On a Saturday evening in early September, Bartees Strange launches into a story about the Korean-American electronic producer Yaeji, who is seated just to his left on an oversized couch, her too-long sleeves shielding her blushing face like an invisibility cloak. “Four or five years ago, I was sending Yaeji beats like crazy,” says Bartees, who erupted onto the indie rock scene last year with his exceptional debut Live Forever. “One was titled ‘Please sing a hook on this beat, if you sing this hook it will be a huge song.’” Bartees never got a reply, so the track became Live Forever’s darkly pulsating “Flagey God.” “It was a general email, no one saw it!” protests Yaeji, nearly tumbling over from embarrassment. They laugh it off and embrace anyway. “I wrote that song for her, but I’m glad I got to keep it,” says Bartees.
The pair are among the emerging musicians that Pitchfork recently dubbed as the “25 Next”; artists that we feel especially excited about right now, and who are emblematic of where music is headed in the future. Five of those artists are gathered at Chicago’s Soho House for a wide-ranging conversation about the past, present, and evolution of the music industry. Across from Bartees and Yaeji, on the other side of a table of cocktails and appetizers, sits Ghanian-American singer Amaarae and multi-instrumentalist and singer KeiyaA, while Chicago jazz bandleader Angel Bat Dawid is elegantly perched at the head of the table.
As Bartees finishes his story, Amaarae gushes about playing Yaeji’s Boiler Room set in the studio while working on her breakout album, 2020’s The Angel You Don’t Know: “I remember saying, ‘We need to get Yaeji to come out here and do this project.’ Then I see her today and I’m just like, bro.” KeiyaA chimes in, showing her love for Amaarae’s album, and Angel tells everyone of KeiyaA’s warmth and generosity. “We played a show together recently and she let me stay at her house,” she says, her presence commanding the others’ attention. “It’s a community. And I’m glad that we’re getting back to music being a community.” In a matter of minutes, the conversation has already turned into a meeting of a mutual admiration society.
The group’s commonalities are clear; they’re musically eclectic, deeply informed by the places they’ve lived, and passionate about clearing a path for the next generation of artists. They push back on old limitations while reshaping genres with long-seated traditions and histories—Angel in jazz, Yaeji in dance music, Bartees in indie rock, KeiyaA in R&B, and Amaarae in Afropop. All five released music that was powerful and moving during the height of the pandemic: In addition to Amaarae and Bartees’ innovative debut albums, Yaeji turned introspective and highly textural on her heady mixtape What We Drew, KeiyaA mapped the contours of her weariness with neo-soul grooves and warped samples on Forever, Ya Girl, and Dawid brought her recent work roaring to life, like a preacher possessed, with LIVE.
For over two hours, the group reflected on what it’s like to survive and flourish in an industry that’s both quickly evolving and averse to change. They discussed structural racism, the many conundrums of relying on streaming services, and the effect of COVID on their careers and communities. They also geeked out over recording techniques, album art, and a shared love of artists like Kim Gordon and G Herbo. What follows is a portion of their sprawling conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Angel Bat Dawid: That’s been the only thing that has helped me. If I didn’t have this music, I don’t know what the fuck I would be doing. To me, it’s deeper than just a performance or a show, it’s life. You just think you’re in your room making stuff by yourself, and then people tell you that shit you made helped them get through it. This year I lost my baby sister because of COVID-related shit. I’m still angry, I’m still crying every day. So to hear that something I created helped somebody through this hard period, is very important.
KeiyaA: Opening for Kim Gordon was insane last night.
Amaarae: What?! Kim Gordon?! Even being on the same fucking roster as her for [Pitchfork] festival, I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m in the right direction.”
KeiyaA: She was so nice. She came over to my dressing room and said what’s up. I remember being 12 years old and playing so many Sonic Youth records, and feeling so vindicated, seeing women who are producers, songwriters, but also community leaders. She’s such an important figure. That show was an honor.
