What Was the Beef Between X and Ski Mask
As the London-based DJ, producer and drummer SBTRKT took the stage in Seattle at the Neptune Theatre last fall, a realization filtered through the audition in discreet whispers.
"I thought he was black!"
SBTRKT, whose existent proper noun is Aaron Jerome, makes electronic dance beats in a postal service-dubstep manner, often with guest vocalists (including Footling Dragon'southward Yukimi Nagano) singing emotionally over the meridian. His self-titled debut album repeatedly uses an mbira Jerome picked upward on a trip to Southward Africa.
At play that night in Seattle was a simple misunderstanding: SBTRKT ofttimes performs with the singer Sampha, who is black, and people tend to assume singers are songs' primary artists.
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But at the show in Seattle, SBTRKT also wore an African-style mask, which covered the height one-half of his face. And in online and print media, masks had constituted pretty much his unabridged public image for the past year — photos, anthology cover, T-shirts. Anyone who had gotten into SBTRKT'south album during that period had seen the mask. Some had apparently only seen the images through his promotional feed and never Googled his confront.
These days a slew of musicians from the oftentimes-intersecting worlds of electronic music and hip-hop are tapping into the power of hiding their faces or wearing masks: SBTRKT; Shabazz Palaces; THEESatisfaction; Zomby; Odd Time to come's Tyler, the Creator; Flying Lotus; Burial and Deadmau5, amidst others. On the mainstream side, women are leaders in the aforementioned move, with Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj wearing masks fabricated out of lace, hats made of raw beef and clothing resembling modern architecture.
They inhabit both male and female characters on Goggle box and in concerts. Their precursors are Daft Punk, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Slipknot, Al Jolson — extreme examples of the hundreds of musicians who accept contradistinct their faces and bodies to enhance their craft, some in ways we at present consider shameful. Jolson's blackface is shockingly racist by today's standards. Is SBTRKT's African mask different?
I explanation for this is that social media has made life into a big performance, with no web/life verification. Everyone can talk, but few of united states can confirm the walk. We demand a demarcation: life over here; performance over at that place. Masks signify an art zone and elevate performance to something serious, not just a fantasy that your interest in cooking makes you an Iron Chef.
At the SBTRKT show, my mind drifted to MF DOOM, the New York and Atlanta-based rapper who inverse his name from Zev Love 10 around the plow of the millennium and started wearing a metal mask, rumored to hide heavy pain over his younger brother's death. Ten years subsequently, with his second persona well-known in the surreptitious and beyond, he began occasionally sending impersonators to perform his shows. They wore the mask, lip-synced the rhymes and were booed off stage.
DOOM's career traces the arc of issues that come when performers wear masks. He started wearing it for personal reasons that were function of an fine art project, but then his mask became a marketing ploy (tag-board DOOM masks were distributed to audience members at his shows) and, finally, a prop to fool people. He started out as "super villain" and ended up a villain for existent.
The aforementioned could be said of Zomby, the electronic DJ who might wear a mask so he won't get recognized and trounce upward for all the concerts he's notoriously blown off at the last infinitesimal and the large chunks of music he's been defendant of stealing from other artists.
A few years ago Tyler, the Creator, of Los Angeles hip-hop/skateboarding crew Odd Future, began wearing ski masks with upside-down crosses Sharpied on them in music videos and at concerts. Through a representative, I was told he'south done with masks now, forever, and does not desire to speak on the subject area. Simply while he wore them it was to corking artistic effect. The ski mask highlighted how scary his underage, quickly cocky-publishing crew was to the clunky music institution, and played to his somewhat demonic character. Last year at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, Tyler spiked his mic and stormed off early at a few shows (notably one for Billboard Mag, which was peculiarly punk because he was on the cover at the time) while wearing a fob mask, sending the message that all these other rappers were chickens.
For SBTRKT, DOOM and Tyler, masks ride the line betwixt persona and gimmick. Maybe that'southward why Tyler's done with it. Simply 2 maskmakers, one for Seattle rap groups Shabazz Palaces and THEESatisfaction and ane for Los Angeles musicians Flying Lotus and Strangeloop, attest to a strong spiritual component that sounds life-giving.
In Igbo and Edo cultures in Nigeria, masks and body suits have long been used for ritual theater operation, and likewise in American Indian, Latin American and Asian cultures. We all have a general understanding of why and how that works. Donning a second pare evaporates the ego and makes risky expression seem more prophylactic, which is why Western psychologists have used puppets for counseling patients.
Electronic and hip-hop performers who clothing masks don't particularly like to talk most it, though people who brand them do. That isn't surprising, since mask-wearers are already in the addiction of hiding information. Simply they exercise open up to the designers.
"We have a constant set of creative conversations," says Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, who has made headdresses (he doesn't use the word "masks") for the Seattle rap group Shabazz Palaces.
In concert at Seattle'due south Moore Theatre in 2010, the musicians in Shabazz Palaces and THEESatisfaction took the stage with black, animistic superstructures on their heads.
That night the groups wore the masks and rapped each others' songs, unofficially birthing a new crew loosely referred to around town as the Black Constellation, which has since incorporated more producers and DJs. None of them likes the discussion "crew," merely with fists aloft like Blackness Panthers and choreography that looked inspired by Public Enemy's military machine formations, Shabazz Palaces and THEESatisfaction connected in a powerful style at the Moore. Alley-Barnes said he could feel it in the back row of the traditional theater. "There was definitely a weight," he says.
