Photo credits: 1. ioulex 2. Timothy Saccenti
Forget hip-hop: there’s no one in the entire music world quite like Mykki Blanco.
The New York rapper emerged earlier this year, the fierce and femme alter ego of artist Michael David Quattlebaum Jr. Predictably, rapping in drag was a one-way ticket to a featured position in a host of think pieces about “queer rap.”
Thankfully, which each successive release, Mykki Blanco moves beyond the superficial intrigue of his crossdressing persona. His debut mixtape, Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss, is due out on November 7. FACT spoke with him during CMJ about the genesis of Mykki Blanco, New York’s vibrant DJ culture, and why he’s not a role model.
“New York is a city where you hustle to get by. If you’re not wealthy, then you need to hustle.”
Tell me a little about your background. How did you end up in New York?
“When I was 16, I ran away to New York City. That was the first time that I really had a taste of the city, and it really transformed everything that I had previously known, coming from suburban towns outside San Francisco and Raleigh, North Carolina. And ever since then, I just kept coming back to New York.
“New York is a city where you hustle to get by. If you’re not wealthy, then you need to hustle. The city really trains you quickly: it’s a very survival-of-the-fittest kind of town in a real way, especially in your creative life. If you really want to do what you want to do in New York then you have to figure that out or you have to leave.
“My relationship to New York is that it’s fed so much of my creative output because it continues to push me. Because it’s a city that, once you develop a foundation, it becomes so much more comfortable and so much more enjoyable to be here, but it still has that edge, that you know if you’re not doing what you need to be doing, at a certain point, you could fall off.”
“I feel like in the last couple of months, the city has been in a little lull. I think that someone a bit younger needs to take the reigns as far as planning parties…”
Much is made of New York’s glory days in 70s, when you had disco, punk, and hip-hop born at the same time. Your work draws from all three of those traditions – does New York still have that spirit?
“Electronic music culture in New York, everyone is realizing, is booming. So many people come out of here and so many people are making music here… One and a half years ago, you had the whole scene with Venus X and GHE20 G0TH1K, where she was flying out DJs internationally and around the country who were really bringing back this DJ culture. You have Physical Therapy, Gatekeeper, Arca, Gobby. L-Vis 1990 just moved here from London, Total Freedom from Los Angeles plays here a lot, Rashad and Spinn do a lot of shows here, like Lit City Rave, which wasn’t happening two years ago.
“Let me put it like this: Right now, I feel like in the last couple of months, the city has been in a little lull. I think that someone a little bit younger needs to take the reigns as far as planning parties. But the more people who keep moving from that culture, it really has it going on right now, with people that are making electronica or music influenced by electronica.”
Is the wall between the electronic music community and the hip-hop community falling?
“It becomes so blurred. A 21st century teenage audience is so… I feel that my notion of what an audience will respond to, or when I get questions like this from a music writer, or when people think about it in this polarized way, I think that a certain amount of us, who are maybe 25 or older… I still remember when no one wore skinny jeans! I still remember when people in hip-hop only wore white t-shirts and gold chains, you know what I mean? I feel like a certain peer group who are now the people that critique and write about things, started to view this culture from a certain aged periphery; we kind of still think about things as we know, when things were super separate.
“When you think about a 13 year old or a 15 year old right now, this kind of genre splicing and melding is completely the norm.”
“But when you think about a 13 year old or a 15 year old right now, this kind of genre splicing and melding is completely the norm. I went to the Death Grips show last night, and so much of what they’re doing — it’s obviously their original blend of punk and hip-hop and noise and this and that — but they have this super aggressive drum and percussive craziness happening, and then I’ll hear a beat that will be super rap-rock influenced, or the thump of hip-hop. Everyone is also moshing, but they can turn on that mechanism and dance after that hip-hop show.
“When people ask me questions about the hip-hop community, it’s kind of a fantasy land. I make hip-hop, but I’ve never really done a quote-unquote hip-hop show. All the shows I’ve done, people have come because they wanted to see me at the party or they knew the DJs at the party. I guess in a sense I clue into things in a much more old school way than I realize, because rather than associating with other rappers, I really make it a point to associate with DJs and producers, because those are the people that actually make my music and those are the people that I really respect. Maybe I am a little bit old school like that: it’s not that I’m not trying to hang out with the hip-hop community, I really am, but I have fun when I go to parties that really good DJs throw. I go out when I know a really good DJ is playing – I don’t really go out when a rapper is performing [laughs].”