Bartees Strange: Four months ago, I realized this was going to really happen for me. Phoebe Bridgers asked me and my band to go on tour with her. I was flattered, even though I never really identified with an ampitheater full of young white girls. I’m a 32-year-old Black man from the country, I stayed away from white girls. The first show was like 4,800 people, all 17- to 20-year-old white girls, screaming “Boomer.” And I’m just like, “Y’all know what this song is about?” It was mind-blowing. It was just such an amazing way to come back. Because like Angel said, I’m just in my room all day making these songs. To perform them in front of all those people, I didn’t feel nervous at all. Even in a room of 4,800 white girls, I was like, I know exactly what I’m supposed to do.
Angel Bat Dawid: During the pandemic, I got a lot of virtual show offers. And that helped me chisel solo stuff and it made everything like turtle energy: Look at them, they don’t have homes, they carry all that shit with them, and they can’t go too fast or else they’ll knock stuff over. My whole thing creatively was going inward this year. I started to hone my skills, really pay attention to technique and visuals, because I want me floating in some cosmic space world [for my virtual shows]. It helped my craft. I got a pickup on my clarinet, and my pedal game…
Bartees Strange: Can I track that?!
Angel Bat Dawid: [Laughs] But with my return to shows, I’ve really been trying to push the boundaries. New compositions, new visuals. How do we take it from just a performance to, how do we embark on what is our music? Twenty years into the last millennium, there was a resurgence of Black creativity called the Harlem Renaissance, and the beginning of a new artform called jazz, right? What’s going to be our new art form? We’ll only figure that out by experimenting.
Yaeji: I think it did. I was in my early 20s when I started music, and it was like love at first sight. I was going out every night. I met all these people who are now dear friends and collaborators. But I also wasn’t pausing to think, Who am I? Am I feeling grounded right now? What are my intentions going into this? I was being pushed to be like, I’m just going to do this because I should be doing this.
When we had to sit with ourselves for the past two years, I went inwards and studied. I read a lot of books. I took this Zoom class called Rhythm, Race, Revolution, and it taught me that music was one of the most honest ways we could look through history. Because history is written by whoever won the war and music actually came from the people living. And then I thought, That’s how I want to make music. That’s how I want to listen to music. That’s how I want to respect and honor musical influences. A lot happened in my mind, and I’ve been flying back and forth to Korea to get a different perspective. I wrote a lot of music there—that was important to me.
Bartees Strange: Something I was able to do during the pandemic was take some of my harder rock songs and be like, Let me show them the country version of this song. I love flipping arrangements, I love writing a song six ways. I felt like that helped me a lot and helped people connect with my music in a different way. Because I think sometimes my music comes off as loud and look at me, but at the center of all those songs is a very easy country tune.
Angel Bat Dawid: One of the challenges I’m feeling with that [kind of experimentation] is people calling me wild. It literally just happened at a show. I was talking to one of the other performers afterwards and the only thing he could come away with was, “Great show, wild woman.” He was surprised I could do so many things. Why is that surprising? I hate that. I cussed him the fuck out.
Bartees Strange: I feel like when people see me pick up a guitar they’re like…
Angel Bat Dawid: “You’re Black and you play guitar?”
Bartees Strange: And I’m like, “Where do you think that shit came from?” What do you mean it’s weird that I make punk and rock and make beats and love pop and house music?
KeiyaA: People find it surprising, not only that I play music, but that I produced my album myself. It’s not a compliment at all. Why shouldn’t it be normal for an artist, especially one who performs as a woman, to control their sound?
Yaeji: My life is my work, and music is my life, so to have someone touch it who doesn’t know what my life looks like is crazy to me.
Angel Bat Dawid: That’s why I started mixing my stuff. I think this needs to be challenged in the recording industry—these words like “master.” I had a problem where I’m mixing my shit, and then for it to be approved for your ears, I’ve got to have this white boy “master.” When I said it out loud, I was like, “That don’t fit well in my spirit.”
Bartees Strange: I’m not leaving the studio without my session. The reason I learned how to do everything myself is because there was so much disrespect. All these white boys want to ignore you and treat you like shit because you didn’t know what a compressor was when you were 20. Don’t tell me what the low end is supposed to sound like! I don’t give a fuck about frequency right now!
Angel Bat Dawid: I know what the bass should sound like, it’s in my head! I need to feel it!
