Lots of people undoubtedly still picture a thuggish black dude in diamond-encrusted chains when they hear the word “rapper,” but over the past decade the face of rap has changed radically, and the public’s expectations are changing with it: witness the recent mainstream popularity of Asher Roth (a white-bread college kid) and Nicki Minaj (an aggressively eccentric young black woman with a serious postmodernist streak). But is rap ready for a black, bisexual video-game geek who’s into indie rock?
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Christmas in the Attic never went far—they played maybe five shows and recorded an album they tried to sell to their friends—but Vinson carried the band’s DIY philosophy with him when he started making proper rap songs. He didn’t exactly know what he was doing, but that wasn’t going to stop him: since he turned 17 he’s made six full-lengths, both albums and mix tapes, the latest of which, Special Moves, came out April 10. More of his tracks are built from samples of rock bands like Yeasayer and Boris than, say, beats jacked from Drake or Usher.
I ask how he developed his aesthetic. “I guess just being a kid who was obsessed with MTV, then MTV2, then Subterranean, and then ‘What is this Feist woman,’ and search that,” he says. “And then I started going on video-game message boards, and off of the nerds on there who were talking about Deltron and Sufjan.”
“Ghost de Megafloor” is on Vinson’s previous collection, Blue Walls, the first album of his I heard. It’s definitely a rap record, but he samples everything from Bat for Lashes to Daniel Johnston. He also messes with syrupy lo-fi synth textures, playing with ambience and feel rather than crafting hooks—an approach that reminds me of the current crop of chillwave artists more than anything else.
But there’s still a lot of social conservatism in hip-hop—people may not know what to do with a male MC who raps to the track from Usher’s “Little Freak” and flips Nicki Minaj’s bi-curious cameo to propose a MMF three-way to his girlfriend. “If I’m just doing something with an indie crowd, no one gives a shit that I’m bisexual,” he says. “But if it’s in the black community or I’m sending it to people from my high school it takes a stance that I’m not a stereotypical . . . what someone thinks a bisexual or gay person is. I play sexuality up in my music. I just really wanna push norms, I guess, in all communities.”
