clipping. on Afrofuturism, Fast Rapping and Sound Design
Upon the release of their second Sub Pop album, the hip-hop trio speak with Todd L. Burns
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clipping. have been compared to Death Grips, Dälek and other “experimental rap” groups at length, but it’s almost better to tie them together with Animal Collective, Black Dice or Oneohtrix Point Never. Or you could compare them to no one at all. It’s not really about the sound of Daveed Diggs, Wiliam Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. It’s more the state of mind. They’re among a generation of bands that has grown up in the past few decades that is precise, but exploratory – open to using any and every sound that comes their way as a means to express their creativity.
\n\nIn conversation, though, it’s clear that hip-hop is the base from which they spring. Their reference points are Bay Area rappers (Hutson and Diggs grew up in Oakland together), Parliament-Funkadelic and image-heavy rappers like Scarface and Raekwon. They love just about everything though. (Cam’ron, Bone Thugs, Fu-Schnickens. The list is long and varied.) They also have a shared love of theater. Snipes is a sound designer for the stage, Hutson has a Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies and Diggs, as you may have heard, starred in Hamilton and won a Tony Award for his dual role as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson.
\n\nSplendor & Misery is the group’s second album for Sub Pop, and it reflects the considered approach of the trio in general. According to the label’s website, it’s an “Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album that follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him.” Todd L. Burns caught up with the group earlier this week to discuss all of the above and much more.
You want to be presented in a way that feels honest, but at the end of the day that probably shouldn’t be your job.
Todd L. Burns
\n\nWhat are people asking you about around this album that you haven’t been asked before?
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nHonestly, there aren’t a lot of questions that we haven’t been asked before. There’s a lot of, “How did you meet?” “Do you like being compared to Death Grips?” We got that one today.
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nWith this one, people certainly ask a lot about, like, “Why did we decide to call it Splendor & Misery? Why is it a concept album? What do we think of concept albums?”
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\n“What concept albums did we grow up with?” We struggle to not answer with all the nerdy things we don’t want to tell anyone we like.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nOne of the things in the press release I found interesting was the fact that you love “genre fiction.” Who is the genre fiction fan?
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nI think all of us. But William the most, for sure. The one with the PhD is the biggest reader. [laughter]
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nI think it’s sort of our personalities and our interests. I don’t know if everyone would call it this, but I’m sort of genre chauvinist. I think genre is really important and I will ride for trashy, pulpy stuff. My favorite thing in the world is really excellently made, very smart, literary garbage, right? Something that is, by genre affiliation, considered trash, but that has unbelievable literary aspirations. It’s that middle ground, Oscar Bait, New York Times book review section stuff that I’m not particularly interested in. Novels about some sad middle class family getting a divorce or whatever? Fuck that.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nWhat’s the last great example of the stuff you do like?
Fast rapping is like candy. It’s rap candy.
William Hutson
\n\nIf you’re going to write some sort of genre fiction, and then you’re going to sell it in the middle of the store because you need to feed your family, I resent you a little bit, but I’ll also read your book. The new Colson Whitehead is great, but it has the most middle browy advertising. The book itself is fucking spectacular, though, and I love everything he’s written. It has a sticker for Oprah’s Book Club on the front, and every time I buy one of those I just tense up just because I don’t need the clerk to see that in the pile of things that I’m buying. That just embarrasses me somehow.
Todd L. Burns
\n\nThings do need to be packaged once they’re created.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nThe thing that I’m slowly realizing is that it’s not always so important that it get packaged in the way you wish it got packaged. It’s a hard line, right? You want to be presented in a way that feels honest and feels true to what you imagine the work you’re trying to make is, but at the end of the day that probably shouldn’t be your job. Selling your album probably shouldn’t be your job.
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nNobody is going to ever hear what you hear in something you make or appreciate. Nobody is going to ever correctly interpret artist intent. That’s never going to happen. People are going to like the things that you make for reasons that you don’t think are valid or even exist in the product, and people are going to dislike them for similar reasons.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nI’m sure that happened when the second album came out. People who loved the first album – and heard something specific in it – were like, “Why did you do this on the second album?!”
William Hutson
\n\nIt all depends on when you found us, too. If you hear us the first time and you’re like, “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” We’re not actually going to provide that another time. You’ve then heard a lot of our tricks and you’re normalized to it. When the Wriggle EP came out and people were like, “Your last album fucked my brain open. This one just sounds like so poppy and mainstream.” No, it’s like, “That’s not us that changed. You’re just used to the types of sounds we make.”
