Blood Orange
Devonté Hynes is a sporty New Yorker, a shy Londoner and a revolutionary pop genius, all at once
The musician Dev Hynes releases records under the moniker of Blood Orange and has written songs for a staggering roll call of artists from Solange Knowles to Kylie Minogue. The 30-year-old New Yorker, originally from London, writes every song in a completely different way, he says, and finds inspiration strolling through the city. As of late, Dev has thrown himself into the political activist movements sweeping across black America, as is clear from his latest compositions. There’s an exquisitely psychedelic touch to his oeuvre and he’s often hailed as a successor to Prince. That may well be true when it comes to musical talent, but Dev also has incredible ping-pong prowess in common with the sadly departed purple pop star.
From Fantastic Man n° 24 – 2016
Text by BIJAN STEPHEN
Photography by ROE ETHRIDGE
Styling by CARLOS NAZARIO
New York is a city full of ghosts. There are odd resonances here, arcane frequencies that tend to accumulate in the corners still unreconstructed. Manhattan’s Lower East Side still has a bit of that energy. You can find it in the neighbourhood’s remaining artists, both the lucky ones who have survived waves and waves of new money and gentrification and the workmanlike youth who’ve washed up on Manhattan’s southeasternmost shores in the hope of making it in the big city.
Devonté Hynes, the 30-year-old musician otherwise known as Blood Orange, has lived in the Lower East Side for around ten years now. Though he grew up in London, he considers North America’s most populous city to be his home. It’s not hard to see why. Above all, New York City is a place to escape to, and by the time he left England, at 21, that was exactly what he needed. “I really hated London,” he tells me when we first meet, in Washington Square Park. “It felt super oppressive and I felt insanely displaced. I didn’t stop feeling misplaced until a couple of years’ living in New York, for the first time in my life.”
As much as it’s a refuge, New York is also a place to try your luck. If you grant that Dev – whose music is as raw as it is occasionally ethereal, like a pop dispatch from an alternate reality – is daring to channel those old ghosts, you can begin to understand why he’s here. But while Dev is rooted in New York, he’s also an itinerant both at heart and in mind; he dances between topics, reads widely and freely, and spends a lot of time traversing the city on foot, making street recordings as he goes. Those sidewalk sounds feature prominently in Blood Orange tracks. They inject a sense of place into Dev’s music, tethering it to the here and now. Even if that here and now is tragic: in 2013, Dev’s apartment burnt down and he lost everything he owned – hard drives, instruments, clothing, sentimental items and even his puppy, Cupid.
In ‘Hands Up’, the tenth track on the latest Blood Orange record ‘Freetown Sound’, Dev includes call-and-response chants he recorded at the 20th anniversary Million Man March in Washington, DC. A voice shouts, “Hands up!” Many more reply, “Don’t shoot!” The words had become a rallying cry after authorities failed to indict Darren Wilson, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, for shooting and killing Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, in 2014. In the wave of protests that followed, the phrase and its gruesome connotation became inescapable. You can still hear it at any protest in support of black lives.
Dev has been attending many of these protests. “A lot of the time you need to feel people around you that are having the same emotion,” he says. “You need to let it out somehow, not bottle it up. I try and go to everything, just so I don’t feel alone.”
Spring has just begun to shade into summer. The weather – 22°C, clear – is perfect for wandering through the park and everyone’s bared their arms to the sun. In the distance a jazz combo plays, and beyond that I think I see a cello player. Dev is tall and all lean muscle. Today he’s wearing a vintage T-shirt from Janet Jackson’s 1990 ‘Rhythm Nation World Tour’. On the front and back, it reads, “No prejudice, ignorance, bigotry, illiteracy,” which strikes me as a particularly fine message to put into the world, coming as it does in the week before the UK’s Brexit vote and just after the horrific massacre at Pulse, an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Otherwise, Dev is dressed for athletic activity – “I have basketball again tonight. It’s like an organised Friday thing that goes down” – with black Nike gym shorts, white Reeboks with New Balance tube socks and a black leather ball cap to contain his neatly kept locks. He is carrying a white string backpack with a MacBook Air and some reading material. “It’s the Philip Glass biography.”
