Anyone that's ever met me knows how much my heart will always be in the music.
There's days when I miss it tremendously. There's days when I hate PTSD from the memories I'm shocked I can still vividly recall from 4 AMs in cities I'm not from. Coming down like a crashing wave against the Alcatraz coastline, dreading the radio interview at a station no one's ever heard of in midwest in two hours.
Fuck it. They're superb stories and I'm not sorry.
I became a "Creative Director" by accident years ago as one of the openers on Mac Miller's first real tour in 2011. RIP Malcom.
That's a whole story for a whole other time. Long made short, however, the eventual moral is the Lord works in mysterious ways.
One path can pivot into quite another. It's less one door closes so another can open type beat, and more, like, there's now a whole past life that existed on the other side of a portal that can only be accessed thru some type of lucid state.
Either way, in whatever manner it can be framed, music has always owned a very large part of my whatever is left of my soul.
However- its given me a wild advantage working with artists to develop the worlds their brands exist in. As much work as I do for majors, what I really dig is emerging indie acts that reject the slave ships and 360s and build cults that power their own futures.
It's the place where I have the most freedom to take the brand & immersive world in a completely free and unexpected direction.
I've gotten really bored with "status quo" Top 40 music in general lately and hence, the unwritten rules of its aesthetic presentation. I spend more time alone at abstract installation wings of galleries lately than I do in trend forums. I think its because I'm focused more on the "why" behind each unique narrative and what shit feels like than I am trying to fuckin impress other creatives.
We all know how the programs work.
We all know the same asset wells and blah blah blah.
It's what you do with them that matters. It's how they feel, and how they make others feel, more importantly, that moves the needle.
Now here's some music shit on that tip.
Artist: BigXThaPlug (Dallas, TX)
Sound: Red Dirt Rap (The fusion of post modern trap & country)
World Inspo: X is larger than life in every way possible, and hailing from the "Everything's Bigger" state from Dallas, TX I wanted to really lean into the dusk falling over wide open plains, syrup-dipped woozy blurs that looks like what metallic string slide guitar riffs feel like, if that shit makes sense.
I've also been hella into indie short films lately ever since the homie Sotorios put me on to Ari Asters early works, which led me to Italian cine masterpiece J'Ador. The title card of Simone Bozzelli's fascist underworld di Italia is fuckin' perfect. It served (in no small way) as the inspo for the textured typography for the X concept "Wilder West."
Artist: TYLA YAHWEH (Orlando, FLA)
Sound: Alt-trap that blends thrash punk, wave 2 Soundclound kid shit & LoFi Bass for bars.
World Inspo: After I heard the audio stems for what would become the push single for Ty's 2023/24's Heart Full Of Rage 2 "Sex Symbol" as an Apple voice note from the studio at like 3 AM (in the form of a text that woke me up on one of the rare nights I was actually asleep) this shit kinda made itself if I'm honest.
I wanted to embrace the subculture roots that all converged in the blender that is Yahweh's sonic pallet.
An ounce of punk pop, a heavy cup of blown out Soundcloud lofi basstrap, a pinch of emotronic for the scene girls & that moody angst that was born out of Lil Peep's bedroom closet mic. This same sonic blueprint was taken to the next level after Peep tragically left us by XxX & Juicewrld, who, as cruel fate has it, also are forever young.
I was doing alot more fashion work than music at this particular time, and playing around alot with "model in front of thematic nod to pieces influence" type shit for streetwear brands. One such was Kollar from Toronto, which Ty was in that season's look book for and the Rorschach test of a bleach splatter jacket was a superb jawn to contrast neon praying hands in front of.
I actually had the same jacket, and wore it on a night walk thru Hell's Kitchen on one of the first night's I spent in my (new) studio at the time. I ended up on W. 51st and stumbled across a neon cross at St. Paul's House which read "Sin Will Find You Out" in sleek, thin neon tubing within the crucifix.
Shot a few low angle selfies like a fucking tourist while people looked at me like the biggest asshole with a selfie stick that was not in Times Square, but I had my reasons.
The jacket and neon Christian iconography played very nicely with each other. And it sparked this above shit.
Artist: Miyaa V (Bronx NY)
Sound: New York Drill with elite juxtaposed bubblepop samples turned block bangers.
World Inspo: Turning the chaos of the Boogie Down Bronx into a Willy Wonka-esque world. Fantasy-born creatures inspired by various drugs, traps turned Candyland board spaces & childlike surrealism to contrast the harsh reality of the coldest & still the least gentrified of the five boroughs. I Don't aim to re-do what's NY drill's status quo typically is. It's boring as fuck.
Throw away expectational playbook and reimagine shit is more the mode I'm on. Miyaa always rocks hyper-colorful hair in bundles, and that served as the first inspo touchpoint. From there I just kinda ran with it.
Artist: OnlyJahmez (Newark, NJ)
Sound: Hook heavy Punktrap baptized in midnight oil
World Inspo: Jahmez & I first met in 2022 thru his former manager & my brother Rich Zeller at Zeller & industry heavyweight Mike Cameron's talent factory imprint Sloppy Vinyl right outside of Jersey City. I spent months there, back and forth from New Haven or my Hell's Kitchen studio crossing the Hudson and dipping in and out at odd times to avoid the claustrophobic nightmare that is the Holland Tunnel to I-78. Jahmez is highly creative, with a penchant for hooks made for arenas over pop punk guitar and 808s - leaning heavy into a heartbreak king narrative with his "Respectfully Toxic" wave.
I spent hours in the studio listening to records build, and being intricately involved in the process. Everything with Jahmez had an almost Frank Miller's Sin City like texture, but sonically, and this needed to amplify that.
Broken hearts, red skinny ties under oversized 90's runway suits, color dipped braids & the use of distortion pedals on lead vocals inspired the coffin-nail-and-dystopian-trap typography for the single "Starving."
I promise the shit says "Starving."
Now you can't unsee it.
Artist: STEPZ (London, UK)
Sound: Gen Z's version of "Clipse" Grinding" Headrock Hiphop
World Inspo: London Christian rapper Stepz crushed "Rock"- doing over 100 M on Spotify and peaking at Number 7 on UK Billboard Charts, I wanted to elevate the original concept for the US single. I was really into DIY collage zines at the time. I'd collect every single one I could find in the dust covered hallways of St. Mark's Place.
The record is a straight banger, and describing it as Clipse's "Grinding" for the TikTok generation really isn't a stretch. I took every iconic element of iconic rock star's hall mark features and made a face. I dont really need to tell you that shit cuz if you're reading this, your eyes work. None of the rock star composites need any introduction- kinda why I did it in the first place.
