After a show one night, an acquaintance came up to the artist Blake Fusilier and asked him a rhetorical question. “You’re black and gay,” the person said. “How does it feel to have two things wrong with you?” The question may have been facetious, but it also cut to the core. Until recently, queer artists of color have been shunted into a small corner of the music industry where their personalities are reduced to sexual curiosities or club culture whisperers. Fusilier is trying to liberate himself from those expectations, and he’s not alone.
Fusilier, who performs under his last name, is part of a generation of artists who are forcing audiences to listen to them as a whole. Along with artists like Kelela, Blood Orange, serpentwithfeet, Mykki Blanco, and Lizzo, Fusilier is making music that is simultaneously of him and about him, merging the lanes that traditionally defined artists that look and live like him. “If you’re black and queer, then you’re about nightlife,” Fusilier told me over lunch in Bed Stuy. “And unless you’re making music that sounds that way, people aren’t going to want to take a chance on it. Some people just want to focus on your sexuality instead of taking you in as a person.” Fusilier and his peers are making music that needs to be reckoned with on its own merits, rather than funneled into the traditional corners of clubs and discos.
That doesn’t mean that Fusilier’s music is self-serious and stodgy. He revels in exploration, and injects an energy into heavy topics reminiscent of St. Vincent, Perfume Genius, and, at times, Death Grips. He has a knack for turning his sound darker through distortion and tension, and the result is something you’d hear in a nightclub at the end of the world.
Fusilier is sharply aware of the politics of music, and how queer artists will always get asked different questions than straight ones. “Nobody is concerned with how many women Thom Yorke has slept with, no one was asking Morrissey ‘How were the groupies?’” he told me. “When you’re queer it’s just like, ‘Oh, well it’s just about sex, right? You go in the bathroom and you do those things.’” Fusilier pauses to allow himself a small grin. “And maybe I fucking do, but that’s not what the song is about.” He also knows the veil of being closeted can be a useful tool in being able to develop your own entrenched narrative as an artist. “When Frank Ocean came out, he was already like a god,” Fusiler said. “Not being out does gives you the luxury of likes and being able to create a narrative outside of that.”
It’s a line that Fusilier and other queer artists of color have had to navigate and negotiate, but the progress has been significant thanks to forward shifts in audience attitudes and the desire of record labels to stay on top of emerging perspectives and talents. “I can talk about sex, but that's not really what I'm here for,” he said. “At the same time, I'm not here to hide from it. If you wanna talk about it, we can talk about it. After you wanna play emotional chicken with my proclivities, we can talk about it.”
Fusilier grew up in Atlanta, surrounded by the layered sounds of acts like Goodie Mob, Organized Noize, and Outkast that spread like sonic kudzu throughout the south. He started playing the violin at 10 and practiced incessantly, a habit that he’s continued well into adulthood. “I don't have a lot of typical middle school and high school memories because I practiced obsessively,” he said. “I have memories of feeling like having to mow the lawn and then going to play violin and how shaky my hands were.”
(Left, photo by Harvey Jackson; Right, photo by Justin French)
He left Atlanta at 18 for Boston University, where he won an academic scholarship and majored in neurobiology, drawn in by a fascination for the complexities of pharmacology. He also wanted to give his mother the chance to say “I have a son who’s a doctor.” But he lost interest in the subject by his senior year, and shifted his focus to taking guitar, piano, and vocal lessons in the school’s fine arts college. He discovered an Atlanta-diaspora at the Berklee College of Music as well, and began to learn his way around the control booth and recording studio, as well as Boston’s rock scene.
That an artist who grew up surrounded by an especially immersive regional sound like southern hip hop in the 1990's would grow up to play hard rock doesn’t seem like a departure to Fusilier. He brings up Project Pat’s 2001 hit “Chickenhead”—recently revived by Cardi B as "Bickenhead"—as a bridge between the maximalist hip hop he grew up with and the rock he would later play onstage. “To listen to the harmony in that song, that’s hard rock right there,” he said. “It's been a little bit more obvious now with the dominance of Atlanta and how they've been able to combine rock aesthetics and more organic instruments like guitar, but it’s the same sound.”
When he started to make his own music, Fusilier focused on texture and made it a central component of his work. He has described his music as “the sound of a scythe dragging across a hardwood floor,” a gothic comparison, sure, but it exhibits his concentration on how sound feels. “There’s a dirty edge to all these sounds, even if they’re not exactly punk,” he said. “That texture of things dragging—the pull is almost violence. Even if the music sounds sort of calm there is always some sort of jerking motion.”
The punk rock references aren’t abstract for Fusilier. He fronted the heavy rock band Ribs for several years while he was living in Boston, and credits the city’s DIY-scene with giving him the confidence to strike out on his own. “It’s a very supportive community,” he said. “Once you were in with people and the people who book venues, it was cool.”
Ribs was a mainstay on the Boston circuit for years, and they parlayed that grind into a few big gigs, including a slot opening for the Joy Formidable and Queens of the Stone Age. It was while he was opening for the latter in West Virginia that Fusilier realized he wanted something more than a career playing New England rock clubs and the occasional tour. “I went down there and there’s a couple thousand people in the stands and I’m opening up for my favorite band,” Fusilier told me. “And I was just like—meh. I just said to myself, ‘This isn’t enough for me.’ That was when I knew I needed to start writing my own script.”
The green shoots of Fusilier’s solo career appeared back in 2016, when he released twin singles “The Moment” and “Make You.” They showed off Fusilier’s knack for fusing the uptempo with the gothic. On “The Moment” a tightly plucked guitar string and the thud of a kick drum provide the spine for the sort of track you’d hear at a club at the end of the world. That desolate disco sound shares some DNA to artists like Arca and ANOHNI, the latter of whom may be the only person to write an infectious—and devastating—pop song about America’s drone warfare campaign.
Both songs can also be found on Duty, Fusilier’s debut EP released this past August. “The Moment” serves as the EP’s opening track, which rises with Fusilier’s pristine, affecting voice before it's buried in layers of distortion. That oscillation is reflected in the song’s video as well, an ode to gender fluidity and the ability to move through spaces without fear.
“dueling,” the EP’s closing track, is a pleading internal monologue, a self-portrait of someone unsure of his relationships and unsure of his power. Fusilier’s eagerness to stack sound textures to the ceiling is on display as well, and “dueling” has something of a Dirty Projectors vibe to it. “Sometimes I hold you/Just to make you stay/or to shield you/from what I could say.” It’s a love song for the modern era, full of uneasiness, self-preservation, and care. It’s also a song that might have been shunted aside in years gone by for being too much about love and not enough about sex for a queer black man to write. “I think a lot of people's pain comes from this idea that who I am as a person or something I'm guarding down here is sort of unsanitary or unwelcome in society,” Fusilier told me. “And it comes from an unwillingness to be vulnerable, and I want to attack that.”
