The running joke about Brockhampton was best articulated in a tweet from the comedian Jaboukie Young-White last year:
“i’ve been gay in los angeles for 8 months and i’m still not in brockhampton idk what i’m doing wrong.”
The thing about Brockhampton is, there’s a lot of them. As founder and de facto leader of the 13-person rap group, Kevin Abstract, GQ’s digital cover star for Pride month, explains to playwright Jeremy O. Harris and me that the collective is inspired by the Factory, Andy Warhol’s famed New York studio. To me this designation reads as both unmistakably queer and multi-disciplinary. Essentially, the more interesting people are around, the better. The crew formulation is not without precedent; Wu-Tang and A$AP Mob jump to mind. But Brockhampton are the youthful inheritors of these legacies, a ragtag group of rappers, producers, and graphic artists who work and sometimes live together. Abstract and the rest of the group are down for the mixing of mediums, down to mix the personal and the professional—and when it comes to art-making, down for collaboration without limits. Abstract’s most recent album, Arizona Baby, which came out in April, marks the ninth year he has been making music in an official capacity. He’s just 22 and poised to be everywhere. There’s a new Brockhampton album on the way, too.
Born Clifford Ian Simpson, Abstract introduces himself as Ian when we meet at Condé Nast Studios. He’s wearing head-to-toe Marni as he rises in stocking feet to shake my hand. My arrival had interrupted the conversation he was having with Jeremy O. Harris, a brilliant young playwright fresh from the Yale School of Drama. Harris’s Off-Broadway debut, Slave Play, which closed in January, received glowing reviews. The New York Times described Harris’s arrival—which happened while he was still a student in New Haven—as if the playwright were “commuting into Manhattan on a comet.”
Jeremy is all long limbs (he’s six feet five) and wearing Gucci, his Afro resplendent as he lounges across from me on a gray sofa. He’s conducting an interview, but the conversation feels much more intimate than that. We touch on everything from Dottie Peoples (gospel music doesn’t dissemble; it’s all right there on the surface) to Boogie Nights (a perfect movie). Harris’s radiance does not betray the fact that he is working, the mark of a great interviewer.
Over the course of the conversation, it becomes clear that Kevin Abstract is preoccupied, artistically, with the idea of home. His group is literally named after the street he grew up on in Corpus Christi. He is not shy about the fact that his sexuality, his ambition, and his inability or unwillingness to conform to the culture of Texas have left him feeling alienated from the idea of home and, by extension, family. Pride month can be painful for many of us because it figures a sort of emotional homecoming: We are asked to confront the ways we are accepted or rejected by our families, and our communities, for who we are. Corny as it sounds, the guys in Brockhampton have clearly found home in one another.
As the leader of Brockhampton—born from a post made in 2010 on the Kanye West fan site KanyeToThe.com—Abstract possesses that rarest of combinations: talent, drive, grace, and an unerring sense of perspective. A respect for the slow rise and the benefits of challenging one’s self creatively. A month before this interview, he took to Twitter to make a strange announcement. Abstract tweeted a message that read: “I’m going to be running on a treadmill for the next 10 hours in front of my childhood home on Brockhampton Street in Corpus Christi, TX.” And then, in what could only be described as performance art, he proceeded to do just that. Why return to the place he left as a teen? Perhaps to confront and exorcise his demons directly, to take stock of how far he has come, to pay homage to his beginnings. It stands to reason that you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from.
Here is that conversation, edited and condensed for clarity. —Muna Mire
Jeremy O. Harris: What made you be like, "I'm going to do a Pride cover"?
Kevin Abstract: How candid can I be?
Jeremy: Very. You're a troll sometimes. I don't want the troll.
Kevin: I'm going to be honest. I think the fact that this opportunity was presented to me is cool, because representation is very important to me. One thing I dislike, though, is that the only time I get these types of opportunities—the shit I romanticized as a kid—is when it's related to my sexuality.
Which, at the end of the day, I don't want to be the thing that defines who I am. [On the other hand,] that representation is really important, so I have to do it, but also I don't want it to become a trend for me.
Jeremy: I get that. I still feel like I'm the black gay playwright who's defining this thing. There's a litany of us. All of our names get put in the same pocket. I'm like, “Can’t my name be next to Annie Baker's name?” Did you think about that stuff when you decided to come out?
