play. Each song functions as a vignette into the hardships Silva’s relationship suffered through the last year and a half.
“It was almost like nine stages of recovery,” Silva tells me. “If you listen to the album, it’s kind of ambiguous whether he learns to love again by loving the same person or with someone new. For me, it’s the same person, which is why she comes on and sings at the end.”
While it was a difficult choice for Silva to put the jagged parts of his journey down on wax following a long period of healing and recovery in the relationship, he ultimately decided to revisit the dark places that inspired his songs, as he’s always believed that the best songs lie in vulnerability.
Silva’s vulnerability in this EP lies in its specificity. Each song is under 3 minutes and pinpoints a stage in the process. Every vignette has a different sound to reflect each stage and emotion, from the zoned-out, autotuned melodies of “Where the Love Go” to the angry gospel chants of “Love Me Good.” It’s an album not for the car but for your headphones, and not least because you may get a little teary.
“The songs I make are going to tap into my [personal] experiences,” Silva says. “In a social media era, where we only share the [highs], people feel isolated when they go through these struggles because they don’t get to see [the lows] reflected.”
His darkest moments are heard in the first two songs, “Love Me Good, and “Feel the Hell”- which were written when he drove 12 hours home from Texas for family and support. “Love Me Good” literally shouts with anger, starting in a rising gospel chant, “If you're gonna love me, better love me good.”
Silva hits rock bottom with “Feel the Hell,” belting his disorientation as many blurry voices distort.
“I can feel the hell when it’s in me… always on your cell so fucking phony,” he desperately croons.
The mending of his relationship begins in “Where the Love Go,” where he begins to focus on his own faults.”I ain’t hit it but I sho wasn’t committed,” he raps over piano bars.
“Those first two songs are selfish, outwardly looking, angry, hurt. The second stage was when I came back to LA and kept writing, and those songs slowly got more and more selfless,” says Silva. “Instead of looking outwardly at what I was receiving, I was looking inwardly at how I’m responsible and what can I do to be a better lover.”
On the seventh track, “Baby, I’ll Survive,” everything shifts into high gear and jubilant tones ring through with a faster dance beat. “I been around and I saw some thangs / But it feels different when you call my name.” Silva keeps it light, like the melodic mood, showing that love, like everything else, shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
At the heart of 9 Love Songs, Silva moves through selfishness, anger, and hurt to look inward. Silva skirts around cheesiness through focusing on the little things in each vignette as we are taken through the story. He “Met a girl at the store today” and fantasizes what would happen if he talked to her. He takes us through the anger of seeing his girl posting other people on Instagram in haunting sounds. As a result, the EP, in the words of Bene Brown, “Sounds like truth and feels like courage.”
The album fades out into “Dead Lovers of The Past,” an eerie, ethereal melody. Lora sings alone, and then Silva joins in. “Romeo and Juliet will see us taking in the sunset/ and I bet they’ll start to regret they ever met,” they harmonize as the echoing synth deepens and fades out.
The production on 9 Love Songs, too, is all about growth for Silva. While he received some help on “Love Is Free” and “Dead Lovers of the Past” from producer Adam Boukis (who has worked with Saweetie), and while “I Need To Love” is from a friend (Justin Muzack) at the office, the rest of the EP is all Silva. The result is a raw and thrilling body of work.
Back in 2015 when I first interviewed Silva at UT Austin, he was unsure about his future in music and about moving to Los Angeles. But he was sure that Lora would be with him.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I saw her I started making music that was more personal and more authentic, said Silva. “Love is simple,” he concludes. “That’s why we move towards it.”