Mykki Blanco found paradise on the other side

The American artist – who has worked with the likes of Madonna and Charli xcx – has spent his whole career shirking labels and butting heads with boundaries. With Blanco, no adjective sticks around for long. From his rugged first EP Mykki Blanco & the Mutant Angels, to his holistic fourth studio album Cafe Paradiso, he has consistently refused to conform to genre, gender, and expectation.

Over Zoom, Blanco is sharp and articulate. He’s calling from London, but just moved to the Moroccan city of Tangier, having lived in Hollywood, New York, and all across Europe too. “It kind of feels like you’re in a noir film,” he says of his new home.

With several releases under his belt, one could safely describe Blanco as a music industry veteran. But releasing Cafe Paradiso feels new and strange to him. “I think this feels distinctly different,” he explains slowly, taking time to hand-pick his words. “This is the most different it’s ever felt because the digital landscape has changed so drastically just from the last time I released an album, in 2022. I think the infrastructure around what it used to be to promote an album has completely shifted.”

That colossal shift does not scare him, however. “It’s exciting because I do think I’m someone whose finger is a little more on the pulse. I don’t feel out of touch at all, but it is wildly and dramatically different… We’re seeing this really interesting moment right now where artists are not in competition with content creators, but in competition with the attention economy itself. People are literally shifting how we relate to our devices and how we relate to music because of content creation.”

He believes that his penchant for aesthetic curation has helped him navigate an industry increasingly governed by algorithm and image. “Industries are making musicians bend to this influencer aesthetic. But having a really strong visual language has always been a tenet of my entire career. It’s one of the reasons why I think I shot to notoriety when I did.”

In an era of blurred focus and thumbs manically swiping across black mirrors, Cafe Paradiso doesn’t fight for your attention, but manages to hold it anyway. Though there are definite moments of feverish flare, the album prioritises stillness and introspection, and enjoys a lengthy sense of narrative. It is, as he puts it, an album about enjoying your own company. 

This is what he was picturing: “Walking into one of my favourite diners on an afternoon where I don’t have work, or even a dive bar. It’s 4 pm, and you have an omelette and a gin and tonic or something, and you just sit with your headphones on. And they’re usually playing an old movie in the background, like Indiana Jones or The Godfather, and there’s this sense of cosy contentment. I wanted to make a record that kind of felt like that.”

For Blanco, alone time is crucial. “Most of the times where I really needed to figure something out, I didn’t talk to a therapist – I didn’t talk to anyone at first. I went for a long walk, or I went to a place like a dive bar or a cafe where I knew I wasn’t going to run into anyone and I sat with my journal and wrote and wrote and wrote,” he says. “I’m definitely not an introvert at all. But I often prefer my own energy.”

Surprisingly enough, when Blanco and his team first began the album-making process, the goal was to make a festival record. (This is definitely clear on certain tracks, such as “Butt Sex” and “Spread For Me”.) “That’s an energetic thread that’s through most of the album.” 

Songs with lyrics such as “You like it rough / You like a fast ride / You like to cum / You like my back side” incite a sense of raucous energy. “Definitely some of it comes naturally,” he says, with a wicked grin, about his tendency for the lyrically vulgar. “But I think when I was younger I would maybe try to be a bit more shocking. I would say I’m definitely less self-conscious now. I think it’s just maturing, and feeling like what I make is high-quality enough that it doesn’t need to be provocative just for the sake of being provocative.” The shock factor is there only when he believes it is appropriate.

Though a festival feel was important, storytelling became a priority on the record, an intent that shines on the six-and-a-half-minute epic “FOXES” (where he introduces himself and asks the audience to “give it up” for his amazing band). “I really wanted to create these vignettes, but wanted to make it feel cohesive. I was trying to create a jukebox selection of future classics.”

When Blanco first burst on the scene, he was hailed as a trailblazer in the genre of queer rap – a term which stuck after he came out as HIV positive in 2015. But it was never a descriptor he aligned with. 

“At the time, that felt really limiting,” he sighs. He came of age in the punk, riot grrrl, and noise scenes. “So when I started rapping, but then drawing in these different influences, it felt like it was a really easy label. People associate me with voguing or the ballroom scene, which are awesome things, but that’s not the world that I come from.”

He admits it wasn’t easy. “People were always throwing all of these identity politics on everything that I did. Mykki Blanco: gay rapper; Mykki Blanco: queer rapper, artist, activist, writer. It could never just be: musician Mykki Blanco.

“I suppose the 2010s was an era of reckoning for a lot of things. But overall, I just found it to be really, really dismissive. It literally took eight years of me releasing music for people to, like, not do that anymore. And with the kind of music that I make now, I don’t really even rap,” he says laughing. “And that was also intentional. The music that I’m making right now feels way more open and way less restrictive than just rapping.” He describes hip-hop, in general, as a young person’s game. “Maybe at best you’re going to get two or three raps out of me per album. I just feel way too much freedom using my voice in different ways.”

The musical possibilities, at this stage in his career, feel infinite.

“When you’ve been making music for a long time and you can succeed at a sound that you never thought you’d be capable of making, the level of confidence that comes, it just feels like things break open,” he says. “With Cafe Paradiso, there was this feeling of, I wanted to be more out of body.” Transcending boundaries, transcending skin. “When we were in the studio, when the songs were in the skeleton stage, I’d already be imagining what I’d do onstage.” 

It was an exhausting, but fulfilling process. He always commits to expanding his sound and pushing himself. Taking it easy, musically, is a recipe for disaster, he believes. “If you rest on your laurels, you can definitely get worse.”

As his sound expands, his musical persona and his own identity continue to merge and stand in tandem to each other.

“I would say that it’s pretty cohesive now,” he says of the relationship between Mykki Blanco the person and Mykki Blanco the musician. “Becasue I’ve been Mykki Blanco for so long. I mean, this career, the experiences that I’ve had…” He shrugs, as if it’s simple. “I am Mykki.”