That can certainly be gleaned from Dijon’s music, or from hearing him talk about how Funcrusher Plus rewired his brain. He can wax poetic about sampling as a workaround for the constraints imposed on hip-hop’s early iterations, or as a way to draw out tension between two seemingly disparate ideas. But it’s also a convenient vehicle for his instinct to self-immolate on the business side. “There was a little bit of being a fucking asshole,” he concedes about the way he stuffed even more samples onto Baby at the 11th hour. The attitude became: “ ‘Fuck it—there’s no money in this shit anyway. There’s no money here. Give the whole song away to 500 different people. I don’t care.’ Which seems, like, insane when you have a kid.”
While he’s never before been this visible, Dijon’s contempt for the commercial market is still razor-toothed. “I’m totally aware of the naivety of even trying to resist it,” he says, also acknowledging that the ease of uploading and distributing songs is what made his career possible in the first place. But, he asks, when streaming services often seem like a “testing grounds for machine learning,” why not try to fuck things up a bit? “I don’t have much to say in terms of macro assessments of the universe,” he says, “but it’s like, if I’m going to do the fucking thing, if I can be a sore thumb within the thing, just by making the music a little bit more difficult to just sit there…. Why not do that?”
Imagine: It’s the middle of the night in the early 2010s, and you’re pulling into the 24-hour Walmart in Lansdowne, Maryland, just south of Baltimore. Going the opposite way is a striking young man, on foot, carrying a massive box—the new TV he’s just purchased with the tips he’s saved from waiting tables, now on its way to the renovated Victorian house where he was living then. He thought to himself, They got me. “I remember being like, ‘This is fucked,’ ” Dijon says. “I’m so broke, but now I can watch Archer.” Instead of chipping away at the impossible goal, he was streaming, streaming, streaming.
