Photos by Evan RodgersLeikeli47 claims to be ageless, which may be true. In person, the rapper projects a little kidâs brand of infectious energy, where she makes the people around her more enthusiastic. She poses gamely for photos and discusses everything, from the voice memos where she stores song ideas to her Nike FuelBand, with a conspiratorial eagerness. As an artist, sheâs already endured a couple waves of internet music trends and somehow come out more on the pulse than ever, a radically positive figure for an era that suddenly demands that. She very well could be living in her own time. She wears a ski mask constantly, so itâs hard to tell.When we met, Leikeli47 was wearing an orange mask and gray sweats, and she approached me with a giant smile and outstretched hand. She was shorter than Iâd expected, and her upbeat attitude caught me off guard, although it shouldnât have. At first glance, the ski mask thing seems like a kind of outdated relic of certain era of creepy, horror-infused Tumblr rap, increasingly out of place in the radically transparent, Snapchat-friendly world of 2015. But Leikeli47 has avoided the trap of being a short-lived web curiosity because her mask isnât a statement of what she wants people to focus on: Itâs not a hollow effort at intimidation but rather an emblem of what she wants people to ignore. âIt distracts from everything that everybody would normally go to,â she explained, âwhatâs she look like, whatâs her shape, her complexion.â The semi-automatic rifles that blanket her visual work are similarly explained away as LKs: âwhatâs coming out of this gun is love,â she told me. âWhatâs coming out of that gun is fun music.âThe word âfunâ comes up a lot when Leikeli47 (pronounced Leh-kay-lee) describes her music. âItâs the funnest thing ever,â she told me at one point. âItâs like an escape. You hear that boom bap, and you just want more. Itâs fun!â She explained her production process, which involves using found sounds and turning her own weird a cappella vocal experiments into beats, as âme just coming up with different creative noises. Itâs fun, you know what I mean?â At one point she summarized her mindset to me, saying, âIâm a kid. Iâm never growing up, and I donât care what anyone has to say.âWhat people have to say, though, is pretty much all pro-fun. Along with two well-received mixtapes, 2012âs LK-47 and 2014âs LK-47 Pt. II, she quickly attracted a flurry of media attention for her arresting videos despite refusing to do interviews until now. She also found some high-profile fans in Diplo and Skrillex, who invited her to play her first proper show with them this past New Yearâs Eve at Madison Square Garden. Sheâs signed to RCA, which is home to acts like Miley Cyrus, Sia, and A$AP Rocky, and last week she released her self-titled debut project. Her music, which finds her rapping in a machine-gun patter and occasionally singing with naked bravado over colorful, dance-friendly beats, is hypermodern, with a sound that falls somewhere between Azealia Banks, A$AP Ferg, and M.I.A. Itâs aggressive but not antagonistic: It bounces along chirpily, and it always makes the listener feel like a cool accomplice and trusted friend. Itâs the kind of thing that isâliterally, one imagines, for kids who might not feel that kind of presence in their own livesâlife affirming.Leikeli47 grew up as one such kid, without many friends. A self-described loner, she dealt with getting picked on and, due to her shyness, found it hard to connect to other kids who might have had similarly offbeat interests in things like music and skating until she was older (most of her friends now, she said, are also musicians). She grew up in various parts of Brooklyn but mostly in Bed-Stuy, the same neighborhood as her musical idol The Notorious B.I.G. She describes her childhood bouncing between housing projects and apartments of different relatives as one with âa good familyâ but âsome rough times,â adding that her parents are both dead. âPeople are absent,â she told me, explaining her childhood. âYou learn things on your own. You become an adult really fast. I sit here and I tell you Iâm a kid, but Iâm a mature kid.â One of the ways she found to cope with the challenges she faced was making her own music.âJust imagine waking up to the things that go on out there,â she said. âYou have no way to escape, and you have this beautiful thing called music. Itâs just like, man, Iâm going to wake up and look out the window and paint that dirty building that everybody looks at, this dusty corner that everybody looks at. Iâma paint this in a way that makes it so beautiful that theyâre going to love it. People are going to want to know where Iâm from, and theyâre going to want to dance to it.