Wutever You Say I Am

In his breakthrough track Wut, Le1f raps: “I'm the kind of John closet dudes wanna go steady on/Toss my gems up, raise the bar, Yung Phenomenon/I make a neo-Nazi kamikaze wanna firebomb”, lyrics that nicely get to the crux of Le1f's sui generis persona – a sassy, avant-garde, 20-something who is casually able to turn gay-bashing into expressions of braggadocio. It's within some odd social and music contexts that Le1f operates as an artist: his avant-garde vibe and open gayness don't fit in with popular conceptions of mainstream hip hop, yet he joins the artists of Brooklyn's 'weird rap' scene in still aiming for that larger, consumer crowd (in Cloud So Loud, Le1f speaks of wanting to win over the “college kids, suburbs, the projects and clubs”). Just like Death Grips, or fellow Brooklyn alt-rapper Heems (the former Das Racist mainstay for whom a 17-year-old Le1f produced Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell), Le1f is one of those MCs society doesn't quite know what to do with.

Does Le1f think the world, particularly a mainstream consumer crowd, is ready for a purple-haired, gay gangsta rapper? “I think Rick Ross is the only one that's gotten away with being such a character that's not what he actually is,” reflects Le1f. “I'm not really interested in being a gangsta. Kendrick Lamar [of whom Le1f is a major fan] reps Compton a lot, but it's not like he's a gangsta rapper... He's a normal person and an intelligent guy so it comes through.” 

A music career wasn't necessarily always on the cards for Le1f, who was raised by his single mum in Hell's Kitchen, before attending a specialist dance school. “I've been doing ballet for 14 years,” explains Le1f, “I boarded at a high school in Massachusetts with a special dance program. It was super rigorous – the same people that programmed the Boston Conservatory were the teachers. I continued with dance at Wesleyan [University], largely because I didn't do well at music.” Le1f had wanted to be a rapper since high school, “but I had performed a little bit and I hated it. Also, I couldn't find a crew of people freestyling on the street anywhere who were my age to talk about it with. I really wanted to be mainly a music major, but it was just so mathematical, the way they taught composition at Wesleyan, I kept having to repeat music classes.”

Le1f's is nothing if not honest, ergo what we see in the video clip for Wut: Le1f with one hand on his hip, a purple fade and sneakers, sitting on the knee of an oiled-down, naked, Pikachu mask-wearing white guy, rapping about a guy wanting to “Bink” his “Jar-Jar” (then, some male booty-shaking) is just Le1f's version of normal. An aesthetic as such still presents a challenging affront to many – you need only read a handful of the comments under the Wut YouTube video to lay witness to this, in the words of one anonymous commenter: “I'm a gay rights supporter, I got mad luv for my friends who are gay. But when you try and make a song like this, and try to force feed people the homosexual agenda and lifestyle, and then bring it into the hip hop world and try to push it onto a mostly heterosexual listening foundation, it makes straight people uncomfortable.”

Le1f vehemently denies that the rap he's making is for a homosexual audience (and thus not to be thought of as 'homo hop', which has a focus on LGBT themes in its lyrics). Le1f is not interested in soapboxing, as he told The Fader in 2012: “I'm not preachy. My goal is always to make songs that a gay dude or a straight dude can listen to and just think, 'This dude has swag'. I'm proud to be called a gay rapper, but it's not gay rap. The best thing a song can be called is good.” If anything, the way Le1f raps about getting and sleeping with guys (“I get guys the way straight rappers get girls”) sits perfectly with what a present-day hip hop audience might expect. As Le1f summates: “If so many girls and women can like songs that suggest they should be sex slaves to any dude with a luxury car, and so many harmless white kids listen to gangster rap, then straight people can probably like my music just the same.” 

There's also the Macklemore cherry: Le1f maintains that the instrumental backbeat to Wut bears a striking resemblance to that of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' Thrift Shop, a position he has put forth on his Twitter, where he simultaneously criticised their 'gay rights anthem', Same Love (lyrics: “If I was gay, I would think hip hop hates me”), slamming the way in which Macklemore, as a straight man, has benefited from the video's focus on a gay relationship. Tweeted Le1f: “That time that straight white dude ripped off my song then made a video about gay interracial love and made a million dollars.”

Is it probable that there are going to be several cool, mainstream gay rappers in the next few years? The mainstream rap and R&B scene itself has been openly supportive of homosexuality: not too long ago Frank Ocean wrote a blog that openly recounted his first love – a man, Bay area rapper Lil B named his 2011 album I'm Gay (I'm Happy) and is an open supporter of gay rights, and Harlem's A$AP Rocky once told Pitchfork, “I used to be homophobic, but that's fucked up. I had to look in the mirror and say, 'All the designers I'm wearing are gay'.” But does Le1f pose legitimate competition to someone like A$AP Rocky – can he capture A$AP's market? At the end of the day, we're with Talib Kweli on this one, who was recently quoted as saying a gay rapper could succeed only if he/she was “better than whoever's the best”. Historically, hip hop culture and music, which critique dominant structures, have gone against the grain of traditional American music; as has queerness disrupted normative tales of sexuality, challenging socio-sexual rules. An artist such as Le1f encourages exploration outside the domains of the norm with his work, which can only be a good thing. And at the rate Le1f's going, he's shaping up to give “the best” a run for their stacks anyway. And he's going to do it in a pair of purple Daisy Dukes. That's what is up.