Shabazz emcee and producer Palaceer Lazaro (a pseudonym for Ishmael Butler) says he too felt a weight. In an email, he writes that he didn't wear the mask and so much as it wore him. He calls the performance, "a diluting of the private into a concentrated 'us.'"
Alley-Barnes considers himself part of a guild of makers that goes back thousands of years, a conventionalities parallelled by a THEESatisfaction lyric about "being an extension of the best," and jibing with the Palaceer's idea of individuals on stage subsumed into something greater. Alley-Barnes, who has also directed and art directed music videos for Shabazz, says all the collaboration isn't a new affair but an old affair, happening in a bike: "I'thou a derivative of a very onetime people, and some of us are finding each other once more."
He says his masks — which he made out of trash and recycling, and formed with his hands — were fabricated in a trance land.
"The thing I'k talking about predates language. It'due south primal. Language is erstwhile, merely not primal. You ask me where these shapes come from, and of grade traditional Africa, traditional Asia. But it'due south not a conscious enough process for me to intellectualize it."
Leigh McCloskey, a Los Angeles-based artist and histrion (he was Mitch Cooper in Dallas) who has made masks worn by DJ and producer Flying Lotus, brings up the same idea of being unconscious on purpose on the phone from Malibu. He'due south still diddled abroad that Flight Lotus (Steven Ellison) wanted his photo taken wearing a mask in forepart of "Ascension," a McCloskey painting near "music beyond notes."
Two photos were taken of Flying Lotus wearing masks and used for promotional images that circulated for Flying Lotus' 2010 album Cosmogramma. 1 was shot outdoors in McCloskey's grand. The other, in front of "Rising," in his studio.
"My studio's called the Heiroglyph of the Human Soul," says McCloskey. "It's really a 3-D painted library, studio and wonder written report."
"Nosotros both like to work with improvisation and see where that takes us," McCloskey says of the similarities between his work and Ellison's. "With the masks, information technology was about seeing what the alchemy of different elements would create. I don't call back at that place was an underlying, deep, 'Nosotros have to achieve this.'"
Within the studio are original copies of McCloskey's hand-drawn and hand-painted tome Codex Tor, which Flying Lotus excerpted for his hitting Cosmogramma album art. The fine art features lots of circles and intricate lines, matching Flight Lotus' throbbing, more-is-more music, which combines electronic patchwork, instrumental hip-hop, jazz and funk. After styling the Cosmogramma artwork and making the masks, McCloskey appeared on stage at the album release party in Los Angeles and painted live on sheet and glass.
"It was a very interesting effect," he says, "that primal gesture of the pigment hitting the glass or the canvas, and [Flight Lotus and friends] doing fascinating feedbacks and loops."
McCloskey met Flying Lotus eight years ago, when his 24-year-old daughter introduced them. He's known Dave Wexler — a visual creative person and musician, known every bit Strangeloop — since Wexler was in high school. He's aware of his deep influence on their artworks, and feels good nearly that, a little like, as he says, "Socrates corrupting the youth of Athens."
"When people come up to my studio, I say, "Nosotros're returning to the cave,'" he says. "When I wait at what nosotros tin do technologically — and what I love about Dave and Steve and their whole generation — is this relation of the creative extension through machines, of all these different voices. I experience it's a prissy juxtaposition and a stabilizing chemical element, me painting in this ancient mode and and then to go total circle to what is happening in the other direction, and that information technology'southward all happening on the same phase is good for the human psyche. Information technology'southward similar, 'Oh yeah, we're not going somewhere else, nosotros're actually creating greater and greater synthesis.'"
One thought McCloskey returns to in conversation is the value of collaboration, how sharing inspiration is vital to the evolution of ideas. Aisle-Barnes kept maxim the same things: we are not alone in this world, no man is an island, fourth dimension isn't existent. They don't know each other, but in interviews both artists used the same words to talk about what they made: alchemy, primal, Africa, Asia, anti-intellectual, incantation. They both have the long view and piece of work with the musicians non as contracted employees, but equally members of a society that might convene at whatever time.
That'due south what masks are almost, and what music is nigh, too. Language beyond language, using emotions and sensations to communicate in some realm that exists simultaneously with our everyday experience, a place where life and death go in waves and everything is everything. Masks tell large stories that might accept the states believe we traveled somewhere else, or received a supernatural message.
In the new video Aisle-Barnes directed for Shabazz Palaces' "Are yous ... Can you ... Were you? (Felt)," wall-mounted masks hang in a residential dwelling house and oversee a classic conflict between mother and daughter. Their presence makes the argument an incantation, a story that echoes in opposite directions on the timeline, forever. Masks have also cropped upwardly in a half-dozen other Seattle hip-hop and punk rock videos recently, possibly because they're cheap special furnishings. Everyone who uses them experiments with different levels of seriousness and degrees of commitment. For the artist and the audition, they can exist powerful, connective, transportive — or but cool to expect at.
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This video contains a few instances of profanity and illustrations that feature semi-abstract nudity.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/18/146981833/musicians-and-their-masks
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