Bully Fae - Defy a Thing to Be

Pitchfork 65

It’s been a few years since Matmos’ label Vague Terrain released a piece of new music, and for the most part Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have called the organization a “vanity label” to release their own work and play around. In 2002, they even used Vague Terrain as a pseudonym to record the soundtrack for a fetish-heavy pornographic film. “Every so often we hear something completely gobsmacking and feel that we MUST share it with the world,” the pair wrote on their website to suddenly announce the revival of their label.

The project that so shocked them is the debut album of Bully Fae, a queer Los-Angeles based multimedia artist. Defy a Thing to Be is the artist’s first formal release, but they (Fae prefers not to be gendered) have been sharing performance pieces and fragments of the album, which mixes rapping, stand-up comedy, abstracted spoken word, and goofy (but highly effective) dancing into a hilarious and fascinating whole.

Fae work has been described as the middle of a “Bermuda Triangle” that includes three artistic forebears: Nicki Minaj, the video artist Ryan Trecartin, and the poet Ariana Reines. Meaning, the work they make is colorful, fueled by amphetamines and raunchy, but highly theoretical, and very interested in the body and identity. Defy a Thing to Be is a short, acerbic, and often very funny album that only spans 22 minutes over 9 tracks. It lives in this intersection of experimental dance music and hip hop, one that recalls the work of artists like Yves Tumor, Nguzunguzu (and the Night Slugs/Fade to Mind crew at large), Lotic, and queer rappers like Le1f. Although, unlike any of these artists, Fae’s work is much more invested—often to its own detriment—in heady and restricted kinds of experimentation.

The lyrics attempt to explore a broad and almost overwhelming number of subjects. The writing can be very serious and probing: “Hack up the program hosting us/Addicted to systems.../You could say I’m addicted/But how do we define addiction,” but also grotesquely humorous: “Bossy but a bottom at best I wish.” On the level of Fae’s writing alone, there is a sly and investigative quality that can’t be imitated. Yet, their voice will definitely be polarizing for many listeners. It can be piercing or cartoonish, and it is often garbled by digital effects, but there is no avoiding the fact that a needling voice can be a bad messenger for such dense thinking. Even if unintended, Fae’s sometimes erratic flow can make the expression of their ideas clunky and forced.

Often, the album’s saving grace is clever, subtle, and fluid production across the nine tracks. Fae’s beats are often vaporous, foreboding, and almost dystopian, cloaking their voice with a razor’s edge that makes up for any vocal shortcomings. Take for example songs like “Elevator Pitch (lasséz-fairy forecast),” where Fae attempts to critically frame this corporate experience with a queer sensibility. Lines like, “Picture us online/All accounts entwined” or “Like a verb man can I heard your a word man” don’t sound disjointed or so random, because Fae is able to create a sonic space that is dimly lit and uncomfortable and unpredictable. In the music video for the song, it becomes profoundly weird, which depicts Fae cavorting around an empty office in a shabby suit.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Defy a Thing to Be is that it just seems better suited for the stage or for visual consumption. Part of Fae’s theory of performance is based upon a kind of focused randomness that can be lost with the album form. Watching videos of Fae perform show that their ideas simultaneously focus and loosen in the context of actual performance. The critical aspect of Fae’s work seems to go missing when experienced only in your headphones.

Similar to the artist working in the NON collective, Fae works to implicate an audience, but it requires a dance floor and willing group to generate this ideal experience. Fae almost proves Peggy Phelan's idea that performance can only exist in the present, and that documentation and records of it are profoundly different. As an act of artistic subversion, Defy a Thing to Be hits the mark with its level of thinking, but misses a key element of physicality that would make it something special.