Mykki Blanco:
going in for the kill

Late last year, Blanco dropped his latest release – the raw, intense and sharply witty Gay Dog Food mixtape. Inspired by the inhibition-eroding impact of his live shows and time on the road with the semi-defunct noise-rap outfit Death Grips, the tape saw Blanco spit, sing and scream over crunchy, lo-fi electro beats. While Gay Dog Food featured some of Blanco’s most ferocious rapping to date (“I fear no man nigga, fuck your judgement / hatin’ ass bitch, yeah I fucked your husband,” he declared in the opening bars of Moshin’ In The Front), this time round Blanco’s vocal experiments were harder to define. There was some eye-catching collaborations on there too, including the deliciously-titled, yet-to-be- heard bonus track Solange in the Elevator with Chicago drill MC Katie Got Bandz and A Moment With Kathleen – a conceptual track featuring the perpetually-inspiring Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna.

Hanna’s work as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and now The Julie Ruin has seen her embrace music as a progressive, empowering form, so it’s no surprise that she’s struck up a bond with Mykki Blanco. And as an artist who’s spent a couple of decades dealing with an industry disproportionately dominated by white, heterosexual males, Hanna recognises some of the obstacles Blanco has faced from her own career. In an email exchange, I asked Hanna why she thinks Blanco plays an important role in the context of the contemporary music industry. “I think Mykki is valuable in terms of contemporary art more than ‘the music industry’,” she replied. “Though she has clearly busted down some barriers in that world, she also went out on the fucking street and confronted a bunch of homophobic teens by freestyle rapping them out of their silly slumber. That’s art. That’s someone who is talented, who gives a shit, and who was born to be creative.”

While Mykki is a gifted rapper, he’s equally a poet, a performance artist, a radical style icon. And despite hip-hop – with its confidence-enhancing braggadocio – might seem like the natural medium for Blanco to execute his swag, he insists that rap was a second choice. “I never wanted to be a rapper, I wanted to be a conceptual artist! I’ve wanted to be in that world, but you have to be an ass-kisser and you also have to be a little boring,” he claims, letting out a mischievous chuckle. “Well, maybe not boring. But, like, if I’m going to be fake, I want to be entertainer fake, you don’t have to have some 30 minute conversation about a sculpture you don’t actually care about. It’s like in the art world you have to form all these long term ‘relationships’, I don’t have time for that shit,” he says, laughing again. But whether or not Blanco is cut out for the schmoozy chin-stroking of the white wall galleries, he’s always been synonymous with the art world. And the story of Michael David Quattlebaum Jr.’s evolution from creative North Carolina teenager to cross- dressing, gender-bending underground star is one that’s punctuated by encounters with New York’s cultural trailblazers. After running away from home at the age of 16, Quattlebaum took a Greyhound coach to New York, where he’d explore his sexual identity at East Village bar The Cock and meet the likes of Alexander McQueen and photographer Ryan McGinley. After returning home for a brief period and flunking a degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, Quattlebaum returned to New York in 2008 to enrol at Parsons The New School for Design. While he only completed one semester, Quattlebaum had already established a network of art dealers, publishers and gallery owners, and began performing a confrontational spoken-word project called No Fear. So how did this act become, as Blanco once described it, “a mixture of Riot Grrrl and ghetto fabulousness”?

“I just had this idea right around the time Nicki Minaj and Lil Kim were having that famous beef, to start this video-art character of a female rapper in high school,” he tells me. With ideas generated by his book of poetry published by the OHWOW gallery, Quattlebaum first performed as Mykki Blanco at one of the trend-starting, mythologised Ghe20G0th1k parties in downtown New York. “When I combined the performance art style I’d been doing with No Fear with Mykki Blanco raps, that’s when it became actually interesting,” he recalls. “Because doing this punk performance as a guy, that had already been done before, you knew what to expect. But when you start rapping in drag, people are kind of surprised by it.”

In January, Mykki was shot for Italian fashion house Iceberg’s SS15 campaign alongside Kim Gordon, and also modelled for Hood By Air’s subversive collection at the Pitti Uomo menswear trade show in Florence. That trip saw him roam the grandiose Fattoria di Maiano estate with HBA’s Shayne Oliver, Venus X, singer Ian Isiah, Fade To Mind producer/DJ Total Freedom and Arca – who crafted the menacing beat for Blanco’s early track Join My Militia (Nas Gave Me a Perm) long before Kanye, FKA twigs or Björk’s teams had him booked in for sessions. “Xen is an amazing album, and [Arca] was obviously always going to be a breakout star, and twigs is now a fucking superstar!” he says with affection. “It’s crazy how many people in our friend circle have literally skyrocketed.”