Back in September, our journalist Lachlan interviewed Daveed Diggs, Jonathan Snipes, and William Hutton of West Coast experimental hip-hop group clipping. at SWG3, Glasgow on the first date of their European Tour. Their discussion includes the inspiration of singing in the shower, creepy woodsheds, and the challenge of approaching a Story 3.
LACHLAN: With ‘CLPPNG’, your vowelless self-titled album, what’s the motivation behind the ego-death of the group and absence of ‘I’s and ‘me’s, for those who don’t know?
DAVEED: the first record we did, Midcity, was sort of a process of us figuring out what the band was. The first couple of songs we recorded for that didn’t have that rule yet but we all, [Jonathan and William] in particular come from a more experimental music tradition and while I’ve always made rap songs they’ve been out there too. We’re all theatre kids, so rules are useful. Boundaries are very useful for us. So, I think in asking what kind of a band we wanted to be, we kept wondering, there aren’t a tonne of examples of rap music without first person narrative.
WILLIAM: I mean almost none.
DAVEED: yeah. I mean certainly no one that does it as a rule, but there are some rappers who are very good at it. Raekwon is pretty good at it.
WILLIAM: It’s pretty occasional. It’ll be one verse per album maybe. You have to comb through it and see.
DAVEED: Aesop Rock does some of it. Story rap is a thing. But we were just trying to figure that out: is it still rap music if you remove [the first-person] entirely? So, for those first ones I remember us thinking of it as a hive mind of rap cliches so that it sounds as much as rap songs as possible when there is no centre there. It was an interesting way to write but it ended up, for me, branching off into all of these other techniques that I had never discovered before. Feeling sometimes really cinematic, or sometimes very instructional, or “Oh, it actually opens up a lot of things, different writing techniques that still work to make fun songs and you don’t have to be as beholding to this implied “authenticity” or truth-telling that exists any time you have a one person with one microphone kind of situation. We always assume that’s autobiographical, whether or not it is. So, challenging that in the writing ended up being very freeing in a lot of ways. It forced me to come up with more interesting things.
WILLIAM: The truth is, no one noticed for a really long time. It was a year after our second album came out that I mentioned it on twitter that the reason the title doesn’t have any ‘I’s in it is because there’s no first-person on the record, and no one had put that together. My friend sent me a meme of people writing fake clipping lyrics, poking fun at the fact Daveed has been on Sesame Street. They were writing funny, violent lyrics like ‘I’ve got these shooters’, but it was all in first person, then it showed a picture of Daveed sitting next to Big Bird. And I was like they’re not even making fun of us right. Like, Daveed does not claim to have shooters. It’s still funny to follow up with that picture, but they didn’t even know how to make fun of us.
JONATHAN: For the next album, let’s do it without using the letter ‘I’.
[Laughing.]
WILLIAM: That would be very annoying.
LACHLAN: With respect to staple horrorcore genre choices, has it been the case you feel especially inspired to reflect social climates within the United States, isolated examples being issues surrounding police brutality, corruption, and racism in Chapter 318 and Knees on the Ground? Does the gratuity and horror come as a reworked response to American society, with inspiration regarding gang culture etc also considered?
DAVEED: I think from all the stuff we’ve consumed as fans genre-wise. So that lends itself to doing horrorcore stuff, or more industrial stuff. I mean the album concepts come from that. Pretty early on we did feel that it became important to wear our politics on our sleeve in our music all the time because there is no first person. So yeah, we do end up leaning that way but that’s what’s scary. If we’re trying to make something scary, in America and all over. Power systems are the scariest thing we all have access to.
WILLIAM: If we’re taking inspiration from horror, film and horror literature, because so many of those songs are completely story telling thematically. I think horror has always done that. You have to decide what is monstrous at any given time, right? And that’s always going to be political. I don’t know how else to do that. I don’t know how to make an apolitical monster.
DAVEED: It’s also an aspect of rap music coming from a lineage of black folk traditions that are generally about “How do we party through the austerity?” Finding the party in the grief and sadness. To me, it has always been baked into rap music anyway.