Kevin: I did it to survive. I couldn't keep hiding stuff. I make music to survive. I couldn't keep lying to myself or through my work if that's the root of survival for me. [But] I came out through my music before I came out through myself, which was a big problem.
Jeremy: Wow.
Kevin: I wear a mask constantly. Even right now I'm performing for you, which is a struggle, because I want to take the mask off and be more candid and more vulnerable, but it's hard because I'm afraid.
Jeremy: Afraid of what?
Kevin: Maybe of rejection or being laughed at. I don't know. This probably stems back to trauma. Childhood shit. I can't pinpoint it, but it's definitely deep-rooted shit.
Jeremy: I get it. I'm a very performative person. That's why I like social media, because on social media the mask I get to wear is controlled. As I've gotten through my 20s, I’ve gotten really good at being both open in my art and more open in interpersonal-friendship relationships. But in sexual relationships or relationships with potential partners? I still have these weird trauma guards up.
Kevin: I got real intimacy issues. I can let someone in, but not fully. Then once I start to let them in, this wall is set up.
Jeremy: Is it the recent stuff, like having an album that's on Spotify and Apple's top albums and being on a magazine cover? Or is it a breakup or something?
Kevin: It's not even rooted in fame or anything fake. It's rooted in friendships and loving people. Losing them. Stuff like that. I feel guilty sometimes even for complaining about shit, because it's the best problem compared to even what my mom's going through. I have a lot of guilt for that. [My mom] works at a Sonic in Texas, and I'm doing an interview here.
Jeremy: I have a mom in Martinsville, Virginia, who works at a salon. She is a hairstylist in Virginia. It's a small town, 13,000 people. I'm also really weird about her talking to our friends back home about what I'm doing. Do you think the truth of your internal life is so far away from everyone else's? Do you feel like there are still ways for people like your mom or people like your close friends to get it, or have you really blocked all of them out, too?
Kevin: I've been pushing people out of my life constantly, which is fucked-up. It's not something I'm doing on purpose. I have guilt. I think I should do better at supporting people in my life, even if I didn't feel like I had their support at some point.
I became friends with one of my idols and heroes recently, Shia LaBeouf. Every Friday at my house, we do this thing called Friday therapy. I invite a bunch of artists from L.A., and we sit in my kitchen. It could be 40 people. One by one, we go in a circle and say what our week looked like. It's taught me a lot.
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Jeremy: What kinds of things are you talking about in these Friday sessions?
Kevin: A lot of people's issues are just rooted in living alone in Los Angeles, because everybody goes to that place chasing a dream. As corny as it sounds, it's so true, and everyone hits the same fucking wall. To sit there and talk with people around the same age, it's just inspiring.
Shia guides the sessions. He's 10 years older than me, so the advice he has is fucking crazy. He was born in L.A, grew up on TV. He fucked up a lot—the most. It's really healthy to have someone like that in my life.
There was a moment where this person I knew texted me and asked me how I felt about my career, and I replied, just talking about how I felt like I was making records from a place where it felt like hell. I sent it to my creative partners, and one of my producers put music underneath it. I was like, "Oh, this is cool. I'll just put it on my website." I put it on my website. It didn't get crazy coverage, but a few headlines and people on Reddit were like, "Oh, fuck, Kevin's having a breakdown and he regrets signing to his record label." That's a fuckup I'm thinking about lately.
Jeremy: There's something fun and freeing in that lesson of you don't have to tell everyone everything.
Kevin: That's old-school, too. That's the shit I grew up loving. Even tabloids and shit felt more like a rumor. If you're in the grocery store and you see some shit on a magazine, you question, because there's a mystique around that character. There's mystery around it. You don't know if it's true or not. I think because social media's such a democratic setup, everyone feels like they owe the public something. But you're an artist; you don't owe anyone anything. That's my current belief.
Jeremy: Was this most recent project one that you really had invested a lot in?
Kevin: I got to take the mask off, because I want to say why I did the record [Arizona Baby, his third solo album—Ed.]. And it's not rooted in pure creativity. It goes back to survival mode and me looking out for the group. Basically I have to deliver records, because I signed a record deal, which I wanted to do—110 percent I wanted to do that. I enjoyed being signed.