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nDaveed, you’re working now a bit on Black-ish and obviously you were doing Hamilton for a while. Do you find that the acting and the theater stuff plays in to what you do with clipping.? Or does it have no connection?
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nI’ve always done those things, so it doesn’t really feel like any different. I don’t know. It’s only because of this last thing that they seem to be in conversation at all. They were just totally separate worlds for everybody else. I mean, all three of us have degrees in theater.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nWe have like six between us.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nI have the fewest degrees in theater. [laughter]
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nAnd you have a Tony Award.
Daveed Diggs
\n\nThe Tony Award winner has the fewest theater degrees!
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nThere’s no Tony Award for best academic book about...
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nWoah! I didn’t tell you guys this. This girl just gave me a book last night, a leather-bound book, and she goes, “I wrote 200 pages of essays about clipping. lyrics. Here they are.”
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nWhat?!
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nI barely got to read it, but it was really academic, super well-written. She said that the thing that she related to the most was our elevating depictions of what it’s like to be poor. She said, “The way that you and your group speak about poverty is so beautiful.”
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nI’d be interested in that because that’s not one of the things that strikes me as particularly unique about us. I think about that as something that is unique to rap music. I think when we do it, it’s a very specific reference to the way Scarface does it or Raekwon does it.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nOr Wayne.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nWhy do you say Scarface first?
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nBecause he’s so good. [laughter]
William Hutson
\n\nHe’s so good. God, because he’s the best. There is so much in Scarface. There is a lot about poverty and he has a very poetic view of it. Also Raekwon, because he has this spirit animal closeness to us. He’s so imagistic. It’s almost like haiku, his snapshots of what poverty or his upbringing or his neighborhood looks like.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nYou remember that one interview with Scarface where he said would obsess for weeks over the first line of a song? It kind of changed my whole thing when I heard him say that. I went back and was like, “Oh yeah, I got to figure out these first lines. I am not putting enough work in.”
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nDaveed, you’re obviously a fast rapper. I’m curious, did the music inspire the speed? Do you feel like you can go faster because of the production?
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nThat it warrants it? I mean, sort of.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nI love that you’re known as a fast rapper now, because that was not really a thing for a long time.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nI worked on that a lot.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nI don’t know, maybe I’m just dumb and that’s what it takes to impress me but I have always loved fast rappers so much.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nIt’s like candy. It’s like rap candy.
William Hutson
\n\nThat’s what I mean by “maybe I’m dumb.” I mean I loved Fu-Schnickens when I was a little kid. I though Chip Fu was the fucking shit. The fastest songs were always my favorite ones. “Flashin’” by E-40 was always my favorite E-40 song. Bizzy [Bone] and Krayzie [Bone] are fast.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nTwista. Busta has the best diction of any fast rapper. I don’t know how he does that.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nTech N9ne has incredible diction. I don’t keep up with his career very well but –
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nIt’s tough to keep up with. I think Murder Dog [magazine] was the only one who did in the press.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nThat magazine was so good. Daveed and I are from the Bay and that was the only magazine that –
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\n– talked about any of the rappers that we liked. Nobody else was going to put Keak da Sneak on a cover. Messy Marv.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nYou originally connected over Bay Area rap?
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nWe connected over tag. We were friends at 9 years old.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nAnd George Clinton. We played tag a lot and we really liked Parliament-Funkadelic. I remember we had this fantasy, in 4th or 5th grade we would draw characters from the Parliament albums. There were all these elaborate stories with characters and we were like, “When we grow up, we’re going to make this cartoon movie, but it’s the plot of all the Parliament albums.” We would draw pictures of characters.
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Daveed Diggs
\n\nI totally remember that. We used to use every school assignment to try and further this. I keep thinking about how everyone keeps asking me to do another musical. There should really be a good P-Funk musical and they should be the band. That would be the reason they could stop touring. They would still get to play every day.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nP-Funk definitely seems highly rated, yet still seems underrated somehow.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nI think for us, particularly, it has to do with the way the three of us listen to music. Generally, people don’t listen to music that way, with this obsession over every choice. With P-Funk, there’s so much. There’s so many choices in all of those records.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nI was so attracted to the elaborateness. The whole cosmology of George Clinton’s universe was so... There were so many little drawings to obsess over. It’s like an Iron Maiden cover or something.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nIs this where the Afrofuturism of the new album stems from?
