FEATURE:
Spotlight
Mykki Blanco
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FOR this Pride Month…
PHOTO CREDIT: Thomas Hauser
I am focusing on artists from the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community. I have been meaning to spotlight Mykki Blanco for a while now. They (Blanco uses the ‘they’ pronoun) are one of the hottest artists around. I will come to Blanco’s new album, Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, in a bit. They have crafted a stunning album that everyone should check out. In case people do not know about Blanco, I want to grab a few articles that will help. In 2016, Blanco was interviewed by The Guardian. The interview uses the ‘he’ pronoun, as it was conducted in 2016. We discover more about Blanco and how they have progressed as an artist:
“It had been three years since he had transformed himself from a New York performance artist into the indie rapper du jour. He toured with Björk, recorded with Tricky and Basement Jaxx, released a flood of videos and mixtapes, and attracted an army of celebrity fans, ranging from the expected (Grimes, Jean-Paul Gaultier) to the surprising (Flea, Florence Welch). Alongside Le1f and Zebra Katz, he established “queer rap” as a viable sub-genre. It’s hard to create an entirely new persona in hip-hop, but a 6ft 2in gay man who performed quickfire rhymes in a bra and blonde wig? That was new.
By 2015, however, the buzz had cooled off and Blanco was stuck. He couldn’t get a record deal and he could only sustain himself independently through constant international touring, which left him without enough time to make the official debut album he had been publicly promising for a long time. He was seriously thinking about quitting music in order to go to college and study investigative journalism. He was, he says now, “at the end of my rope”.
The reason Blanco felt that he couldn’t move forward as an artist was because he was keeping a secret. In 2011, before he had released his first single, he had been diagnosed HIV positive, but he had told very few people and was tired of having the same awkward conversation every time he hooked up with a guy. His love life was as paralysed as his career. “The psychosis of secrets starts to make you crazy,” he says. “I was a very unhappy person. It’s funny now for me to look back, because I consider that I love myself, but during this period I was so turned off by myself.”
So, last June, Blanco decided to go public via a brief Facebook post. If being the first out HIV-positive rapper since the late Eazy-E 20 years earlier would cost him his career, so be it. “I thought when I came out that was going to be the end,” he says. “Mykki Blanco is fun. Talking about HIV is not fun. How could I be fun and have HIV?”
As it turned out, the reaction was the opposite of what he expected: he was flooded with good wishes and support. “It surprised the fuck out of me!” he says. “It allowed me to see how humane people are. It made me realise I had a much more jaded view of humanity than I realised.” His eyes moisten and he sniffs. “I’m so emotional today. I think it’s astrological. There’s a new moon in Leo or something. I’m really sensitive to stuff like that.”
When you’ve been called a faggot every day since you were six, there comes a point where you stop crying and become hard
A Mykki Blanco interview is a non-stop performance. I ask him one question and he answers three. Opinions and revelations spill out of him like treats from a piñata. “I’ve always been a little bit in-your-face,” he says. We’re sitting in the basement of a gay pub in Dalston, east London, talking about that long-awaited debut album, the fierce, frank and emotionally affecting Mykki. Blanco, 30, has close-cropped hair (better for wigs), silver eyeshadow and a lean torso decorated with tattoos. Now signed to Berlin-based !K7 Records, he’s planning to settle down in London for a while after a long period of being “glamorously homeless”.
Blanco has always enjoyed being on the move. “I like to be fluid,” he says. Growing up in North Carolina as Michael Quattlebaum Jr, he loved his family but hated his neighbourhood, so when he was 16 he emailed actor/director Vincent Gallo to seek his advice about running away to New York. “Don’t come to New York,” Gallo replied. “You’re an idiot.” Blanco did it anyway, living on his wits for three months before his mother tracked him down and, demonstrating remarkable understanding, gave him money for a hostel so he could intern at Elle magazine. Later, he won scholarships to two prestigious art colleges, but dropped out of both. He was, he says, a very volatile young man.
