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In 2018, Livingston Matthews landed in New York for a series of gigs and his money ran low after he had to unexpectedly check a bag on his flight. So he jumped from a subway turnstile, but was detained by a police officer who wanted to replace him.
“He was just overweight, bruh,” said Matthews, who was visiting from Baltimore, with a casual Southern pull between bites of cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal at a Brooklyn cafe recently. “It was like, ‘You’re dead meat, I can do anything I want with you’.” This event prompted him to write “Deadmeat”, the hottest track of the 2020 album. “Black” With an aggressive mix of rap, punk, and free jazz, it rebuked racism and police brutality.
The album comes a month before protests began as cases of Covid-19 rose globally and following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. For the 29-year-old rapper, singer, and producer Matthews, who has recorded under a variety of names, notably Pink Siifu, “Negro” was the most fearless album in its vast catalog of equally experimental music. It was also the busiest.
“He record? They were God and my ancestors,” he said. “I almost cried after every piece.”
latest album, “Okra’!,” released earlier this month and returned to an even earlier musical moment: body-shaking bass and down-tempo Southern rap that Atlanta’s Dungeon Family crafted in the 1990s.
“His records were like anything else,” said Matthews of the touchstone community, which counts Outkast and the Goodie Mob as members.
Poet Ruben Bailey, a member of the Dungeon Family and known as Big Rube, said he heard the band’s influence in Matthews’ voice. “He has a Southern style, but it’s also lyrical,” Bailey said in a phone interview. “When I first saw the name, it drove me crazy because it sounded really creative and it turned out to be.”
Wearing a white sweatshirt, denim overalls, shimmery gold-painted nails, beaded knits, and a white durag under a brimmed leather kufi hat, Matthews looked like his influences at once: Sly Stone, Andre 3000, Sun Ra. He spoke with the same relaxed cadence he used in his music and cheered when he talked about his upbringing.
He’s not always so cold-blooded though: his live shows are full of constant action. Sometimes he jumps into the loudspeakers, other times he walks on stage or occasionally through the crowd in an uninterrupted loop. It’s as if all the music he’s been in for years is trying to come out at the same time.
Matthews is from Birmingham, Ala., in a family that exposed him to all kinds of music. and Cincinnati. His mother loved ’90s R&B, and his father, a saxophonist, played Charlie Parker’s old records. He got into rap through his older brother Hardy, who loved New Orleans-based Cash Money Records—especially Lil Wayne—and decided to follow suit.
“I always wanted to be like my brother, so I said, ‘Wayne is my favorite rapper too,'” Matthews said.
He started trumpet, then drums, and played in marching bands from fifth grade through high school. (The cover image for “Gumbo!” is a cartoon illustration of Matthews in a marching band uniform.) He didn’t get serious about music until he came to college, a theater major at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He began singing poetry while quietly building his image as the Cash Money sidekick, singing like R&B vocalist Macy Gray – “I really want to work with him,” she said – but he also admired the conscious rap ballad.
“I heard them say and thought, ‘Poems are just rapping,'” Matthews said. “Then I said, ‘Oh no, I can rap my poems’.”
Showing who the experimental musicians are, including soul vocalists Liv.e. Georgia Anne Muldrow and Nick Hakim, “Okra”!” It’s a throwback from the raw emotion of last year’s LP, designed to showcase the full breadth of Matthews’ art. His voice is bigger and more bass-heavy, but his focus is on his deep admiration for family and friends, voicemail messages from relatives, and recorded conversations with friends. In a series of tracks towards the end of the album, songs like “Living Proof” and “Smile (Wit Yo Gold)” slow the pace towards a walk that feels like a barbecue during the summer months when the sun starts to set and the temperature cools to perfection. .
“I didn’t want people to put me in jail,” Matthews said. “I was trying to do something that reminded me of those trips from Birmingham to Cincinnati.”
His overall goal is to continue working towards the pinnacle of two of his idols: Prince and George Clinton. “You can lump me with whoever you want, but my music everything“said. “A slow meal. You’re at grandma’s house, no need to rush.”
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