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Interviews

Hip-Hop's Come Out of the Closet: An Interview With Cakes Da Killa

We asked the upcoming rapper about masculinity, sexuality and being young and gay in the hip-hop world.

Recently, I was in Paris for the Loud & Proud Festival – a four-day celebration of queer culture held at the Parisian culture hub la Gaîté lyrique. The line-up included names such as Planningtorock, Perfume Genius and Austra and having covered the left field, indie pop spectrum, Saturday night was dedicated to the queer rap & ballroom sounds of Brooklyn with Le1f, MikeQ and Cakes da Killa on the bill.

Annoncering

The latter stood out in particular, delivering a show equal parts twerking, joking and rapping and also some serious musical chops. I first heard of Cakes da Killa back in 2013 with the release of his second mixtape, The Eulogy—a colorful, up-tempo and quite sexually explicit endeavor. Since then, he’s released a couple of EPs and another mixtape, Hunger Pangs – all high quality stuff – so when I got the chance to sit down with him, I was curious to delve into what it’s like being homosexual in a genre filled with hyper-masculinity, misogyny and homophobia. I sat down with Cakes, or Rashard Bradshaw as his real name is, to find out if hip-hop as a whole really is changing or if the media just jumped on openly gay rappers to use them as clickbait.

NOISEY: How and when did you start rapping?

Rashard Bradshaw: I was the cool gay kid in high school so I always had a lot of straight friends and was hanging out with straight boys. Rapping was really their thing, so I was like: “Okay, I can do that, too.” It was more an attention thing, but I never felt serious about it—I never meant for it to be a career. In college, I started making videos I was rapping, and off of that someone invited me to be on a compilation project. But there wasn’t a mental switch where I thought: “Now I’m going to make music.” I just got an opportunity, and I took it

Was there ever a point when you considered what it meant to be gay and be a rapper?

Annoncering

Well, it happened a few times, but when I was on my way to the Hot 97 interview, I had the switch in my head like: “This is bigger than me.” I’d never really thought of it like that before because this is just something that I’m good at—something that I do to pay my bills, express myself and have fun. But that’s when I saw the bigger picture. I can see why to some people this is revolutionary, even though to me, I’m just being myself. I sort of realized that I’m laying down groundwork for future people in my situation, which I’d never thought of before because I’d never thought that I would be touring or doing interviews.

Hip-hop, at least traditionally, has been a very masculine and misogynistic place. On The Eulogy you wore a pink crown of flowers on the cover, and had the song “Fuck Ya Boifriend”—a boldly different mixtape. On Hunger Pangs, however, you seemed to go a bit more traditional hip-hop. What changed?

With The Eulogy, I had no one to answer to. I was just getting beats from producers off Soundcloud. I would write what I wanted to write, and I just gave it to Mishka who put it out. With Hunger Pangs, I was having meetings with sponsors. They weren’t pressuring me, but they had opinions about my content. The media had opinions about my content. My mom had opinions, you know? My manager had opinions. I’m not the type of person who gets easily influenced, but I’m also not someone who’s stubborn enough to not take people’s opinions seriously. My livelihood is based off of what people think sometimes. I wasn’t faking it – I was definitely in a more masculine place – but I was also feeling like I had to appease people, which is something I never did in my life. I was trying to do something that was a little bit more marketable, I guess.

Young, black, gay kids from New York rapping isn’t exactly that new of a thing, but it seemed like things really took off around 2012—especially after Pitchfork’s feature article. What do you think changed?

It’s people not being tastemakers but being followers: once you have one site saying that this is cool, then you have all the other sites saying this is cool. I went to school for journalism and I feel like a lot of writers don’t have their own voice or their own say on the bigger picture. One blog will be like: “This is a hot new thing—gay rap”, and they’ll do a full on review and it’ll be really in-depth. I feel like the Pitchfork review was really in-depth. The writer met with each of us separately. She got a feel for us musically and wrote about our music, our different sounds and us being gay. Next, you have all the other blogs that just copy the headline and that’s the article. They don’t get to know the person as an artist, and they don’t listen to the music. It’s just used as clickbait or for shock value, which is fine because it gives us traction, but as an artist, it’s like: “I’m bigger than a headline.” To me, it’s like fashion seasons or something. In 2012-2013 everybody was gay-black-male-crazy; now it seems like everybody is very trans-crazy—that’s the new thing. Everybody wants to talk about the trans movement. I’ve had media outlets speak about me and say that gay rap is over. And it’s like, gay rap isn’t really a thing in the first place—and I’m still touring. How can you just say that something is over?

Cakes da Killa is currently touring Europe and working on his debut album.

Photograpy by George Howard.