Bartees Strange: It’s about taking control of our music. We’re going to say when it’s finished.
KeiyaA: I’m always going to say when it’s finished. What’s important is that people understand the context of who’s mastering, presenting, and adding the final touches to the music they have access to.
Angel Bat Dawid: One thing that came up during the pandemic was this huge racial disparity thing. It’s still fucked up, artists of color still get treated like shit. But I’m at a place now where I need an alternative because I’m getting triggered left and right, and I’m having to say stuff. I use the music to sonically deal with that issue as well. To me, the stage is the only place where I can be myself. I have no other way to channel my frustrations as a Black woman who plays to mostly white men. They love my shit.
KeiyaA: They think they invented that music.
Bartees Strange: I always say the Beatles had the internet first. Because they had people farming that music, sending it to London. They’re not dummies, they know how to copy and make things sound cool. They had the biggest budget you could have, the greatest studio that ever existed. They could pay people to go and pick off whatever they want. And they put their white stuff on it.
Angel Bat Dawid: We know that the Rolling Stones went down to Mississippi. There was this place called Tin Pan Alley where Black folks could sell their songs. People would buy them, change them a little bit, and put their names on it. A lot of these old songs we love were written by Black people. James P. Johnson was writing opera symphonies and everything. The world is a lot smaller now. You could be in South Africa and we could collaborate, but there has to be an understanding, a difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation.
Amaarae: I relate to that because African music is broadening its appeal. But with Afropop, Afrobeats, and all the offshoots, you can never replicate that rhythm. I keep seeing all these Western artists try and they miss every time. It’s inorganic; just because you heard something doesn’t mean you can just get in the booth and repeat it. You have to understand its origins. For me, my sound is so experimental because I’m a student of music history. I lived in Deep South Georgia, bumblefuck New Jersey, Ghana, London, Paris, just as a kid. To me, repurposing Sade, or Lady Gaga, or Anthony Kiedis is paying homage. But there’s something about the way they incorporate Afrobeats that doesn’t sit right with me. It feels like a rape of the culture.
Bartees Strange: I really identify with what you said, in the sense of: It’s not appropriation if it’s something incredibly personal to me, and I’m repurposing it to tell you more about me.
KeiyaA: We don’t really control the things we consume. We’re not the media gatekeepers, we don’t have access to wealth, and we don’t control who gets to say what the loudest. Especially when we were kids, something that we all had in common is that we synthesized so many things that are considered to be in separate worlds and contextualized it through our own specific lens.
Bartees Strange: You ever come across a white rapper where the only hook is that they’re white? Like Jack Harlow. Guess what? He’s white and rapping over a beat that’s obviously made for Future.
KeiyaA: Do you think their popularity is based off the fact that it’s impressive simply because they are…?
Bartees Strange: Yes. They’re risking nothing. I’m risking everything by being myself.
Angel Bat Dawid: Spotify and things like that… we’re in the age of the robots, and the robots give you everything you want. But as human beings, we actually need to be in the same room with each other, breathe with each other, and the robots don’t understand that. I don’t think using the robots is wrong, we’re just going to have to do more human things to balance out our non-human society. We control the robots, not the other way around.
Yaeji: Also, who made the robots? White people?
Angel Bat Dawid: The robots have white mentalities. If you Google “beautiful human being,” what images are going to come up? I know they’re not going to show an image of me. My last autonomous space is in my own head. This is why one thing I’ve been saying is, if I’m not prioritizing education [for young people], then what the fuck am I doing? We have to think of the generation underneath us, like this 10-year-old piano student I have. I also teach an eight-week class called Great Black Music Class, and we start with the Black composers of the day, like Lil Durk and G Herbo.
Amaarae: I love that you say Lil Durk and G Herbo are composers. Like think about Young Thug—what he does is so jazz. He could riff with Ella [Fitzgerald] and Billie [Holiday]. He can hit harmonies and melodies that nobody is even thinking about.
Amaarae: Yes, these niggas are in my ear with the bullshit so you can get numbers all the time.
Angel Bat Dawid: Make real music and you ain’t got to worry about your numbers.