So what else has he been reading? “A book of Miles Davis interviews, a Thelonious Monk biography, a book on black queer writing, and a while ago I started then stopped reading ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’.” The latter, Marlon James’ third novel, which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, investigates the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in the 1970s. “I kind of tailed off but not because I didn’t enjoy it… I usually read ten books in one go, but I was enjoying it. I would love to get back into it.”
Lately, Dev has been feeling out the contours of what it means to be black, and a black musician, in America. He tells me this is partly “because of things that happened to me in the last few years in terms of being jumped because of my race, being overlooked because of my race.” At Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival in 2014, the venue’s security guards allegedly assaulted Dev and his then-girlfriend, the musician Samantha Urbani. Dev was wearing a handmade T-shirt bearing the names Eric Garner, Jordan Davis, and Trayvon Martin, all unarmed black men killed in America in the past few years. In the cases of Davis and Martin, the perpetrators were not police but regular citizens, Martin’s killer having been controversially acquitted after his lawyers argued it was self-defence. The Lollapalooza attack came just after Dev had given a speech to the audience about American racism and police brutality. It left him in a leg brace for six months.
When Dev was younger he was severely bullied. He had knives pulled and a gun drawn on him, and was even put in hospital, as he said during a recent interview with National Public Radio: “I think in black culture – I should add, as well, that I think 90 per cent of the people bullying me were black, which was extremely confusing – there’s such a big deal with a sense of negro masculinity, especially in a part of the world where the history of black people isn’t particularly taught.”
In an interview with ‘Pitchfork’ at around the same time, he clarified what that meant for ‘Freetown Sound’. “I became aware that his is the time when the most people have cared about what I’m doing,” he said. “But it was a weird moment, just in terms of me in the world as a young black man. So I started thinking about that more, and that was affecting everything as I was writing, making me a more direct person than I ever was before. I went from being very insecure about myself – just from growing up and having crazy bullying shit – to being very secure. I’m aware, as a black musician, that I will never be seen on par with white people that do what I do. That’s just what it is. A white guy showing soul is so much more interesting to people than a black person showing soul.” This kind of thing, Dev says, is what he’s been dealing with his whole life. But inspired by the people he looks up to – such as Prince (to whom he’s frequently compared) and Miles Davis – he doesn’t want to make excuses, “because it’s easy to make excuses, whether they’re valid or not.”
One place where that sense of security is visible is in Dev’s social media presence. He’s a confessional, compelling and seemingly compulsive user of Twitter and Instagram. On the photo service especially, his captions are either minimalist or maximalist, never modulated. From the outside it seems cathartic. “Nigga this, Nigga that, Nigga in my heart & Nigga in my face,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “The younger me was a batty boy on the bus, after that he became a batty blacky. Once older my eyes weakened, but the image got clearer… I tried to fix my sight. It’s easy to hide if you can’t see reality & the confusion will hit us in these moments of malingering. Who u r can’t ever be hidden. I was always a ‘batty’ & a ‘nigga’. Out there u r just another nigga. But just another nigga can speak to another nigga, who was born with another nigga, who lives with another nigga, who is in love with another nigga. & this lens that you shine on us thinking that we will fry is actually just going to magnify our intensity, and our passion. We know who we are, and we know our history.”
This combination of strength and vulnerability is a large part of what makes Dev’s music so magnetic. He’s reaching into the murky waters of his private self to find things that we, his audience, might find useful.
The album is a magpie-ish collage of interconnected references, drawn primarily from queer and black culture. “The lyrics have different references and some of the music has different references, and now, on top of that, the mixing has references and the production has references and the drums have their own references,” Dev tells me. There’s jazz legend Charles Mingus and 20th century transgender performer Venus Xtravaganza; there’s early Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo and incisive commentator on racial politics Tanehisi Coates; there’s hip-hop group Boogie Down Productions and filmmaker Marlon Riggs; there’s 2Pac; there’s Trayvon Martin.
