The trope imposed on people who smoke marijuana has always been that they’re lazy, zoned out and unthinking. It’s a lame and lazy characterization. Want proof? Just look to Seattle rapper, author and admitted smoker, Matt “Spek” Watson, who this week (on 4/20) released the first single, “Uncle Ike” from his anticipated new record, Nine to Fives & Afterlives. The song highlights the hypocrisy of the pot shop’s popularity on a corner where many have been arrested for selling weed.

The rise in Uncle Ike’s presence in the Central District, an area of the city where Watson lived earlier this decade, rang particularly troubling, he says. The big, bassy track, in Watson’s words, came about “last year, as medical marijuana was being phased out in Washington and Uncle Ike’s was establishing itself as one of the most successful pot dispensaries in the state, despite being located on a corner so often associated with illegal drug dealing in the past few decades.”  

But the track isn’t just pointing out hypocracy, it’s also aimed at a larger problem of social ineqaulity in our “progressive” city.

“My goal with this song,” he says, “is to shed some light on the ways in which our drug laws, zoning laws, prison industrial complex and local politics all intersect to create a system that disenfranchises and displaces marginalized communities while bolstering an inherently racist system.” 

The pot shop is “a striking metaphor, and an undeniable symptom of the failures of I-502, the drug war in general, and the displacement of people of color through gentrification,” Watson says. “My song is just one voice though, and there have been many others, most notably Draze who released his song Irony on 23rd a few weeks ago…his song touches on a lot of similar themes as mine, but focuses particularly on Uncle Ike’s proximity to a youth center just a few hundred feet away.” 

Watson’s new LP will be released June 20 and he will also be at Town Hall with Dan Savage, Nick Licata and Riz Rollins on April 22 to celebrate the release of David Schmader’s new book, Weed: A 21st Century Handbook for Enjoying Marijuana. For more information visit spekulationmusic.com.

Listen to “Uncle Ike” here.