Blanco liked dandyish MCs such as Outkast’s André 3000, but his teenage heroes were people such as Laurie Anderson, Le Tigre and genderqueer performance artist Vaginal Davis, and he didn’t start making music until he was 25. He had already tried painting, photography and performance poetry – publishing an acclaimed verse collection, From the Silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Boys – before he created Mykki Blanco in 2010 as a teenage female alter ego for a video art project. He was surprised to discover, once the concept evolved into gorgeous, audacious rap videos, that people actually liked his music in its own right. He wasn’t just a performance artist who rapped; he was a rapper.
Around that time, Blanco spent two years identifying as trans and using female pronouns. He eventually decided not to transition but it was a life-changing experience. “When you’re a trans person but you still have very masculine features, people think they can frown and snarl and look at you as if, ‘How dare you exist?’” he says. “That period allowed me to see just how wonderful people can be and just how horrible people can be. I went through this period of hiding my eyes and being ashamed and then I was like, ‘What am I doing? I have a right to be on this earth as much as all these other assholes!’ It gave me a whole lot of inner strength”.
I put out a lot of that interview from The Guardian, as Blanco is very candid and honest. Since 2016, I think Blanco’s career has taken off. They are certainly one of the most promising artists of the moment. The reason why I have included Blanco in Spotlight even though they have been going a few years is because of the new album. Blanco is a trailblazer and a hugely influential artist. Before coming to a recent interview and sourcing a couple of positive reviews for Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, there is a fascinating article from Vogue. Published last year, Blanco provided their lockdown diary. I have chosen a few exerts:
“Wednesday, 1 January 2020, 10:30am
Raleigh, North Carolina
A new year and a return to a way of living I am all too familiar with. I’m back at home at my mother’s house. I just left behind a beautiful, lopsided Portuguese apartment filled with plants and a black house cat, and ended a three-year relationship that has taught me more about how to love myself then all my previous clumsy attempts. The relationship actually ended in August, but the lease would not expire on our flat until the new year, so we had been coexisting amicably between me flying out for concerts, rehearsals, and shooting a music video prior to coming home for Christmas.
Tuesday, 18 February 2020, 16:15
Milan, Italy
Life has stopped and living feels suspended, but racism never takes a day off. I asked our chauffeur if we can stop the car when I saw a man on the street corner selling what looked to be very ripe and very good melons. We had passed the same man on the same street corner earlier on our way to the Gucci show and I have not stopped thinking about the melons since. It has been a beautiful and exhausting morning, something straight out of a Michelangelo Antonioni film.
PHOTO CREDIT: Benedict Brink
Gucci has flown me out for Milan Fashion Week and Alessandro Michele has been a remarkable host in a whirlwind 48 hours of dinners, fittings, a New York Times cover shoot and the fashion show itself. Our hotel is striking, but there is no supermarket nearby; I am happy the driver did not mind stopping in traffic so I can buy my melon. It feels silly reading this back on the page right now, but it was a carefree and glamorous experience. Maybe I’m just being overly poetic, but having a driver stop in traffic so I could get out of the car, tall, 6ft 3in in a teal-and-pink tweed suit, just to fetch a melon… It was a complete ‘ladies who lunch’ vibe. Black trans people like me do not often get to feel oh so nouveau riche and so, so glamorous!
Saturday, 22 February 2020, midday
Milan, Italy
I am sitting in my friend Francesco’s kitchen, alone, looking for a recipe to make pesto cauliflower. I am crashing at Francesco’s for the weekend and want to cook Sunday dinner as my way of expressing a heartfelt thank you to him before taking a plane to Greece tomorrow. Francesco has called me from the Marni headquarters and told me, “Mykki, they just announced that in Lombardy, the number of Covid-19 cases is over 100 and people are in a panic. They are telling everyone to get inside, and you know Italians, everything is going to be a drama.” We laughed”.