“My mind is thinking about a million things,” says Dev. “It’s like I’m doing a million things in my life over a period of a few years and at the end of that I put a bunch of stunts together.” His albums are diaries, left open for whoever might get what they say.
In his personal life, Dev surrounds himself with loyal people who get it, get him, get his project. “Anything for Dev!” many of them say to me, in some form or another. Musician Adam Bainbridge, who records under the name Kindness, shared a house with Dev’s two bandmates when Dev was in his first well-known band, Test Icicles, a British dance punk outfit that existed from 2004 to 2006. Bainbridge eventually went out on tour with them, as their DJ, and after that band broke up in 2006, he and Dev moved in together as roommates. Adam’s first impression, “Nerdy…talented…private, vulnerable. I mean, he used to take his glasses off to perform onstage,” Adam says. “That’s not to say that he had contacts in. He’s really, really short-sighted. So when he took his glasses off it was like he was retreating into a bubble where he couldn’t actually see the audience.”
‘Freetown Sound’, says Adam, is closer to Dev’s earliest vision of Blood Orange than anything else he’s released: “It sounds exactly like him, and much like the original aesthetic of Blood Orange that started when he delivered GarageBand demos to Domino and asked them to release them. I mean he’s been going for this kind of rawness for years now, but no one was prepared to actually let him follow through aesthetically. And I think now is just the moment in time when he has his foot in the door and he can also put that foot down and say, ‘This is my sound, there’s enough people that understand the rawness and sort of idiosyncrasy of this to let me do it.’”
Dev Hynes was born in England, five days before the first frosts of December and eight before the new year of 1986 was ushered in. His parents had both immigrated there when they were in their early twenties, his mother from Guyana, and his father from Sierra Leone. They met in London. They’re both now retired. His mother was a nurse – “a health visitor, visiting old people and people in need that didn’t have a lot of care” – and his father worked in Marks & Spencer, the quintessentially British department store. Just after he’d dropped out of university, the store hired Dev as a janitor. It was around the time Kanye West’s seminal album ‘The College Dropout’ came out. “I really remember that record,” he says. “Like, this is the soundtrack to cleaners.” Dev was in his late teens. “I loved learning and studying but I needed to be a man of pace,” he explains. “I was young and I just couldn’t really focus. I had trouble just doing one thing.”
And that still might be true. When I ask about the last thing he has worked on, Dev tells me he’s written and recorded an entirely new album, called ‘Denim Dean’. “I made artwork for it and everything,” he says. “The name was a joke because I was at a wedding early in the year and this guy was introduced to me and before I can introduce myself he’s, like, ‘I know him.’ He’s, like, ‘I know this guy. What’s up Dean?’ and then he walked away.” He laughs. “So my friends would call me Dean. And then one day I was wearing full denim, so then that came out as Denim Dean.” When I ask whether he plans to release it, he tells me he might put it on cassettes and give them away at shows, which he has done before with other new releases.
Dev has two older siblings who grew up with him: a sister, who’s 38, and a brother, who just turned 37. Both of them influenced his musical tastes. His sister played piano, which is “kind of the main reason” Dev took it up as well. He was already playing the cello, an instrument he started learning at age nine. He studied according to his own needs. “All my music knowledge was outside of academia, but was pretty academic. I taught myself music, but through reading the books.” The family home contained a telling amalgam of musical tastes. His brother was listening to hip-hop artists like DMX. His sister, on the other hand, was more into Nirvana, Prince and Madonna. Also: “My mum would make me listen to UK soul like UB40, Sade, Annie Lennox. My dad listened to classical.” Dev’s listening habits still take in everything from the operas of Mexican composer Daniel Catán – “It’s really fucking tight, so sick. It’s like Sibelius, Stravinsky, it’s so good” – to ‘Lockjaw’ by Moroccan-born American rapper French Montana. “He has the best beats selection in the game maybe; he’s up there.”