My problem was, we lost a member from our group. Close, close, close childhood friend, traumatic experience. We put out a fourth album after the stuff, which got us a lot of hype, [and] didn't get the reaction we wanted, so it made us take a step back and made me realize maybe the group should take a break and just live life for six months. I had already released a solo record, and maybe we could just give that to the label and that would count for a record. I did want to [put out a record], but also I was burnt-out. I should not have made an album. I think the thing that saved my record is, it was vulnerable and it's honest and it's pure. But I personally don't want to make another album.
Jeremy: What do you want to do?
Kevin: I've always wanted to be a filmmaker, but now I want to be an actor—100 percent. I don't know when I'll do that. It's also because I hang out with Shia so much. Shia is a hobbyist in a way where he'll just start rapping. Then he's also an incredible actor, a real performer. I'm attracted to the idea of that, just losing myself and becoming someone else and then going back to myself.
Jeremy: Something that's really interesting to me in this crop of black queer performers is this sense that there's a lot of blind leading the blind, because a lot of their idols don't seem to be black queer people. Where did you, as a young black queer man, see yourself in a Pride landscape? I hate Pride, actively, because I don't see myself in it, even though we are the foundation of all this stuff. Did you have any queer inspirations when you were coming up? It could even be people who maybe aren't gay but had a queer sensibility. Prince was a huge person for me.
Kevin: There's no one I can think of that was like Prince. I didn't have those type of inspirations because I was programmed to believe that I wasn't that.
Jeremy: What do you mean by you were programmed?
Kevin: Living in Texas, my Mormon family, I didn't want to go to the church, although I did go for a little bit. Texas high school football, guns, having to lose your virginity as soon as people are talking about it. Stuff like that is [being] programmed.
Also being black around a bunch of fucking white kids. They expect black people to be a specific way.
Jeremy: I was socialized so white. I was the only black kid in my high school.
Kevin: Where are you from?
Jeremy: From Virginia. Martinsville. Southwestern Virginia. I was the black kid in my high school. I learned about myself and my sexuality by looking at people who were so different from me and figuring out myself in response to them.
Kevin: Fuck. Honest truth is crazy sometimes. A year ago I would've never allowed myself to be like, "Oh, yeah, I was programmed to like that," because it seems fucking problematic and something somebody would want to cancel you over. But it's the truth. I've had to re-program myself to like people that look like me. I've been taught to not like that. It's dark.
Jeremy: My mask has been off about that for a long time. I was celebrated, canceled, celebrated, and canceled for the article that I wrote that was literally about this. There was an erasure. That did something to me after a while, because it was just like, if I'm avoiding all the boys that look like me at a bar, then what does that mean for me, long-term?
Kevin: I think it's healthy to realize that. I think it's healthy to deal with that, go through it, and to realize it. It's a bigger conversation and discussion to be had that isn't just about someone's preference.
Jeremy: It's so much about the fact that history is so aligned with white supremacy. It makes me excited about the representation you talked about. What is having the mantelpiece of now being someone that people can point to and be like, "I am black. I feel like I might be queer. I want to be a rapper. This guy exists." Does holding that alleviate some of the pressure of that sort of discomfort you expressed about people wanting to position you because of your queerness? Does that alleviate it, knowing that there's some kid like you who might be a black Mormon in West Texas who's like, "Oh, my God, he exists, so I exist."
Kevin: Yeah. It makes me want to keep fucking up, keep making mistakes in real time, so that kid that is aspiring to be another version of me can not fuck up the way I fucked up, I guess.
Jeremy: You guys calling yourselves a boy band feels really queer. I wonder how present that was in your mind when you were creating this collective, or was it really just subconscious?
Kevin: Subconscious. I wanted to redefine what it meant to be a “boy band,” because all the boy bands I saw growing up—’NSync, Backstreet Boys, I was like, "It'd be cool if we just made hip-hop music and sang sometimes." That was an idea in 2014.
I don't think the world was ready for that type of conversation, but something’s happened in the universe [since]. People are into the idea of something new but still obsessed with nostalgia, so “boy band” sounds cool for this.
Jeremy: I'm very interested in who else comes to this weird group you have in L.A, because I lived in L.A. for six years and loneliness permeates that space so deeply. Loneliness makes a lot of fast friendships happen. It's cool that you have this steady communal friendship that happens every Friday.
Kevin: Do you know who YesJulz is?
Jeremy: No.
Kevin: You know YesJulz? Canceled a million times online. A lot of crazy problematic stuff, I guess. She tweeted, "Should I wear this shirt to a festival?" It said something with the N-word on it. Everyone was off her.