Can you explain the genesis of Mykki Blanco?
“Mykki Blanco started as a Facebook video art project. It started out with me dressed up and in full makeup pretending to be a teenage female rapper, but really not rapping yet, just spitting some rhymes; more talking to the camera in this confessional way. I have my Drake posters and Nicki Minaj posters in the background, in my fake teenage room. If I re-active the original Mykki Blanco account, the old videos are hilarious. It’s so funny for me to watch, because it’s such an art project and it came from such an arty place.
“The reason I started rapping was because one of my friends said ‘if Mykki is a rapper, you have to rap, to continue to the project.’ I started making raps not to become a rapper – it was still a part of this video art project. I performed out one time, thinking now it’s time for Mykki to come out of the videos into real life. I did the performance, and people afterwards said ‘you know, you can actually rap, you should keep rapping.’ And I was like ‘haha.’
“At that time, what I was performing out was my industrial stuff, Mykki Blanco and the Mutant Angels, but at that time it was called No Fear. What I was performing out in venues and galleries was a very industrial, very aggressive, almost spoken word project. Mykki Blanco came about at the same time as No Fear, but that’s not what I was performing.
“One day, I had dressed up to do a Mykki video, but I had a No Fear performance at night, so I said to myself, “I want to fuck with people: I should do my No Fear performance in Mykki Blanco drag.” After that performance, the interest people had in me went to… like times twenty. People did not expect someone in full drag to have a really punk, really hardcore performance. I began to realize people liked Mykki Blanco almost more than they liked No Fear, or not even that they liked it more… as my friend put it, ‘people like things when they come in a pretty package.’
“It hit me that I could take the same energy from No Fear, but that people would honestly respond to it better as Mykki, and I started performing like that. The crossdressing was something that I had begun to do in my personal life — I wasn’t doing it performance-wise — but then when I realized the theatricality of the performance was raised so much more because I was dressing as a girl, that’s when I realized that it did make a difference.”
“I realized the theatricality of the performance was raised so much more because I was dressing as a girl.”
Who are your influences, musically, visually, or performance-wise?
“I’ve always been influenced by Iggy Pop, Vaginal Creme Davis, Beyonce, GG Allin, Marilyn Manson, Eminem, Missy Elliott, Fiona Apple. I’ve always been influenced by cabaret performers, in the traditional sense, that Berlin 1920s era, or basically any showgirls.”
Are you surprised that people were so quick to group you and other non-hetero rappers under “queer rap?”
“It used to bother me because it was like, you’re being lazy, you’re only saying this because we’re black and gay. Then I really had to think about it: you have Zebra Katz who has a hit song, you have Le1f — this is not Le1f’s first time in the spotlight: he had a lot of attention when he was younger and that died down when he went to college, this is almost a second explosion for him, because he has been producing for people — and then you have me. We’re all getting a lot of attention, and it’s all separate, but people are starting to group us together.
“People do it less now. The more we individually put out, the less that people compare us. Truthfully, now that everyone has already written their article on gay rap, as we continue to put stuff out, they’re not going to do that anymore. After my last video, for ‘Haze.Boogie.Life,’ they were not grouping me in with anyone. Some did, but the larger outlets and people that would have done that a couple months ago didn’t because they’ve already written it.
“It doesn’t bother me now because everyone is always going to need an introduction. You can’t just come into pop culture from nowhere. If people associate me with Le1f, I have no problem with that, that’s my friend – but his music is so different than mine. As we keep putting out music and videos, you can’t compare us because we are so different. It doesn’t bother me at all anymore.
Photo credits: H. Spencer Young
What’s your poetry performance background?
“That’s what I was doing mostly in 2011, because that’s when my book, From The Silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Boys, was published by OHWOW Gallery. That is actually how I entered the machine, and I’m really honest about it with people. I was a nobody, but the reason that I started to get attention from magazines and the reason I started to get fed through the entertainment PR machine was because of OHWOW Gallery, and they were responsible for blasting my name out there on the different projects that I began to do.