I think the best way to discover Mikki Blanco is to listen to the music. They are a wonderful artists with many bright years ahead. There is a GQ interview from this year that is compelling. People should read the whole thing. There are bits of it that especially caught my eye. Blanco’s story and experiences are so powerful:
“Mykki does not remember much in the way of HIV education at school. ‘I probably did have some, but it would’ve been a blip,’ they say. North Carolina state sex education at the turn of the millennium was still a terse practical run through of the basics. 'It was very biological. You learn about the parts, no mention of pleasure. A teacher saying one line, ‘When you are older you will have intercourse and you may wear a condom so that you don’t have an unwanted child.’ It was very clinical.'
When they started living a queer life, as a teen runaway to New York, information didn’t get formalised much clearer. ‘Those conversations for me were part of an erotic reflex. I don’t really have sometimes the best memories of my sexual life back then. For so long I guess I just didn’t know how to properly care for myself. A part of that behaviour was with this neurosis around sexual health.’ They tested positive in 2011. 'When I contracted HIV, I didn’t know a lot about how to go forward, but I did know that it was not a death sentence.'
PHOTO CREDIT: Lydia Garnett
Mykki Blanco believes that US health policy paused sometime before their positive test. 'I feel like the public health discourse thinks that it has done this amazing job at re-educating the public on HIV/Aids,' they say. 'But it ghettoised the discourse. Your average Joe, your average Jane are so uninformed and have this 15, 20-year-old idea about what it is to live with HIV. There is not a public health narrative that you can live healthily and live a long life. I do think everyone, generally, knows they have medicine for it. But there hasn’t been this strong public health push or campaign to let people know the strides that have been made, how far we have come, the quality of life and health you can have. I don’t see these narratives anywhere.'
Mykki Blanco believes that there is one narrative that has followed their life in music and performance, part of the reason they have chosen to shed a second skin on Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep, infusing the record with joy. ‘There is definitely this narrative around my career about being an underdog.’ The Bikini Kill and Riot Grrrl legend Kathleen Hanna once took Mykki aside to impart a truism about artists working at the vanguard of societal moments. ‘She said there are some of us who are archived even before we’ve reached the climax of our careers. I was always, always on the edge of where it seemed like society’s next marker was. Or what the next big conversation was. But, somehow I was never able to be recognised as a part of pushing that zeitgeist forward. What a strange feeling it was for someone to know, in their heart of hearts, that they had not reached the peak of their career.’
Other rappers may have scored more commercial success than Mykki, but few have pricked the intellectual imagination with such piercing candour. ‘The amount of colleges that I have spoken at,’ they explain, ‘My work being added to syllabuses. People telling me, 'oh yeah, I studied you in my gender theory and queer theory', whatever the class was. When multiple people tell you that they studied your work and yet you know that you haven’t even hit the really prolific part of your career? It does something strange to you. You are cannon before you feel you’ve earned a place in it.’
Earlier this year, Mykki Blanco turned 35. ‘Social media has transformed all of our lives,’ they say. ‘There is somehow this neurotic idea that you’re supposed to have it all figured out and each year it seems to get younger and younger. But you develop in life, you know? And that development takes time. I genuinely don’t feel like there’s been any time lost for me, at all. Maybe if I had made more careerist decisions, I would have more money than I do now. But when it comes to the truth of my artistic development, I am exactly where I need to be. Because I could not be here any other way’”.
I am going to round off in a second. As they put out the album, Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, on 18th June, it is nice and recent. Go and listen to it if you have not done so already. The reviews have been largely positive. There are two that I want to quote from. In their assessment, this is what The Guardian said:
“Mykki Blanco has spent their career immolating boundaries. A performance artist-cum-rapper informed by everything from outré digitals to punk, this 35-year-old’s work has long combined aggression and mischief, frankness and vulnerability.
This nine-track mini-album is their first outing since 2016’s self-titled Mykki, when emotion seemed to gain the upper hand over spikiness. Here, Blanco is processing the end of a relationship aided by producer FaltyDL; the mood veers from regretful to flirtatious. The trap-inclined That’s Folks sees Blanco go head-to-head with Big Freedia, while the defiantly single Summer Fling is as lewd as it is catchy (“Your dick smell of hamsters, go take a bath.”)
