An Interview With Klein About Road Rap, Grime, Reality TV, and Whatever Else

Pitchfork: I think the silences and background chatter on sleep with a cane trip me out sometimes. It’s almost like I’m listening to someone listen to the album, which makes it feel realistic and dreamy at the same time. Is that intentional?

Klein: It’s like that newer Top Boy. When Drake took over, one of the main things I didn’t like was the lack of a score, but upon watching it again it kind of works. Because the music that does play just feels like the music people would actually play off their phone, so it makes it quite realistic. I’d like to see a film go fuck it and take away the score. I don’t need manipulative music to guide me.

I feel like I’ve watched a few old noirs do that.

I did my own film and it took me an hour before I added a score, it just felt too easy. Like, did you see The Whale?

Nah, I think I’m good on that one.

They didn’t trust the audience to feel sorry for him, so they just kept playing this sad music while he’s eating and stuff.

One show that’s comfortable with silence is Love Island, they’ll have these, like, two or three minute conversations with no music, and it makes scenes feel so intimate.

The UK one innit? I love it. That’s why I love British TV: It’s so quiet, you’ll hear like this [Klein scratches at the collar of her black polo] and to me that is a score, too. I used to keep sounds of everything, like me sweeping and drinking water. That’s probably because I was a logger for TV for a hot minute. It was super fun.

What does a logger do?

I won’t name the show, but I was working on this one reality show on Channel 4 when I was younger. It was a crazy show about men being stupid. But each day I’d be given a roll of cameras and have to log what a specific character is doing. Like, let’s find all the bits of Jack laughing and put that into a folder. It’s because the show had such a fast turnaround time, so if you needed to find a character doing something, it would be right there. Once, there was a character getting a lot of flack, and I saw some other employees log when he falls asleep but not when the other guys do. It was a big eye opener how you can manipulate TV before it even gets to an editor.

Was it tedious work going through all of that footage?

I kind of used to live my life like a Sim so I didn’t get bored. It was just life. But I think that job definitely played a big part in how I was putting together my own stuff. I used to just have a folder for everything. You know, finding drums that are just like kitchen sounds or whatever.

It’s always so interesting to hear that industrial sound filter into rap. I feel like that shows how people are feeling. Like no, we don’t need that Timbaland drum. Let’s move on. Let’s wrap it up. Let’s move the genre forward. But even then everyone can sound like an algorithm of each other once everyone starts doing it.

Are you anti type beats?

No, but I feel like people are scared to do stuff without permission. Like, if you try something new and people don’t like it, it’s OK. It’s a recession man, we got to experiment [laughs]. I saw something you wrote about my album [marked] and it had me weak. You compared it to, like, a wrestling theme, or something like that, and I couldn’t tell if that meant you liked it or not, but I listened to it and was like, “Huh, makes sense.”

Have you always been open to criticism of your music?

If I ever thought too much about that then I just wouldn’t make stuff. Like, you might not get why I wanted to have 10 minutes of silence, but I do, because it’s dedicated to Mark Duggan and I wanted to do that for him. Shit, I’m free. What the fuck? That’s why I have a song on the record called “young, black and Free.” I remember I started thinking that one day when I was watching The Color Purple, the new one—it’s quite bad. But halfway through, I started crying. We really lived in a world where they wouldn’t let us read. I called my friend and was like, “Yo, we running it up! Books are back bitches!” They were like, “Uh, what?” That’s why I made that song; we can really do anything we want. That’s like when people call my music “experimental,” I just think of it as being myself.

Do you ever make albums with an idea about how you would like people to feel about it?

I made one record like that, it was called Harmattan. I wanted to make a record that an auntie could hear and actually chill to. But usually it’s just about capturing how I’m feeling. A lot of times people seem to gravitate to my more somber stuff, which I gather is because of a solitude thing. That’s why I think marked was cool, I made that like all in one session, standing, in a hyped mood and that’s the kind of record you can listen to with more than one person [laughs]. But, like, when you’re writing, I’m sure you don’t think too much about how people are going to feel about your opinion.

I probably do a little subconsciously, but not really.

You know a writer who is like that?

Who?

Hilton Als.

I read his book The Women recently. It was really cool stylistically.

He’s a nuts writer. I have a long way to go, but I have a secret art critic blog. But from what I’ve read of White Girls, it’s so—I’m gonna use that word— “experimental.” It blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and that’s something I try to be honest about in my work.

It does make your music sound raw, it’s mad hip-hop in that way. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I think my approach to music is inspired a lot by Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner and the videos that used to air on Channel AKA, an iconic British grime channel, where if you had an idea you piece it together and go fuckin’ ham. I feel like I work like the mixtape side of rap, like I’m gonna have a CD, sell it to 50 people, and then move onto the next thing.

What was it specifically about Boy in da Corner that you meshed with?

It’s just really vulnerable. I remember when I was younger I cried to “Brand New Day,” because I was growing up in South London and it wasn’t easy—and having someone say that it was hard was everything. Then they released the instrumental album and it’s just like, here’s a flute, here’s a xylophone. That Fruity Loops drum kick. To me, it represented lost youth. I thought about that all while making my new album, like the harmonica on “score for J.” I think of that song like it could be in a Tyler Perry movie. Someone gets murdered and kidnapped, and then at the end we’re in church and it’s all fine [laughs].

So it’s more the mindset of Boy in da Corner than the specific grime sound?

It’s just so pure and honest. You can tell he was just figuring it out. It wasn’t so metronomic. Because sometimes, when you use Ableton’s metronome, it can take away from that. Like bro, I’m Nigerian. We Black. We don’t need them to know where to put a drum or a piano chord. We don’t have to tune a guitar that way just because they said that’s how you’re supposed to.

Were you a big grime head in general?

I loved Ghetts. I loved Tim and Barry. When I was younger we used to just be able to go into the Tim and Barry studios and there would just be people DJing, I thought I was in the future. It was a pretty crazy time. It was my introduction to music that was very fucked and manic, with loops and echoes, people writing the most insane bars. Obviously it was very male-centric. But there were artists like Lioness and Shystie that I’m surprised didn’t become super famous because they were fuckin’ sick. Shystie also had an interactive show where you basically get to decide what happened each episode. It was kind of a musical. You’d love it. Then came Nines, but I was more of a Giggs person.

I’m taking Nines.

I like Nines but sometimes with him I just want to read his words. But Giggs, I was looking back and that nigga with his emo jacket and chains was like a little hipster on his indie sleaze shit. Like when he did that video for “Talking Da Hardest,” I was like, Fair enough. No one could tell me what a video is supposed to be after that. There’s a level of play that makes it really personal.

Do you think your songs without vocals are just as personal as the ones with them?

I tend to hyperfixate on things, so I end up picking up random instruments to communicate without using my voice. I think it’s more vulnerable when I don’t use my voice. Like this new record is pretty emo and you can always feel my voice trying to come through and it really doesn’t all the way until the end.