JONATHAN: But it is an important distinction because I think we don’t tend to make a lot of songs that are specifically political. But all of our songs do have a politics to them. It’s impossible to make anything without a politics.
WILLIAM: ‘Nothing is Safe’ is not a “get out the vote” polemic. But it is about killer cops. So, we’ve made a couple “message” songs in response to specific events and moments, and then everything else is imbued with whatever politics we think drive and operate the stories we want to tell.
LACHLAN: The recently published article ‘Afrofuturism and “Splendor & Misery”’ by Jonathan Hay has highlighted discourse on contesting slavery and challenging narratives that exist against slavery and African and African American culture being manifold and not homogenous. Regarding the article, how were such considerations for you three balanced with Splendor & Misery.
DAVEED: I don’t know. We were all reading a lot of Delany at the time.
WILLIAM: Jonathan had always said since forming the band “We should do a science fiction record.” We have all these synthesisers, we should.
JONATHAN: There’s something with the production of it. Concept records for me are always a little bit frustrating. It was frustrating for me as a child to read science fiction and fantasy then see an album cover with cool goblins and wizards on it and then it’s just guitars, drums, and bass… again. Why is the timbre and why does the orchestration or instrumentation never seem to have anything to do with the concept? Obviously, that’s a generalisation. We were in a pretty unique position given the fact we could make an album that, diegetically was set on a spaceship. So, we had the idea to do a short science fiction concept record where the rapping was done as if it was somebody wandering a spaceship on their own listening to the clanks and gears and things that were making sounds on the ship and just rapping along with them. I find myself, if I’m singing in the shower and listening to the pitch of our bathroom fan and using that as a kind of like pedal tone, it’s sort of a version of that. We hadn’t worked that way before and we haven’t since, we had been very formally and structurally specific about how the songs were supposed to go when making beats, and that was the first record we made while Daveed wasn’t really in town. So, we made these really long, kind of aimless not quite jams but beats that “one kind of has this feel and this one kind of has this feel”.
WILLIAM: They were conceived as different rooms on a ship, like machine rooms that have a different hum. There was one that the idea was the anti-gravity was off in it. We might not have made a song out of that. But screws and tools were clinking around with synth notes that sounded like they were pinging off of walls.
DAVEED: When we had started putting the story together, we had all been reading that N. K. Jemisin trilogy.
JONATHAN: The first one, The Inheritance.
DAVEED: Yeah, and as some of the ideas started coming together. And this is how we work, throwing ideas about and the ones that stick end up being on the project. It was like if we’re about to do this thing, what if we pretend that all the rules and characters from all science fiction exist in this same world.
WILLIAM: So, we could reference weird, specific lore out of every science novel. Like refer to some piece of technology from some Ursula le Guin novel and then also something from Blade Runner in the same song. As if they’re both true.
DAVEED: There is a whole lot of Afrofuturist and Afro-sci-fi references in there but there is also a lot of other sci-fi references in there too. Those novels were not necessarily speaking to each other but in our brains they were.
JONATHEN: And then the idea too that the ship he is alone on is receiving transmissions, broken transitions from our earth and our time that just took that long to get to wherever he is. Which is where the barbershop quartet come in. These fragmented radio transmissions are his folk music.
WILLIAM: You [Jonathan] had been doing folk-song things for the Puppet show while I had been T.A.ing a course called “Race and American Pop Music” at UC Berkley we were reading the opening of W.E.B. du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks and every chapter opens with a spiritual. Then Daveed eventually said he wanted to do a work song thing. All of which came together for our slavery story.
JONATHAN: That quartet was amazing. That was the thing, the record was done but it took about a year and a half, two years to get the quartet together. It was really hard. But they were incredible.
LACHLAN: For Daveed, performatively, how has moonlighting in clipping. from your position in acting impacted on you? How similar are the expressive stances you take when performing for clipping. and the likes of Hamilton? Has this impacted on your abilities with writing, with the intricacies of explicit and implicit narratives that are now definitively clipping.?