But most of the sounds here are mellifluous, with ample space given to heavenly backing vocalists on the more heartfelt songs, like the standout Hudson Mohawke co-production Free Ride. (“What I wouldn’t do for love,” sighs Blanco.) There are nods to jazz and house and the merest swish of bossa nova on Want from Me; soulful intercessions from Blood Orange (It’s Not My Choice) and Jamila Woods (Love Me) add to this record’s levels of bruised classicism”.
I have been spinning Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep for a while now. It is a terrific album that has some true gems. NME mention a few in their positive review:
“’Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep’ boasts other moments of braggadocio, but it’s also vulnerable and reflective. The impact of the romantic relationship that ended shortly before Blanco began working on these songs looms large on stunning recent single ‘Free Ride’. Co-produced by Hudson Mohawke, it’s a Luther Vandross-inspired soulful bop with a gorgeous sigh of a chorus: “What I wouldn’t give for love.”
Later, jazzy break-up number ‘Want Me’ offers the arresting image of Blanco trying to “sweat out” their ex at a spa in the French Riviera. And on ‘Love Me’, a pitch-shifted Blanco confides: “Without you by my side, I swear, I’d probably be a gonеr.” This strikingly direct approach is no surprise from an artist who revealed their HIV positive status in a 2015 Facebook post, then spoke candidly about their gender identity four years later. “I’m not gay, I’m trans,” Blanco wrote on Instagram. “And it took me however fucking long it took me to actually fully self realize that.”
Working with producer FaltyDL, who’s credited on every track here, Blanco creates a body of work that feels cohesive but not constricted. The Blood Orange collaboration ‘It’s Not My Choice’ offers sax-flecked nostalgia; ‘Summer Fling’ sounds as sun-kissed as its title; and ‘That’s Folks’ teams Blanco with fellow queer-rap pioneer Big Freedia for a catchy hip-hop banger.
Some of Blanco’s rhymes could be tighter but this ferocious performer commands attention whether they’re chastising a partner for drinking their soya milk on ‘Fuck Your Choices’ or baring their soul on ‘Love Me’. The result: a bold and brilliant step forward”.
I shall end there. Go and follow Mykki Blanco and see where they head next. Based on what we hear on Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, there is going to be a lot more golden music in the future. I just want to finish by bringing in an interview published in The Guardian last Sunday. It is another fascinating insight into a modern-day idol:
“It’s such a romantic album. What kind of mood were you in when you were making it?
I went through a breakup in 2019. It was painful and sad, but also amicable. After the actual breakup, we lived together for another six months. I wasn’t going into the studio being like, “I had a dream about this fight that we had two months ago, let me write a song,” but I guess it was coming up from my subconscious.
How do you think your sound and style has influenced other artists?
It is not lost on me that even though I was not a mainstream success, I helped pioneer a lot of what I see now as far as new queer artists. Artists like Le1f, Big Freedia – we really laid the blueprint. People sometimes say: “Oh poor so-and-so, they were the first ones to do this and they never got their roses,” but now in this second chapter, I think I’ll be able to enjoy the atmosphere I helped to create.
How do you feel about the landscape of music and “queer rap” today?
Lil Nas X is a black queer pop star: that’s the world I always wanted to exist in. Yves Tumor toured with me for two years before they blew up. Arca produced one of my first songs when they were first freshmen at NYU. I don’t ever want to take responsibility for anyone else’s creativity, but just knowing that there were doors that were closed that I helped to push open, and now other people benefit from that, is a cool feeling.
What do you love most about being black?
There are so many powerful things that black people and black culture have given to this world. We are actively reclaiming our narratives and our own history. For the first time, we’re telling the truth, and not someone else’s version of events”.
As it is Pride Month and I am very keen to explore and salute some of the finest new and legendary artists from the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community, I couldn’t pass Mykki Blanco by. They are a tremendous figure and artist that is…
A role model for so many.
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