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nYeah, totally.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nThis is you doing Parliament.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nWell, it’s Jonathan and I admitting how unfunky we are, deep down. Therefore, we have to do Parliament filtered through our interest in horror. It’s like, “What is Afrofuturism filtered through H. P. Lovecraft?”
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nWas that the mission statement from the beginning?
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nI think that was really clear. We definitely discussed it. We also talked about the ending of this record a lot. Because in any destination he goes to, he’s a slave. So the idea is that he pilots the ship into the unknown with the hope that the ship will somehow crash land after he’s long dead on some uninhabited world. More than likely, it’s just going to keep going into the unseen world until the end of time. Making the void and the infinite unknown a triumphant choice at the end of this record was the heated discussion of many a night while making this record.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nOblivion is preferable to white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. And the discussion was how to make it sound like piloting into a black hole feel like a powerful choice.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nWe’ve never really done a triumphant song.
William Hutson
\n\nH. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism is only terrifying if you’re a straight white man and you thought you were the center of the universe anyway. To anyone else – and this is why his racism comes into it – finding out that you’re not the most important thing in the universe is a relief. I think it’s interesting that his characters go mad when they figure out that humanity doesn’t matter. It’s only terrifying if you ever thought you were important, if everything in society has propped you up as the dominant category.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nWhy’d you guys want to tell this story now?
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nWell, we wanted to tell it two years ago when we finished the record.\nHonestly, there were so many articles about Afrofuturism in the past two years that I was panicking that we were going to release this the moment that Afrofuturism was not cool. We were ahead of the curve and didn’t get it out in time. Also, we were going to go in the studio the weekend after Michael Brown was killed and we were thinking, “OK, the next song we make has to be a fucking banger.” I remember calling Daveed a couple of days before we went in and was like, “I don’t feel like I want to go to a party.” We were all bummed out. So we made a song sort of about police violence. I remember we had to sort of couch it in, “Hey, usually we don’t do such overtly political things –”
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nBut how can we do anything else?
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nWe hadn’t worn our politics on our sleeve up until then. We were trying to do something that was a lot more coded in its politics before that. I think we just sort of let it go at that point.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nThe intention of removing the first person perspective from clipping. made us hyper aware. You had to be sneaky about getting your politics in there, right? The way we sort of did that was by being really gender fluid with pronouns. Things that you’re not going to catch unless you’re really listening. That way it doesn’t assign a person to this non-person. Right? The reason I never say “ni++a” on a track is because that assigns, in rap music, a non-white persona to it, for the most part.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nYeah, there are very few white people who have said that word on record.
The first song I did without using the word “i” was really hard. Then it forced me to be a lot more interesting.
Todd L. Burns
\n\nHow much of that is a group discussion?
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nKind of everything is a group discussion.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nTo never say the N word was definitely Daveed’s –
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nThat was me. Let’s say anybody wants to interview us and I can’t be there. I’m not going to have you guys have to justify the use of the word.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nThe worst word in the English language. It’s been called that. The first person, the no “I” was my idea and my sort of challenge.
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nWe made two songs before that. And on the third song we said, “Hey, why don’t we do a song not in first person?” The first handful of songs were us learning how to do this, how to make this project. What it should be and defining the roles.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nEspecially at that time, we were having like three and four hour discussions before every song. Everything was really song specific. It was always about, “All right, what are the things that this song needs?” The first song I did with that “no I” constraint was really hard. Then as I kept doing it, it forced me to be a lot more interesting. When it’s just a person, you can brag about yourself for 16 bars really easily. There’s so many ways I can say that I’m dope. One of the things that work really well for clipping. songs is establishing a really wide picture and then zooming in on little things that no one is going to catch otherwise.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nIt’s very Raekwon.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nYeah, it’s very Raekwon.
William Hutson
\n\nWe’d done enough interviews where I remember thinking, “Well, maybe Cam’ron might be our precedent?” We couldn’t think of anyone. Then we were in Germany, driving from a show, listening to Raekwon’s verse on “Skew It On the Bar-B” and it doesn’t have the word “I” in it. He says “me” twice and “my,” but doesn’t say “I” in it. I was sitting in the backseat and I remember just leaping up, “Holy shit! Raekwon didn’t say ‘I.’” And we were just like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to listen to every fucking Raekwon song.” It never occurred to us until way later that that might be the strongest precedent for what we were trying to do. It’s sort of like convergent evolution. We can’t ever claim direct influence, because it was unconscious. Obviously we all listened to Raekwon a lot before.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nWhat’s the most unexpected sound source that you used on this album?