“People kind of think that in 2012 I had this fast-track, meteoric rise to notoriety, but it actually began last year. If you google Michael David Quattlebaum Jr., you get all this stuff about the book and doing poetry readings, but that quickly shifted towards Mykki Blanco. When I started doing Mykki Blanco, I was already in the machine: those people, writers and outlets who previously had known what I was doing came around because of it. I still do readings. I still perform my poetry work. I just had an art show in Sweden. It’s actually the poetry and the readings and performance work that keeps my foot in the art world, because I definitely want to keep a foot there.
“I like making people people dance – it’s a bug.”
“When you’re working on, to be blunt, an alternative pop career, everything is more strict and your focus can’t really waver as much. I would love to get back into my studio practice or work on my performance art or make my own videos but right now I’m on this track where I’ve put in a lot of time and recorded a lot of music. Music is definitely my focus right now. I have to think about the production of what I’m doing, about the producers I’m going to continue to work with, and continue to write songs that are not only good but have lyrical content, still achieve my goals, and that I like.
“I like making people people dance – it’s a bug. After you make someone dance, you like that, because that’s what really makes people happy. I’m writing now in a way where I want to make people dance, and make sure my lyrics are hard hitting. This career becomes so dense and so full that I think that only after, honestly, I’ve started to make a certain amount of money, that I’ll be able to come back in a real serious way to my art career and my poetry. This right now takes all my energy.”
Do you see a point where your art, performances, and videos all go through one creative outlet, through the world of Mykki Blanco?
“I made this decision very early, for my own personal reasons and for reasons involving the gay community: I decided to do my videos as male and female, both under the name Mykki Blanco. That decision was made because I don’t like being pigeonholed, and I change my mind a lot. With my image, I like to be a chameleon. I didn’t want people to only see Mykki as this feminine, pretty It Girl, because that was happening a lot and that in itself is powerful. I’m a black American boy from a middle to low income family, and maybe besides Ru Paul, I’m the only black transvestite that has been in Elle, Italian Vogue, or Interview. In a fashion sense or a cultural sense, that’s doing something. That’s promoting visibility in a way that makes everything I’m doing completely normal. Through Mykki going through a period of being a glamazon, and having that side to the character, I’ve achieved certain things.
“When I decided to do the ‘Join My Militia’ video, it was at the height of getting hit up for the fashion stuff. I said, you know what, I want to do the video, but I want it to be messy, I want to be as fugly as possible, I want to look like a mutant. That’s where the whole mutant theme comes from. I didn’t want to continue to do drag so much that if I decided to stop or didn’t feel like doing that I would have gay fans who would say “you’re becoming more masculine because you’re trying to conform to some heteronormative image of what the industry is.” Also, there are times when I don’t feel like getting a weave and getting my nails done. As Michael David Quattlebaum Jr., I want to be able to perform as Mykki but to also be Michael.
“My entire thing is freedom. I become unhappy when my freedom is challenged.”
“My entire thing is freedom. I become unhappy when my freedom is challenged. What I’ve wanted people to see in each video is that Mykki is many characters: Mykki is boy Michael, or Mykki with blond hair, or Mykki with braids, with blue eyes or three eyes. With the whole Mykki Blanco project there is so much theatricality involved, and I want people to get used to that, because it’s just going to continue.
“The number of emails I get from people that want me to help them with their gender pieces, I’m thinking, “I’m not going to help you, because you’re using me as an example as someone who plays with gender.” That consideration is not my goal: that’s what you’re extracting because that’s what you like, and I want you to like it, and I’m glad you like it, and I’m glad that I did it. But I’m more show biz than politics. I’m more entertainment than political statement. If I make these statements, I’m glad I made them and I’m happy that my creative vision is helping me express something or helping other people feel visible, but that’s not what I’m all about.
“I will always I will always stand up for transgendered rights; I will always stand up for transgendered people in American and globally, because no one else does, because no one else takes a public stance for transgendered rights. They are a very neglected community in America and they face discrimination at every turn – there was a critical study released by the government last year called Discrimination At Every Turn (Ed. we think it’s Injustice at Every Turn). I will always give support and visibility to that community, but you shouldn’t use me as a role model because I am artist, and within my vision are many different characters and theatrical avenues.”
What can people expect from the Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss mixtape?