Amaarae: I’m not even mad about the length of albums because Marvin Gaye was in that bitch with five versions of “I Want You” and they all bang. But there are pros and cons to how accessible things are. You can have a studio in your bedroom—which is great, I’m a product of that too—but some of my favorite artists end up putting out a lot of filler.
Bartees Strange: To me, playlists and stuff is whatever. I know plenty of artists with 80 million plays that can’t sell 100 tickets. I’m going to build this and convince you to invest in me. Even with Live Forever, I didn’t have a label or real playlist support. It was just me doing a show in your town, and we blow it up, and then you buy my album on Bandcamp.
Amaarae: I think about it bending to me. There was a point where I was just an experimental artist, I would do everything but Afrobeats. But then I began to do it but in my own way, fusing all these different pieces, and kids were so fucking excited. All that pressure we have to conform should be fuel. They be fucking with us. Why can’t we fuck with them? Twist it and throw it right back at them.
Amaarae: I’m really going back and forth with the whole label conversation. I’ve been independent for the last four years, and my team truly did this in the mud. The last thing that I want to do is go into a space where [the label] says, “We want to change this, we want to change that.” That’s my biggest fear. We’re having a lot of conversations with labels, and there’s money being thrown around, and I’m really like, “Bro, it’s not the money that’s going to convince me.” I have an issue with the way labels can mishandle artists sometimes. I think about artists that I love, like Kelis or Fefe Dobson: These are artists with really clear objectives or really great stories, but then they get into the space where it’s like, “You have to fit a mold in order for us to believe that we can push you.” And it’s crazy to me because Kelis was the mold for every alternative Black girl. Had artists like that really been given space and resources to grow, there’s no telling what could have been in terms of what certain people see themselves doing now.
Yaeji: The reality is, I do have to think about my streaming numbers. Maybe I have to take this private party jewelry gig because I want to be able to pay all my friends. So it comes up, but when I make music I just have to move with that in mind.
Bartees Strange: Everyone in my life has always worried about money. My mom was an incredible opera singer, and I grew up watching her sing in opera houses all over the world. But it was hard for her: she was successful but the way they treated her, and the money, was shitty. She was a teacher for 20 years and never got tenure. Classic Black shit. It was heartbreaking. So I felt like the only way I was going to be happy was if I found a job and made money. I was a press secretary in the Obama Administration for a while. I was working jobs like that and hated it. All I wanted was to make music, but all I could think about was that if I chose music, I wouldn’t be able to make money, and I wouldn’t be able to have a family. It would be impossible, but everything is impossible. Getting a good job is impossible. Going to a good school is impossible. Graduating is impossible. I didn’t graduate—I lied my ass into the White House—but I was sick of lying and just had to be myself. Now I get DMs all the time from country-ass Black kids like, “Bro, you’re from Mustang, Oklahoma?!”
KeiyaA: I empathize with Bartees’ story so much. I grew up on the Southeast side of Chicago, and my family didn’t think music was the best way to make money. I dropped out of college because I was working full-time, and I was a jazz major, which meant that I was playing in four or five different ensembles as well. My mental health just got so crazy that I quit. All that aside, I got this job at a tech startup that sold tickets for events. I thought I made it: I had a salary, team events, and a fridge with kombucha on tap. [Laughs] But like Bartees said, I was lying about who I am. I was forcing myself to concede, to make money to survive. Success to me looks like what I’m doing right now. Making money for being myself, but also seeing other people who look like me, who synthesize art in the way I do, who see the world in the way I do. I want to fully exist, be rewarded for it, and then bring others along for the same story.
Amaarae: I agree with you 100 percent. Right now, coming out of Ghana, I’m probably the only independent artist that I ever see doing things so far outside of the community. Doing shows out here, playing Pitchfork, Governors Ball, being able to headline. I’m not seeing the kids back home doing it, and it’s because our community has been so restrictive on what kind of music you can make. Me being experimental, there’s not a voice given to it back home. Well, I think the world still needs to hear it. And then the world is receiving it. There’s so many kids that do what I do back home, that are DMing me, “How are you doing it?” How do I show them how I did this so that they don’t have to go through the pain of the rejection that comes from our community?