DAVEED: It’s been such an interesting process because we all started this as a side project that became our major creative output for a while, then this Hamilton thing happened to me and then my life changed. But I still think of this, in terms of the stuff I make, this feels closer to how I figured out to make art. It started writing rap songs and this is the only place I’m generating rap songs. For me, it does still inform everything but the shitty thing is just the time. Why it’s taking us so long to get another album in. Being pulled in too many directions and the amount of creative energy I have is not great and we don’t make money off of this band either.
I don’t work like this with anybody else. The method we make music with is so unique and just the only way these three brains can work together. Which is super fun, even if it is an impossible itch to scratch for me.
JONATHAN: It is hard for us to work with anyone else.
WILLIAM: For a lot of our features we don’t even meet face to face. We’ll just talk to them and ask if they want to do this. We almost never make something and then think ‘Who would be good on this?’ It’s always we made something because we wanted to work with that person. When we do have people collab in the studio, I think they find that we don’t work like anyone else.
DAVEED: It’s not fun for them either.
JONATHAN: We work very fast. Our process involves deciding what we want to do and then doing that very quickly as opposed to just finding where we want to go but just making a thing. It’s interesting because I now work that way more on my own now because I’ll be in the position where I have to turn out something even if I don’t have an idea. And so, I’m doing a lot more improvisation and jamming to find things, but that’s not how this band works. We don’t have a lot of stuff in the archives because usually we know exactly what we want to make and finish that.
WILLIAM: And then it comes out.
DAVEED: That’s what we’ve got. At shows where they’re [the audience] wanting more encores, that’ll be all of the songs; I don’t know any more songs.
LACHLAN: Now for Jonathan and William, in terms of experimental exploration, how do you feel Midcity through Visions has progressed in divulging in noise and certain industrial concepts, the techniques regarding miscellaneous ‘everyday sounds’, and sampling?
JONATAN: Well, we’ve definitely broken all of the rules that we’d made. We were really rigid of ‘No drum sounds, no pitched material.’ We even broke those rules on Midcity.
WILLIAM: Well, it wasn’t ‘No pitched material.’ More, nothing in a key that is harmonically like Western tonality, right? Because some things would be pitched but a screaming feedback tone.
JONATHAN: But yet rhythmically we had to be incredible coherent and precise and you had to be able to internally feel the rhythm of it as if it was a rap song. We didn’t just want to make chaos with rapping on top of it.
WILLIAM: We didn’t want to be sloppy. We thought it was possible to be really precise.
DAVEED: Those first songs are almost all three verses, three hooks, they’re also very formally rap songs, sixteen bar verses for the most part.
JONATHAN: We still mostly do that, first verse, first hook. Sometimes not. But we’re now using a lot more drum sounds and a lot more melodies. In those early days I can remember making a song and listening to it and thinking it needs these eight things. We’re going to make this list and do these eight things and then we’re done. And we’d listen to it and think ‘I guess that’s the thing we set out to create but I don’t know if it’s good enough or not yet.’ I just knew we had ticked all the boxes we set out to. It took about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through Midcity for us to start having the innate feeling of what the sound of the band was. And now we can abandon the rules while making things that sound like ‘clipping.’
WILLIAM: Yeah, there’s also, starting as a side project that was very constricted, all of your other ideas get to be in all of these other things. But then once this [band] started to become the one people like then we had to start expanding it because we wanted to keep making more material. Once it had spiralled into our main band, then you want to slowly expand your palate and what you’re doing with it to be able to encompass more of your ideas and imagination. We would have never put ‘Say the Name’ or ‘Nothing is Safe’ on our first record. They’re too conventional in a way. We’ve expanded incrementally out from that record to the point where we feel like they count as ‘clipping.’ songs too.
JONATHAN: We just dropped a pretty by-the-numbers club 12” that I made which we wouldn’t have done back then.
WILLIAM: No, definitely not. I think it’s also one of those things. I’m still always so confused when people are surprised to find out what music we listen to and like. I tweeted a recommendation for a metal album once and people were like ‘What? clipping. listens to this?’ Of course. How is that surprising to anyone?
