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Music

Firsties and Faves: Jib Kidder

Waffle House, Jodorowsky, true crime reality TV, feelings.

Classifying Jib Kidder's music is a tad baffling. He first hit home back in 2009 with "Windowdipper," a glitchy, genius cut and paste hip-hop tune, assembled with samples of MS-DOS bleeps and beeps, and babies burbling. Thanks to the track being used on So You Think You Can Dance, the then emerging artist got a major boost. Fastforward to now, this Louisville, Kentucky-born dude is set to release his thirteenth collection—Teaspoon To The Ocean—this coming January, and the music he now creates is barely comparable. Take his latest song "Dozens," below, a super cute indie-pop song, perfect for buoying you up when you're in the most sour of funks. The prolific, left-of-center artist is playing a show in Brooklyn this Sunday, if you happen to be in the hood, and here are his (incredibly endearing) firsties and faves.

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Favorite time you were totally embarrassed:
I played a show in Ann Arbor a few years ago where I got drunk, tried to play the Webb Pierce song "There Stands the Glass" on faulty equipment, laid in a crack in the stage, let out a blood curdling scream and left the venue without the audience knowing. This was not at all more pleasant than the other times I have been totally embarrassed in my life but it had a more lasting positive impact. Now that the bottom has been established I am free to enjoy myself lightly as a performer.

First feeling:
The universal first feeling: hunger.

Favorite thing about Georgia:
Hot rain. Rain you can walk a mile in barefoot. Steaming blacktop. They must have that in a million places though. I could say the deranged, but lovable people there, but deranged and lovable people inhabit every place. I could say going to the Waffle House and putting "There Are Raisins (In My Toast)" on the jukebox and just kind of sitting back and waiting for the waitress to spit in my coffee or unplug the thing, but there are Waffle Houses all over the country and I could get my coffee spit in at any of them. Besides that I bought a Waffle House Jukebox Favorites Volume 1 cassette on eBay. I can play that tape and eat shitty food anytime.

First fictional crush:
I haven't felt that yet. I first fell in love with a real person very young, like when I was 11 and we had a bafflingly real relationship and so I never really invested much in this kind of daydreaming. I never longed for these kinds of ideals, I longed for long trips into real women.

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Favorite thing to laugh at:
Jodorowsky DVDs with the commentary on. Imagine a show like Bill Maher but it's like Žižek and Jodorowsky and their sons and the guests on the show would be like Anwar Congo, Bill Cosby, Pope Francis, DSK, etc.

First disappointment:
The universal first disappointment: mewling, puking, gasping for air.

Favorite fact about your mom:
The fact of her life. She had a brush with death twenty years ago. If she had passed then the duration of my life in her absence would overshadow the duration of my life in her presence. It is from her I get the energy of making. You can also credit to her my smooth, professional singing voice.

First sculpture:
I'm still working on my first sculpture. It's a universe of cigarettes. When I figure out how to people it with cigarette-people it will really come to life. I'm glad you asked this question. I'm glad you take me seriously as a sculptor without my actually being a serious sculptor. I just say I am a sculptor and you trust me. As people we have all these false rituals of reification which are part of a collective subconscious project to make people feel unreal, because then they are willing to invest in the impossible task of becoming real. Their perceived fraudulence drives consumption. But I have won a lottery of our false rituals and the prizes are a press release (like other speech but more real) and your magazine's ear (like other ears but more real). We speak out and say it is an insane idea to think that corporations are people but then privately, as people, we all aspire to be corporations because we have absorbed the message that things created by companies are more real than those created by real people.

Favorite reality show:
Small Town Security or I Almost Got Away With It. True crime is the only real reality TV. Everything else is a variety of fake pet pigs or the dullest modern takes on Roman gladiator battles. There is this DVD about C-Murder, hosted by Ice-T, where all anyone says is "it's real" and what they mean when they say it is that everyone is getting killed. What they mean when they say it is soon I will die here, it's a racist lottery of death here. Birth and death are among the few things we know to be real.

First place you felt at home:
I haven't felt that yet so I have to wonder what that even feels like. I have a sense it feels something like the comfort of bed but that is an altogether alien joy to me as well. If something of that home feeling were present in the experience of taking a bath I would know I know it but that is impossible. I can climb into any bath and feel an equal comfort. Like Bolaño said, "Poets are born orphans."

Jib Kidder plays Silent Barn in Brooklyn on Sunday 11.23.

Teaspoon To The Ocean is out on 27.1 via Weird World.