“Even when meaning I am taking much less cash […] what issues to me most [is] that I’ve full say-so over what I put out and the way I put it out.”
Elissa Salas
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Elissa Salas
In a metropolis teeming with eccentricity, Kenny Mason’s emergence is unusual even for Atlanta. He is precisely what one may count on from a 3rd or fourth era ATLien in a way. But he is additionally an outcast in a metropolis of them. An isolationist at coronary heart whose saving grace ranged from Smashing Pumpkins to Peewee Longway, the rap-rock iconoclast’s third studio album, BULLDAWG, is so seamless a hybrid it is exhausting to inform the place his devotion to 1 style ends and his experimentation with one other begins.
But when rap’s corporate-backed output is engineered by starched fits taking advantage of a programmatic weight-reduction plan of Black pathology and predictable drum patterns, then the query is: How did an anomaly like Kenny Mason handle to squeeze by means of? Much more to the purpose, how does a rapper emerge from Traplanta with out sacrificing his alt id on the altar of conformity?
These have been a few of the questions top-of-mind once I interviewed him over the summer season, as BULLDAWG started incomes important reward. And from what Kenny instructed me, the making of this album pressured him to reckon internally with doubts of the identical sort. Within the midst of a inventive disaster, Mason discovered himself questioning “am I similar to each different artist that is caught up on this factor? Or am I truly doing this for a purpose? Do I truly know what my music is doing?’ I used to be asking myself a bunch of questions.”
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His preliminary solutions have been equally unsettling, extra attuned to business metrics than his inside compass. “It was at all times numbers or scale, issues like that. And to me, I appeared like a label or a non-artist. All of my solutions have been outdoors of artwork and actual objective,” he mentioned. “I noticed I needed to remind myself why I am doing what I am doing and why I really like what I am doing.”
The nonconformist questioned whether or not he was straying too far right into a formulaic strategy. “I at all times felt I might establish what sort of sound might blow up sooner in Atlanta the place I am at. So I used to be making that sort of stuff — or I used to be making my model of that sort of stuff. However I’d additionally make these information which are extra different leaning or completely different. And my workforce would encourage it, like, ‘it is a distinctive sound.’ “
However that does not imply he hasn’t been tempted to compromise his sound. On BULLDAWG‘s final tune, “7ELEVEN,” he alternates between competing visions of success on the street to self-acceptance. Within the darker model, he releases an album that flops and he “falls right into a deeper void / the extra I am not the individuals’s alternative.” He considers “making pacts throughout the darkness” and his demons inform him the way to win over the mainstream: “This the way you develop your energy / You modify the entire sound / Dumb the stream down / And love from everybody will certainly bathe.” When he follows that profitable formulation, the mainstream acceptance that follows feels hole.
The tune with the strongest gospel overtones on the album is greater than an allegory about good and evil. It is a metaphor for his profession and a window into the alternatives he is made to honor and shield his sense of self-discovery. Now that he is reached the purpose of “not needing any exterior validation with a view to worth this factor that I am doing,” he cannot be content material with merely feeding the machine. That conviction reveals throughout BULLDAWG. The album finds Kenny digging in fairly than dizzying himself with pinballing between opposing fanbases.
The cussed self-awareness heard in his music just isn’t a efficiency. It is the particular person he is at all times been. Whilst a child rising up in southwest Atlanta, the place he religiously attended Church of the Grasp on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive together with his grandmother, Kenny was by no means down with blindly following custom.
“I hate to say it, I used to be wreaking havoc, bro,” he mentioned. “I used to be undoubtedly in there questioning each single factor they mentioned within the Bible. Like, ‘how is that this potential? What does this imply? So God let all this occur?’ I used to be disruptive for certain.” Singing within the youth choir did not quiet his rebellious spirit, both. Nevertheless it developed his ear for music. It additionally supplied a way of stability that acquired interrupted by the lack of his grandmother.
Shuttled from relative to relative all through center college, Mason relied on video video games to fill the void. Rather than a gentle click on of mates, gaming soundtracks launched him to alt-rock and pop-punk instigators. Not solely did he establish with the music, it gave him one thing he might secretly lay declare to when little else felt tangible. “I did really feel form of cool about the truth that no one else was doing it. It made me really feel prefer it was mine,” he mentioned. “I saved that, I assume, near the chest.”
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As he leaned additional into musical experimentation — linking with burgeoning collaborators like his former Home 9 collective and co-conspirators inside Atlanta’s now-defunct Division Retailer scene — that outdoors acceptance taught him to belief these early instincts.
One efficiency proved pivotal when an early supervisor and scene staple, Noah Zark, persuaded him to not play his breakout single, “Hit.” As an alternative of assembly crowd expectation together with his trap-adjacent rallying cry, Kenny went left with “his rock stuff” and struck a chord. “I do not forget that being the very best present of that underground period. My favourite present ever. The power was loopy. So it gave me quite a lot of confidence.”
At present his palette is a distillation of his childhood. It ranges from his dad’s day by day dose of 2Pac to his grandmother’s gospel indoctrination, mashed along with Atlanta’s trapped-out template and the choice sounds that served as his escape.
However the true lesson in Kenny’s story is available in how he purchased himself the area and time to play with synthesizing all these sounds till he perfected them.
“It is at all times a precedence for me, contractually, to ensure I’ve inventive management each time I am negotiating with a label. Meaning so much to me — even when meaning I am taking much less cash. What issues to me most [is] that I’ve full say-so over what I put out and the way I put it out.”
Insisting on that stage of inventive freedom is what units him a world other than major-label artists pressured to chase numbers to show their price — to themselves and their labels. Although he is no stranger to Billboard, he is no slave to it both. And he is made sacrifices for that freedom, “whether or not that is an advance or much less price range,” he mentioned. “I believe quite a lot of occasions what occurs with artists [is] they let individuals inform them what they need. They will make it sound horny. It isn’t as cutthroat as that, clearly. [But] you must ruthlessly know your imaginative and prescient and know who you might be and know your id.”
Perhaps it was Kenny’s loner years — forcing him to hone a way of self — that taught him to worth it a lot. Energy got here in isolation, and he is nonetheless down to face on that. Simply as he concludes on “7ELEVEN,” “Now that you simply gave me acceptance / I do not want it, actually.”
“BULLDAWG saved my life as a result of it saved my id or jogged my memory of my id,” he mentioned. “We dwell in a world now the place visibility is every little thing, and folks commerce their identities for that visibility. I fell sufferer to that for the higher half of my profession. I consider this album was a press release and proof that I did not have to try this.”