JONATHAN: That feels like a very young idea. I definitely had that idea when I was a teenager that genres were much more rigidly segmented than they are and that you define yourself by locking yourself into a particular genre of music. That’s what teenage fans do, right? So, I guess the assumption for me is that is of course what musicians do.
DAVEED: It feels less and less true with kids these days.
WILLIAM: But we listened to everything as kids. Did we ever think that artists listened only to artists that sound like them or to themselves. I remember Trent Reznor really admired Prince and that didn’t seem crazy to me. But when someone sees that I have a Kim Petris T-shirt online they’re like ‘what is a guy from clipping. doing wearing a Kim Petris T-shirt?’
DAVEED: Bill also reads more tweets than us.
JONATHAN: I think the Nineties, when we were all teenagers, was more with major labels controlling that sort of branding and branding was much more narrow than it is now having the width of the internet in front of us. I also listened to everything but I was the only person I knew in Riverside, California. Most of my friends were ‘oh I’m a… I listen to industrial music and I dress this way.’
DAVEED: So much of our identity as kids was about what kind of music you listen to. That dictates who your friends are. Kids these days seem much more agnostic about it. I don’t really know what an ‘indie’ band is anymore. Music is inherently an independent act at this point. Unless you’re one of very, very few people who are monetising the albums that they make.
LACHLAN: What are the distinguishing features of concepts and inspiration behind the sister albums? For example the uniqueness of Eaten Alive’s “speaking English via crocodile” extending to analysing aftermaths of Club Down.
DAVEED: We usually just talk about things until there is an idea. I remember with ‘Eaten Alive’ there was that musical idea existed but we got Ted [Byrnes] on it later.
WILLIAM: The song existed before we decided to ask Ted and Jeff [Parker] to play on it.
DAVEED: But it was sort of a similar feel. I had been listening to a lot of MC [indecipherable] at the time and I really wanted to rap like that.
WILLIAM: The beat was called ‘Creepy Woodshed’ and we just had this idea that what we were going to do was make individual hits, individual one-shot sounds. And we would each make one and then play a click and drop them in on off-beats until we had filled a time up with on-beat but not in a standard rhythm.
JONATHAN: Then allowing the rapping to come in and be the spine.
WILLIAM: Yeah, the rapping has to follow a very rigid cadence because the beat, all of those fall on a beat but don’t form a groove in any way. The idea of ‘Creepy Woodshed’ was just, in the wind, all these tools on the walls are rattling.
JONATHAN: Like zero-gravity.
[Laughing.]
JONATHAN: A lot of our songs have that diegetic ‘Ok, here’s what’s happening in physical space’ and now let’s make what our version of the sound is. Some of those ideas are very easy to come up with and then the execution of them is maddeningly impossible. I don’t think that we spent more time on a song than on ‘Run for Your Life’ to get it to actually work.
WILLIAM: Literally days of driving to different places.
JONATHAN: We recorded at those locations three times on three different days.
WILLIAM: They were all, sometimes for hour-long drives away to get somewhere quiet enough.
JONATHAN: ‘Dream’ had a similar kind of re-amping thing where we had to drive hours and hours and playthings.
WILLIAM: That’s right we had a drum loop that we played over a P.A. in the forest and re-recorded it from 200 yards away from the P.A. up the mountain. So, we kept having to hike. We did that one twice. Once in Palm Springs and somewhere in Los Angeles Forest.
DAVEED: There’s a lot of that: trying to find somewhere that’s quiet but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Because you want it to sound like it’s in a space but you don’t just want to hear traffic. All those guns on ‘Shooter.’
WILLIAM: Oh yeah, all the guns on ‘Shooter’ are us firing guns.
JONATHAN: Except for the automatic.
WILLIAM: Yeah there was one machine gun we didn’t but the rest we had to drive out and shoot in the desert.