Back home in Ghana, if you don’t make a record that people can dance to, they’re like, “OK, you’re out of here.” You can’t play shows, you can’t sell music, nothing. Every year, you have to have a great sort of dance record, so that you can play shows so that you can make money. There’s like 1,000 kids who make experimental shit, and they’re all just stuck. Even though there’s the internet, they need resources, they need education. And my question every day is, “How do I provide those resources and how do I educate them?” Because really and truly, I started doing what I was doing with nothing, bro. And my gift was that my mom really insisted, “If you're going to do music, go to college, do your four years when you’re in college, take a music business class, learn everything you can, and I will let you do music.” That’s the most important thing for artists of color: the education. We’re literally wasting our time if we can’t tell people, bar for bar, this is how I did this, take this information, tweak it, whatever—but it’s going to take you less time than it took me.
Angel Bat Dawid: I don’t have any fear. My hope is that there won’t be any of this racial bullshit, and that music can get away from a lot of the problems we’re talking about. One of my dreams is to perform in front of 10,000 people, not for my own shit, but because I really want to hear what 10,000 voices sound like singing together. To get back to how our ancient ancestors used music as part of our community. It’s actually a very Black thing: we had work songs, we had cooking songs. Music was just a part of life. It wasn’t a whole, let me get on a label, let me make a record. I want to see music working more like that again.
Bartees Strange: I’m fearful of a doubling down in the mainstream. Did you see that American Idol-type show but for activism?! I was like, “What the fuck is this, bro?!” I know people in Southern Louisiana who are organizing on environmental justice work in Black communities, who need grants but can't get a check. That is what’s real to me. But this woke culture, self-righteous, white-money thing is eating everything. I don’t even think they’re trying to do the right thing. They’re just trying to say the right words so that people will get off their backs. There’s a better way to do this. Like I shouldn’t need $3 million from the Ford Foundation so I can save my community, there should be systems in place so that we can save ourselves. An activist panel with freaking Usher on it is not going to do it.
Yaeji: My hope comes back to what we’ve been talking about: I’m just trying to be myself and be comfortable with myself, and I want to show that so these younger kids who look like me hear my music and think they can do that, too. To me, it’s not that much more complicated—I’m just doing what I want to do with my intent. I just hope the younger generation doesn’t get blinded by things that don’t matter, like thinking about clout or this playlist or that algorithm.
Amaarae: I think the generation after us is just so radical and self-aware in a way that we’ve just started to learn. They’re fearless. There’s this girl I found on SoundCloud named Staysie Atoms, and she makes beats, records, and mixes her shit all on her phone. When I went to Nashville, I DMed her and we went to the studio. I was working with this multiple Grammy-winning producer Ian Fitchuk—he does Kacey Musgraves’ stuff—and she just takes complete ownership of the session. There’s a producer doing her vocals and she’s like, “I don’t like how you do it,” and then proceeded to do it herself. Most people would be intimidated, and she’s only like 21 or 22 and was like, “Nah, you gotta get my shit wet, this is how you get my shit wet.” I thought that was the coolest shit in the world.
Angel Bat Dawid: I am surrounded by 20-year-old musicians right now, and they are blowing my fucking mind.
Bartees Strange: The shit I get in my DMs?! They’ll be like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And I’m like, “Are you fucking kidding?! I could have never made this.”
Amaarae: I can’t say that I worry about our future in their hands. Because first and foremost, they respect themselves and their boundaries. And they understand the importance of their decision-making in the way that they go about it. But they wouldn’t be that way if we hadn’t been as radical as we are in our generation. We fought to have our voices heard and to unlearn a lot of our past traumas. And they’re completely from the reality that we just finished. It took us until now, but these kids are coming out of the womb with the heat.
Photos and videos by Atiba Jefferson; visual direction / production by Jenny Aborn; styling by Leslie Deckard; make-up/hair by Crystal-Eyez MUA Jojo; cover motion and typography, video editing by Drew Litowitz; header video by Arjun Ram Srivatsa; special thanks to Abi English, Membership Manager for Soho House.
See Amaarae and KeiyaA at the 2021 Pitchfork Music Festival Paris, and see Amaarae at the inaugural Pitchfork Music Festival London.