Jeremy: Wow.
Kevin: At Friday therapy though, you might get someone like that popping up. She was there last Friday. The energy was like, "Oh, fuck. She's here." I think that's the wrong attitude to have, because I feel like you need to have empathy for people, because people are dealing with their shit and trying to get through it. I may have judged as soon as she walked in, but by the end of it I listened and I looked at her like a human being.
I think we should help each other move forward and not shame them. It could be someone like that, someone like Shia LaBeouf…random people who just want to talk. People are lonely as fuck in L.A. Just knowing that every Friday you could go somewhere where a bunch of artists are going to be and talk, in theory it seems corny and cliché, but when you're there it's just sick. It's tight. It goes on for hours. You don't got to be alone. You can just go there and listen. I just listen. I don't even speak that much.
Jeremy: You live by yourself, right?
Kevin: No. When we started the group in 2014—like really, really started the group—we all moved to Texas and lived together. Then we moved to South Central, all lived together; then North Hollywood, all lived together. Then after North Hollywood, we split up and everybody got their own houses. We're working on new music now. We have this house called the Creative House, which is turning into the Brockhampton house all over again. People are slowly moving into the house. I've been sleeping there, sleeping on the floor where the studio is, or the couch. I'm not alone anymore. I'm always around the guys. It's nice because I get really low sometimes. It's nice to have people uplift me in ways and support me.
Jeremy: One of the members of your group had this #MeToo thing happen. How did that disrupt the brotherhood?
Kevin: It's just like, fuck. In those moments, family was first, for sure. We spoke for hours internally, always talk, talk, talk, talk. Also that pressure makes shit move really quick. What if we wanted a little bit more time of having therapy as a friend group, and still came to the same result? The same thing happened, he still left the group, but what if we had more time to talk? That's how I feel, because I think talking is important. Even if the same thing happens, years of history with a human being, it's just insane. There for years, gone. That's not to excuse anything.
Jeremy: Tell me what the day-to-day is like in the creative hub.
Kevin: We've been fighting more these days, which is weird, because we never fight. Every day we wake up, we try to make something that's great. It might not stick.
I don't think I'm that good of a leader right now because I started to believe that what happened when we made our first three albums was all magic or luck. It's like, "Fuck, what am I doing?” “What am I doing?” “Am I as good as I think I am?” “Am I as good as they think I am?"
People call it impostor syndrome or whatever, but I feel like all artists have that in a way. I don't fucking know. I don't know what it is. This feeling I have, just lean into it and that'll become the work. Lean into that insecure space and being unsure. There is magic in that. If you do the same thing for 10 hours straight, you'll catch the magic. If I can't come up with a chorus immediately, I'll sit in front of the microphone for 30 minutes, an hour, until something comes. I'll force it. Through that frustration, you catch some magic, even if it's a tiny thing that doesn't make sense in that moment, maybe hours later you figure out how to put it into your work.
Jeremy: I get that. I'm constantly wrestling impostor syndrome. The only thing I can do to stop impostor syndrome is by giving myself insane deadlines and being like, "This play has to come out next season, because I just told someone it would be done." This album you're making with these guys, what's it centered on? What are you thinking about?
Kevin: We want to make a summer album. Feel-good. Not too sad and like, "Oh, our life sucks," just more like, "Just enjoy what's in front of you."
Jeremy: Is it easier to do that when you're feeling like your life sucks?
Kevin: Something we're doing is putting those type of lyrics—like this shit is trash, anxiety, depression, all that stuff—taking those type of lyrics and putting it on a song that a bunch of people could dance to or something. It's just like “Hey Ya!” My favorite song ever. It's basically that.
Jeremy: What does it feel like to be a young person inside of this particular part of your career? Do you feel in control of things?
Kevin: I don't feel in control of anything. I wake up every day and I wish shit was going faster. I wish I was bigger. I wish I was more important. More important outside of my bubble, is what I mean. I'm also extremely grateful, because the slow rise is special to me. And sacred. I want to just hold on to every moment.
Jeremy: Do you think that part of your drive to be big is related to a sense of place-making, as the gay boy that was raised by his sisters in Texas, where you didn't see people like you?
Kevin: Yeah. I think everything I make is rooted in trauma, and generational trauma, 100 percent. I just got to accept it and not try to control everything. I don't know.