JONATHAN: ‘Eaten Alive’ is interesting because we have a lot of ideas that feel very separate in our minds. We made this beat with all these things happening on grid, to a logic but with no spine to its sound. And then we also knew we wanted to make this free jazz track with Geoff and Ted. We didn’t necessarily know they were the same song at first. Or like ‘Say the Name’ was Bill wanted to make a song with that Ghetto Boys sample, or more correctly quote, because it’s Daveed saying the line actually. And I wanted to make a Chicago House dance mania inspired track about the Candy Man. Because I had been listening to this old dance mania record Wax Master Maurice, Cabrini Green. All these dance mania records that I loved has been named in the projects that Candy Man is set in right when that movie came out so I was like there has to be a dance mania record about Candy Man already and there’s not that I can find. Not in the way they’re always referencing Robocop.
WILLIAM: I was about to say there’s so many references about Robocop.
JONATHAN: There had to be this incredible treasure trove of Candy Man club records that I was unaware of but there just isn’t. So we had to make one. And then those end up being the same song.
WILLIAM: That’s the other thing. Once we made that Dance-style beat and slowed it down to a rapable beat we realised it sounded like Nine Inch Nails. That’s when the outro was written. Let’s just do the end of ‘Closer.’
DAVEED: Lyrically having those two things, having to do Cabrini Green and then Scarface like a very lucid rapper. Story wise it was about how we connect those two things and Candy Man. Anyway, that’s the way this band works. All of these ideas somehow focus into a thing.
JONATHAN: It’s always difficult making the last song of the album because we’ll be like ‘shit, what didn’t we do’ and then cram them all into one song.
WILLIAM: Which is exactly what it was like. Jonathan said we didn’t make a song in four-four and we didn’t do an odd time signature and I had all these EVP recordings by a ghost recordist I know.
JONATHAN: And we also didn’t make the break chord thing I wanted to so then we made ‘Pain Everyday.’
WILLIAM: The story had to be like ‘well we have ghost voices and it’s in seven and seven sort of sounds like an action chase sequence.
DAVEED: So now we’re running from ghosts.
JONATHAN: There’s a lot of practical decisions.
WILLIAM: It’s just house-keeping that song.
DAVEED: We couldn’t possibly not make another song.
LACHLAN: Does this extend to identifying the foreboding qualities in existing musical fields using unique methodologies in the involvement of the work of the likes of Annea Lockwood and Yoko Ono? Or John Cage for ‘Williams Mix’?
WILLIAM: That was sort of a fun thing we made. On Midcity we made a fake Steve Riche outro at the end of the record. And then ‘Williams Mix’ is not a reference, it follows the score perfectly. They’re performances of the pieces that are open enough they allow us to follow the rules but insert our own sounds. The royalties for ‘William Mix’ goes to Edition Peters; it goes to John Cage, not to us. Tom Erbe made it. We gave him folders of music and he wrote software that could channel performances through Cage’s very long, very complicated score.
JONATHAN: I heard in an interview him saying he had heard from this rap group who wanted to do a performance of this and he said “well, it’s going to involve seven-hundred sounds,” expecting never to hear from us again. And then a week later I gave him these meticulously laid out sounds.
DAVEED: I don’t really know why we did it on Midcity but the reason I still like it is that it’s rap music that still comes out of this tradition. We know these pieces. We like these pieces.
WILLIAM: In the same sense, rap music was built out of people making a new genre out of the music that was part of their history, right? That’s where sampling comes from. A lot of people were making rap songs out of their parents’ record collections. Whatever you could find around. Early on I think we were talking about how it’s a true trajectory out of our own tastes and training to use experimental music as part of our language of making hip-hop. It’s true to us.
JONATHAN: It’s how this impersonal, academic band became incredibly personal and very much about who we are as people.
WILLIAM: I was a little worried that Annea and Yoko were going to think it was weird that we had put spooky spins on what are very dry, not necessarily very spooky things. But both were very happy with the results. Annea said it’s her favourite recording. Only because we did it with more mics than anybody else.
JONATHAN: We did it in a way that was very much about the acoustic quality of the piece from a recording perspective. Not just as a performance happening.