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nThis one doesn’t have super-interesting sound sources that I can think of, because it’s supposed to take place in a spaceship, so what we’re sort of going for is film foley tricks where we’re recording incredibly mundane things that, in a different context, you don’t recognize. City bus brakes and espresso machines are, like, airlock doors opening. I recorded slamming Jonathan’s oven door and Jonathan’s dryer.
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nIt was a lot of figuring out what object would make the sound that would evoke the sort of science fiction element. I remember putting microphones in a coffee maker to use it as kind of a reverb chamber to feel like that space rumble was coming through a space helmet.
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nWhenever Daveed’s character raps – whenever the human raps and not the computer – we would broadcast it through a little FM transmitter to a handheld radio, and then stick a microphone on the radio. We had this idea, like the opening of that movie Contact, where the spaceship had caught up with the electromagnetic signals sent out from the Earth at a certain time. Once we’ve hit warp drive, we can catch up to the first radio broadcast in space. That’s a nerdy thing to say.
Jonathan Snipes
\n\nThe main beat in “Body and Blood” is made out of a recording of the rain gutter in front of my house, and the way it slooshed water.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nWhat makes for a good field recording?
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nThat’s the amazing thing about field recordings: You don’t know while you’re making them. I definitely have learned, by being in clipping., to not throw out the parts of my field recording that have mic-handling noise, someone laughing in the background or a car passing by. You just cut it and label it, and it’ll come in handy.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nWhat’s the labeling system? I always find that fascinating. Is it just “Car 1,” “Car 2,” “Car 3?”
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nI have a very long document that I’ve written about my file-naming system for field recordings. It’s on its way to getting turned into an article for Designing Sound. To me, it’s about making sure that you’re labeling everything that you might ever search for at some point, so I always try to think of sounds as a sentence. It’s like, “something is performing some action to some object that makes the sound.” “A bow on a violin.” “A soft mallet hitting a vase.” I spend a lot of time thinking about this.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nI like hearing them talk about this because my brain does not work like that at all. We’ll be on tour, stopped by some train tracks, and Jonathan will just hop out of the car with the recorder, getting audio of himself stepping on gravel and pointing a microphone at all kinds of things. I’m aware of the sounds, but it would never occur to me that that would be a useful sound for anything. Working with this band, I’m aware of these things more than I have before.
Honestly, if it takes two weeks to work on a song to be 1% better, we’ll do it.
Todd L. Burns
\n\nWhat have you learned from these two over the years?
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nI’m a better writer because of clipping.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nIt seems like they push you.
\n\nDaveed Diggs
\n\nAlways! Well, recording with them is different from recording with anybody else. We’re going to do it again if there’s a mumbled word. Their attention to detail sonically is so different than most people I’ve worked with. I tend to obsess over the writing of a thing, and the phrasing of a thing, and the cadence of a thing, but once it comes to technicality of recording something, I don’t have the ears for that. There are things that I would let slide that they won’t, and in the final product, I appreciate them.
\n\nEverything I’ve done with clipping. is the best thing I’ve ever done. When I play those things, those are the things that I listen back to, and there’s no notes. Once we release the song, that’s the song we wanted to put out, and I’ve never had that feeling before in any other project at all; where you do a thing and it’s the exact thing you wanted to do. I didn’t know that existed as an artist, really, until I started working with them.
\n\nTodd L. Burns
\n\nSo you do a lot of takes.
\n\nJonathan Snipes
\n\nDoing a lot of takes is something that I got interested in when William and I did a soundtrack for a movie about The Shining. I got pretty interested in the mythos of Kubrick doing like a hundred takes. He said, “When you’ve got a good one, why would you stop?” You’ve got a good one, and maybe 20 takes later, something interesting will show up. Because you’ve got a good one – once you have safety net – why not?
\n\nWilliam Hutson
\n\nWhen we’re working with younger rappers who go through something once, and they said the words and they were sort of on beat, and they’re like, “All right, let’s move on; we’re good...” We’re just not that type. I’ve said this in a bunch of interviews, but honestly, if it takes two weeks to work on a song to be 1% better, we’ll do it.