“You’re going to get everything the Mykki Blanco project has been. Everything is way more dance oriented: you’ll get tracks that are teched out and very electronic, with me rapping in weird ways. And then there are tracks that are straight up hip-hop tracks, and some of my older stuff that I don’t even promote, the old freestyles you find if you put ‘Mykki Blanco’ in YouTube.
“This debut is going to be awesome and I’m excited for it; it’s everything I’ve been working toward this year. But it’s funny, my output is going to increase so much. By the beginning of February, I’ll have my next EP out. I’m working on that now. I had to play catch up to my own musicality. I decided I wanted to work with this many producers, and these producers aren’t stay at home people in their rooms all day. They’re touring DJs and musicians. Tracking them down and working together, but also maintaining projects I was doing, it was not easy.
“I’m really not a gimmick, I’m really working my ass off, and the producers who are working with me have not worked with me in vain.”
“In a lot of ways, I’ve gone in a backwards way, doing large scale music videos based on the singles I had. Whereas I kept putting up singles, a lot of people would have kept quiet and put out their mixtape in the spring. I’ve always had a weird way of doing things, and honestly, I was a showbiz baby, I said, ‘I could do it that way, but why would I need to stay quiet for six months while working on this mixtape?’ I went on a European tour, promoting some of the new tracks, and people want visibility, they want a face for what they’re hearing.
“I think that people thought there was so much hype in the beginning, but with each single, the hype is dissipating. I’m really not a gimmick, I’m really working my ass off, and the producers who are working with me have not worked with me in vain. These are also people with names that are associated with quality music, and I think there was so much hype — that’s why on ‘Haze.Boogie.Life’ I called myself the ‘great white hype’ — people saying this is hype, this is hype, this is hype: no, it really is not.
“I’m excited for it to come out. I’m even more excited for the next EP that’s untitled right now. I worked with nine different producers on this release and it definitely has a distinct sound, but I’m only working with two or three producers on the next one, which will give it an even more refined sound. I’m excited for that experience, to work with a producer in a way where it really is a collaboration in the sense that they’re not just working on one track or two tracks, but they understand my cadences and there really is a one-on-one relationship.”
Who are some of the producers you’re trying to work with?
“I’m definitely going to work with Sinden again, with Matrixxman. I’ve been talking with James Ferraro, the guys in Supreme Cuts, L-vis 1990. I had a brief conversation with A-Trak. None of those are confirmed, but I feel fortunate that because I associate myself with DJs more than with rappers or other people in hip-hop trying to create a co-sign, I think more DJs and producers are willing to work with me for me, and not what I’m necessarily associated with. Honestly, that’s the camp I want to stay in because that means other awesome people are willing to work with me without any hangups.”
The way you’ve been releasing singles and working with producers is a very old school way of making music.
“It’s a very 50s model, but usually people are performing the singles that are on a pre-recorded release. I’ve been working on new music, but the only people who have heard it have been at my live shows. I’ve been putting out the singles as they’re created; it’s been a funny experience, it’s been organic and unorthodox. I put out ‘Join My Militia’ and the video was out two months later. I put out ‘Head Like A Stone’ and three months later the video came out. I put out ‘Wavvy’ in April and the video wasn’t out until like August 10. ‘Haze.Boogie.Life’ has been the most ‘music industry’ and proper release, and it’s how things are going to be for me now. I had ‘Haze.Boogie.Life’ done, but we didn’t release the single until the video was ready.”
“If you’re good, and you believe in what you’re doing, and you continue to work with good people, you can construct your own pop career.”
“People are going to hear the album, and then I’m going to do a video, and then another video. Because if you’re good, and you believe in what you’re doing, and you continue to work with good people, until a larger hand steps in, some record company with tons of money offering you a deal, you can construct your own pop career. That’s what I’ve been doing this entire time. That’s what UNO NYC has been doing with me: I’m not like any of the other artists on UNO; I’m the only one with a pop curve. We have all these insiders that want to help us, that understand we’re doing this by ourselves, and we’re continuing to make good decisions. You get that confidence boost when you realize your hard work isn’t going to nothing, when people in the industry who are really creative and came up at this time when there weren’t big budgets, before the record industry crumbled, and you realize there are people who are willing to help you because they want to do things that are creative.”