WILLIAM: There aren’t really that many recordings of it, honestly. Most of them are an event that happens and people stand around and watch it happen.
JONATHAN: There was a recent documentary about Annea that uses some of our audio over other videos.
LACHLAN: What’s the ideal impact of the music of clipping. in respect to amending attitudes and influencing listeners? Oh dear, shaking your heads already.
WILLIAM: We can’t put control over that part. All we can do is, you set out a table of things for people to eat and just make sure there’s enough stuff on it for people to take away from it.
DAVEED: Hearing what people get back from it is the fun part. Sometimes it’s very close to what we maybe thought and then sometimes it’s so different. Which is great.
JONATHAN: That was something else we learned from Splendor & Misery too. There isn’t a lot of narration as to what happens on the album and so the three of us still have different ideas of what the actual story was. So we decided all three could be true simultaneously. And every fan theory is also true. Because history is just memories anyway there doesn’t have to be an objective truth inside of the clipping. structure.
DAVEED: Jonathan talks about this primary source theory a lot and I think it’s a cool way to make music but does remove a little bit of that responsibility.
WILLIAM: Yeah, instead of reading a narrated novel you get a folder of documents of all the things that have happened and you have to put them together. This one is an eight-by-ten and this one is a report photo. You get a pile of things rather than a beginning, middle, and end.
LACHLAN: Sometimes not enough though. Just like with ‘Story.’
DAVEED: Still going.
WILLIAM: Still stubbornly refusing to do it in the order.
JONATHAN: We have definitely created a lot of work for ourselves with that.
DAVEED: At this point there is one sheet of paper with a wall-sized number of things connected to it with string. We keep adding to it then going back and being like “oh fuck, okay.”
JONATHAN: We have pretty clear ideas musically about what a lot of missing ‘Story’ pieces are.
WILLIAM: What if we’ve already made them? They don’t know. We might have just not put them out yet. … . People know the last note of the previous song is the first of the next. That’s why we started skipping numbers.
[Laughing.]
JONATHAN: More stories are not going to answer anybody’s questions, they’re just going to leave more.
WILLIAM: They’re not going to add up to anything. I know there were fan theories about which song might secretly be ‘Story 3.’
JONATHAN: We’re never going to do that.
DAVEED: You will know when ‘Story 3’ comes out. Hopefully it will do some work and answer a couple of questions, I think.
JONATHAN: When I talk about ideas and rules that we’ve made for ourselves that are so impossible and take forever to accomplish: ‘Story 3’ might be one of those.
WILLIAM: ‘Story 3’ has become something of a White Whale. We have so many plans for what it’s supposed to be.
LACHLAN: How do you feel about moving onwards as a group? Is there reason to expect new music?
WILLIAM: We’re working on something. It’s different but it’s also the same. It’s another role-themed thing.
JONATHAN: What tends to happen when we are working on a project and one song doesn’t fit. We say “oh, we should make a whole album that sounds like this with this song as the lynch pin.” ‘Club Down’ was made while we were making CLPPNG and thought that was good enough that we should make a horror record. It just took forever to make the rest of it. Or, ‘Club Down’ was supposed to go on Wriggle. We made it in early 2016. All the songs on Wriggle came as we had just finished CLPPNG and yet we still had all this energy and all of these ideas and so we made all of the Wriggle stuff to be released just then. ‘Club Down’ was made in sessions but not used.
DAVEED: We did perform it one time as the opener at the Knockdown Centre in Queens. Which was our worst show. It turns out the P.A. wasn’t on in the house so we played what we thought was an excellent show but when I jumped down to the audience for some reason it was just a vocal piece because the vocals were on but the music wasn’t.
WILLIAM: We were just listening to our monitors on stage so we had no ideas what the audience could hear. And they were all standing there not into it at all while we were doing great. It was a bad show.
DAVEED: I was fast rapping with nothing, literally.
JONATHAN: The front of house sound was being run from the stage so no one had ears on the P.A. What could go wrong? You could just not turn it on.
DAVEED: That is the only existing performance of that song.
WILLIAM: Now it’s time for soundcheck.
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