My problem with being vulnerable is that if it's not well written, it can come off as self-indulgent. That's my least favorite type of music. I struggle with that. Sometimes I don't want to put the song out because I don't want people to think I'm so obsessed with myself.
Jeremy: What is your love life like?
Kevin: [smiles] It's great. My love life is great.
Jeremy: Are you dating anyone?
Kevin: Yes, I am. The internet knows. Not the internet, but my bubble, the audience that cares about me, they know I'm dating someone.
Jeremy: How do you woo someone when you're on the road and also have, in a sense, a collective of other boyfriends?
Kevin: I don't like to be alone. I need to be loved. I need to love. My boyfriend will come on the road with us. Everybody's cool with him.
Jeremy: What does your mom think of this whole thing now?
Kevin: I was hanging out with Rick Rubin, playing him my album before I came out, and he asked me, "What's your relationship like with your mom?” We were close when I was younger. The older I got, I started to put these walls up—
Jeremy: You put the walls up because the world around you is so different from the world back home?
Kevin: Yeah. The older I got, I started to push my family away. Then I moved out, moved to Texas with my friends. The way I came out was through this interview I did with USA Today, which was really random, but a big thing, because it was mad early in my career.
[When I told my mom,] it sounded like she didn't know who she was talking to, like I wasn't her son. That's what it felt like. She didn't say that, but it felt like that. It fucked me up a lot. She got mad weird after that. I stopped talking to her. She stopped talking to me. Then I signed my pub deal, started making money. Not only that, I also started to become just bigger. More people knew who I was. She'd send me videos she saw online of people singing my song at a show or just proud moments she was having. I started to get really frustrated because I felt like she was only fucking with me because I was able to pay bills and support her financially.
Anyways, I told Rick Rubin that when he asks what's my relationship like with my mom. He's like, "Did you ever think about the fact that maybe it's easier for her to understand you now because the rest of the world has been able to accept who you are, that maybe that's helping re-program her?"
I was like, "Fuck." It made me feel like I should fix shit with my mom.
Jeremy: She might be homophobic, but she's not necessarily anti-you.
Kevin: Exactly. Which could lead to her realizing that she is homophobic, even though she says she's not, and that can also change, I believe. [Now] I feel guilty for calling my mom homophobic in the past on songs, because I now believe she wasn’t able to understand and accept me until she saw others doing the same.
Jeremy: Completely.
Kevin: Sometimes I feel guilty because it's like I'm using this shit that's happened to me and using these people who have helped raise me, and they're becoming characters in my universe, which is why I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I'm self-obsessed. It's all about me. Even though I'm hurt by something you did, I didn't have to tell everyone." Now I go to a show, everyone sings this lyric about my mom, and if my mom was in the crowd, it would probably hurt her feelings.
Jeremy: Say your mom hears a song and maybe feels hurt by it or something, how do you navigate that?
Kevin: Like I said earlier, music and art, it's how I survive. Now, if I didn't get that out, it would just be sitting in me. She understood that, but also wasn't cool with it. The only way I know how to set up that barrier, I guess, is just being honest and up-front before it even comes out.
Jeremy: This is GQ, so I am going to talk about the fact that you're wearing Marni and it's really nice. Have you always had a relationship with style?
Kevin: Nope.
Jeremy: You haven't?
Kevin: Nope. I don't have a relationship with style.
Jeremy: You're wearing Marni! Are the socks Marni, too?
Kevin: It's all Marni. I learned what Marni was six months ago. I went into this store, saw these really crazy big sneakers that looked like shoes I wouldn't see anyone else wearing, and it just fit with this energy I was leaning into, like André 3000–esque. I loved everything at the store. Everything's loud, but also expressive, I guess.
Jeremy: I also love that you've mentioned André 3000 twice inside of this interview, because he was one of my queer icons growing up. I had straight hair in high school. My teacher was like, "You know who you look like? That André 3000." I was like, "I want to look like the white Power Ranger, but anyway, that's cool."
Kevin: I guess he is. That's the closest.
Jeremy: Where's your hope right now? Where is it situated?
Kevin: I just hope that it all works out, whatever that means. I hope that at the end of all of this, I'm happier. And the work is as great as I can make it.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Barry White
VFX Supervision by Mina Mir
Directed by Andrew B. Myers
Cinematography by Evan Burris Trout