Dev would dash between band rehearsals, cello recitals, skate parks and sundry sports like football and basketball. He was, he tells me, “at the most professional level you can get to when you’re 17. I was doing that as my main thing and kind of got tired of it. I still play a lot, but I can only ever do it for fun.” Lately, in New York, he’s been playing pickup soccer and basketball – sometimes with musicians, most of the time with whoever’s around – and a lot of ping-pong, which he’s also really good at. Dev also dances nearly constantly and loves vogueing, though he is on a “slight break” after “dancing very intensely for a good couple of months.” He writes music for dance performances, too, such as one seen at last year’s Art Basel Miami, when he collaborated with artist Ryan McNamara.
That kind of cooperation is embedded in Dev’s personality. Lorely Rodriguez, the musician who records under the name Empress Of, met Dev through the Brooklyn-based Terrible Records gang two or three years ago. She worked with him on ‘Freetown Sound’, most notably contributing vocals to ‘Best to You’, a standout track that the two dreamt up in Dev’s room. “At that point in time in New York, it was very much like a community,” Lorely tells me. “You could go to, like, Glasslands, or 285 Kent, or Death by Audio and you could just see these people. I think Dev is a very unique artist. I don’t think he’s making music to appease anyone or anything except his own – I don’t know, I may be wrong – his own personal, artistic goals. It feels like a very careful art he’s crafted.”
Beyond his own music, which he released under the name Lightspeed Champion before switching to Blood Orange, Dev has a prolific and impressive song writing career. He’s written for artists from across the pop spectrum: Tinashe, Florence + The Machine, Diana Vickers, and Kylie Minogue have all benefited from his talents. For Solange Knowles, Hynes wrote ‘Losing You’, her universally acclaimed dance-y R&B cut about love lost. He played guitar on Carley Rae Jepsen’s widely-praised E.MO.TION album and produced the song ‘All That’. That album debuted to wide praise and his fingerprints were all over it. Dev’s musical gifts are prodigious and apparently universal.
“He just knows how to hit my core,” filmmaker Gia Coppola tells me. The two met around six years ago, when she was filming her debut feature ‘Palo Alto’, and he contributed the score to the film. “Beautiful and heavy and sad, but truthful – I think that’s why so many people connect with his music. Because it’s truthful.” The two have continued to collaborate; they just shot a short retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice for ‘Vogue’ and Gucci. “I don’t know what it is, but it just feels like whatever I do visually, his music just fits for me, and it adds a whole other level. I’m constantly trying to think of more things to do together with him.”
The week after the UK decides to exit the European Union, I find myself somewhere in New York City’s Chinatown, in an artificially foggy rehearsal space. Here, Dev is premiering ‘Freetown Sound’ for friends and collaborators in his adopted city. The fashion vibe is recognisably nostalgic. I spot Debbie Harry, who sang on the album, and David Byrne, who didn’t. A jazz combo is playing as Dev floats around and greets people. It’s the magic hour before sunset, and the room is suffused with filtered golden light. Eventually, after everyone’s settled in, Dev sits down at the piano in the middle of the room and begins to play the opening chords to ‘Augustine’, the second song on the new album. The room suddenly feels like a cathedral, maybe even a little like the church Dev attended as a child, and after a moment the sun begins to set.
There’s a special energy here, one that mirrors Dev’s own. The audience is enraptured; it feels as though we’re being drawn inexorably to the centre, towards somewhere inside Dev’s mind, or perhaps inside his heart. It feels like it’s only me and him in this foggy, golden room. After I leave, I carry this feeling with me for the rest of the day. I’m calmer, more peaceful.
Later Dev will tell me, “I wanted the album to feel like a place. I wanted it to feel like a place where people are.” I’ll wonder if that room with the piano is the place he’s talking about: a spare room with beautiful light, with all the friends he knows in the city he loves the best.
Photographic assistance by Will Englehardt. Styling assistance by Yuiko Ikebata and Brock Castillo. Grooming by Jawara at Bryant Artists. Production by Artist Commissions.