âMuch of Leikeli47âs appeal comes from the way she rejects easy narratives. Her music is made with an unconventional approach and spills across genre boundaries. She prefers to categorize her vocal delivery as âcommunicatingâ rather than rapping. She doesnât really subscribe to the idea that an artist in 2015 needs to be active across social media: She doesnât have a Twitter or an Instagram, choosing instead to interact with her fans mostly through the Ask function on Tumblr (she quipped that if she had a Twitter all she would use it for would be to post Pusha T lyrics). She has an unmistakable Brooklyn swagger, but sheâs bored of the New York hip-hop sceneâs fixation with bringing New York âbackâ: âI think you just need to keep pushing it forward versus bringing something back that donât need to be brought back,â she told me. âItâs like, you know, thereâs so many great entertainers that came before. They did it: They put that stamp on the map for us. Itâs like, here, take the ring. Itâs passing the baton, but no oneâs getting it.âAnd then thereâs the mask. On a creative level, it gives her a measure of anonymity that she says allows her songs to cover more ground and tell stories beside her own. Although her devotion to the mask, which she says she wears at all times (much as she claims to be ageless, her default answer about the mask is to claim sheâs not wearing one at all), might seem to border on the extreme, itâs not hard to understand why a female rapper would choose to present herself in a way that de-emphasizes her looks. The music industry is notorious across genres for evaluating female artists on precisely those criteria.So much of the way music is processed is through extraneous elements and pre-existing stories. If youâre youngâespecially if you identify, like a young Leikeli47, as a âweirdoââyou have every reason to search out something that flies in the face of these things, that tears down the institutions and assumptions of the past. Leikeli47âs hyper-positive world is a place of radical acceptance, where, the way I see it, itâs possible to be a freak and get lost in the music and be appreciated on exactly your own terms. Thus Leikeli47's discussion of her biography is largely contained to her songs, and she is only sometimes the one under the mask in her videos.Leikeli47 was insistent that anything I write mention I have dreamy eyes, which Iâm happy to do to fan my ego but also because I think speaks to the way she encourages us to look at the world. If youâre wearing a mask, your eyes are one of the only things people can seeâincidentally, they are maybe our most honest physical feature, the most suggestive of our interior lives. To look into someoneâs eyes is to look at them as they are. Itâs no wonder that Leikeli47 would encourage us to do that with a ski mask: Itâs not so much a way of hiding her identity as a way of explaining exactly what it is that her music is all about. Itâs a great way of looking at the world, and it makes sense that Leikeli47, the sometimes-outcast, would embrace it.Best of all, itâs a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more the mask becomes a lens on the world, the more power it takes on. As Leikeli47 described performing with Diplo and Skrillex, her eyes lit up remembering the moment she watched them pull on their own masks. âPardon my language,â she said, explaining the maskâs effect, âbut itâs like, âNigga Iâm here!â Iâma do me, you know? When you put that mask on, itâs empowering. You feel invincible.âKyle Kramer is an editor at Noisey. Follow him on Twitter.
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When Leikeli47 describes making music, she does so as if itâs a compulsion, painting a picture of a mind bursting with ideas. She claims that some of her songs, like âMiss America,â stem from ideas she had in her head for close to a decade before she was able to figure out the technical elements required to make them: âI would always hear different sounds, and I would want to get it out but I had no way.â In the end, she learned to bend the tools at her disposal to her bidding, mostly using her voice and found sounds instead of instruments or presets in programs like ProTools and then manipulating those sounds as needed. Itâs not exactly a cappella or beat-boxingâboth of which she says she was never particularly interested inâbut rather something weirder and more focused on drawing out specific sounds or a specific atmosphere through âa lot of tweaking, grinding, trying to make that sound as sharp as you want, as dull as you want, as warm as you want, soft as you wantâ with production software.
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