Mykki Blanco on Getting an MFA, Living in Morocco, and the Acceleration of Everything

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: Alongside being a fascinating and unpredictable artist, Mykki Blanco has always been someone who's good with unearthing threads of conversation (just watch his recent Interior Motives appearance alongside Physical Therapy if you don't believe me). I've interviewed Mykki twice before—once in 2013 for Pitchfork's now-dormant Guest List series, and again in 2016 via a very in-depth chat for VICE—and last I had the opportunity to get him on the horn again ahead of the release of his invigorating new album CAFE PARADISO, which just saw release a few weeks ago. It was, as always, a very enlightening and engagingly casual chat—check it out:

You live in Morocco now. Tell me about relocating there.
I'd lived in Lisbon from 2016 to 2020. In 2022, some friends from Portugal brought me here for the first time, and I absolutely fell in love with it—being close to the water, the really crazy and interesting history, the look and feel of the city. I came back here a few times over the last three years and I was like, "I could really live in this place, so let's give it a try."

Are you fairly malleable in terms of living in new places?
I'm flexible, but high quality of life wins out. There's a certain level of post-pandemic stress in the United States that I don't like. When I was recording the album in New York, even though I was subletting for seven months at the East Village, I was shocked at what things cost in the grocery store.

What was it like living in Lisbon?
The city very much looks like a kingdom. I eally get off on living amongst ruins. The old part of Lisbon, Alfama, was definitely my favorite part. The houses are beautiful, really old-school, and actually tiny. We lived in one neighborhood that was originally my boyfriend's neighborhood, Anjos, which is now a really hipster neighborhood in Lisbon. It was way more mom-and-pop when I lived there. The other place that we lived, I'm not joking, was a 15-minute walk to Madonna's house. It was this walled-off castle mansion, but from the outside, it just looked like one big building.

I didn't even know she lived in Lisbon, that's wild.
One of her kids was attending a football college there.

Did you visit Sintra while you lived there?
I played a festival in Central Town.

Sick. Sintra is one of those places where, when you go there, you're like, "This is unreal. I kind of can't believe this place even exists."
Yeah, there's definitely a storybook quality to Tangier as well. I'm going to recommend you to watch the Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown Tangier episode.

I'll put it in the queue! Let's talk about the last four years in your life between records. I know you got your MFA.
I got my master's, but I never got an undergraduate degree—but in an art school context, when you're putting together your portfolio, the career experience will lead most art schools to grant that person a master's. It was cool to be back in an environment completely outside of what I was doing with music. It gave me this reset. All of a sudden, I was researching in a super academic environment and going to lectures. I'd known about five different people—artists based in Switzerland, France, and Germany—who'd done this same program, so it didn't completely come out of left field. I had already a friend that I could live with if I had gotten into the program. So when I did get in, everything fell into place really quickly.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Basel a hamlet, but it's a pretty small place in Switzerland. It's known, obviously, for Art Basel, because that's one of the biggest things that happens in the city—but it's also known for pharmaceuticals. It was a complete lifestyle shift, and I needed that, because it just seemed like my life—I'm not trying to have a negative connotation, it wasn't a splintering, but even after graduating, I did the record, but only now since the first single has come out did I process the fact that it was going to take. time to get back into the rhythm of an album campaign.

I did my thesis on the African American presence in and post-Bolshevik Revolution—this pre-Nikita Khrushchev time in Stalinist and then Leninist Russia, where after they'd massacred their own people, they were bringing over these skilled African American agriculturalists to help them industrialize cotton production in Uzbekistan. Later, when it got to an indoctrination propaganda campaign, they'd invited Langston Hughes and all of these different people from the Harlem Renaissance to perform music and onstage. I made these sculptures that were about that, and then I graduated.

I'm really curious to hear you talk more about returning to school. It's fairly common for people our age to go back to grad school, but I always find it really daunting to consider.
That's the thing. I'm really still green, but I did my master's in studio art, which has a whole different construct about your expectations of its use, outside of you graduating. I was having this conversation with my friend who was visiting me from Marseille, and I was like, "It feels like an MFA in general now is this elder millennial lie." We were indoctrinated that we had to have one, and I guess it depends on the field, but it seems like going back to do that now would just put people in massive amounts of debt.

Overall, it was one of those things where I felt after the pandemic that I should have, like, other skills. There are a few things that I think I realistically will achieve still, in the near future—and it will not only be this other fulfilling thing I have in my life besides the music, but also an alternative revenue streams. I do still want to write a book and get into publishing. I'd never move back to L.A., but I thought about wanting to maybe get into film and television—but nowadays, nobody auditions for anything anymore. I'd like to have someone be like, "We like Mykki Blanco for this." But I don't desire to write myself into, like, a TV show.

There was also this sensation around the 2010s in the space of streaming television where you could potentially get a gig in a writers' room and have that be a career. In the last five or six years, that's also kind of disappeared.
It's so crazy, in the last three years, how many jobs don't exist. Just [compared to] the last album campaign in 2022, there are fewer music outlets—and I was shocked. I didn't realize the landscape would change that dramatically.

The 2010s was such a crazy time. There was all this—if not necessarily explicit opportunity, then at the very least the promise of opportunity.
There was so much more development and infrastructure, no matter what tier you were at—whether you were an artist that was signed to an indie or a major label. Transgressive is the biggest label that I've been on, but all of them have been independent. I'm someone who directly benefited from the super developed infrastructure of touring.

This record contains a few references to New York City in several ways. When you emerged as an artist and started getting a lot of attention, it was very much in the context context of what was going on in the city in general. Talk to me about your memories of New York City in the 2010s and your relationship with the city today in comparison.
I moved to New York in 2008, and New York morphed a few times in the time that I lived there. I started to spend more time in Europe in 2013, but I still had an apartment. 2015 was maybe the very last time I had some kind of semi-permanent roommate living situation in New York. But when I first moved to New York, downtown was still very much populated with the Terry Richardsons, the Ryan McGinleys, and the Dash Snows. You had this older world that me and my friends at the time were trying to cling on to, but once that all got ushered out, you got really interesting parties like GHE20G0TH1K, which was one of the first parties that I ever performed at as Mykki Blanco.

You'd hear these wild mashups. During those days, it wasn't so common to hear dembow [transitioned into] hardcore techno, ending with like a gospel mix. In those days, it still felt like a really big deal to hear that on the dance floor. I was starting to get this little reputation from performing at these underground parties, which was how Charles Damga from UNO asked me if I'd want to join his label—and he was my first manager. New York was always the city that sustained me. Funnily enough, when people give me my digital analytics, it's still the city that I have the biggest following on social media. Those ties run deeper than I realized—but people often tell me that they really enjoyed my music when they were in university, which would also have been around that time.

I'm definitely back there with the new music. I didn't set out to have this be an intention, but almost all of the artists that are featured are from the New York scene. I mean, I'll always work in New York, because I don't foresee when I wouldn't work on music with FaltyDL. The apartment that I sublet when we were recording was Brian DeGraw's apartment. I've known Brian over the years, and he was in Europe the whole entire time I was subletting. So there was already some cool lore and energy kind of going into the record. When I'm in the creative process, I'm not aware of the osmosis that's going on. You just absorb the vibes of the city that you're in. But when we got into the cutting room floor of the record, I was like, "Jesus Christ." Even though I wrote lyrics in New York, Morocco, Tangier, Paris, and London, there's this really rock-y New York thing that I'm happy we tapped into.

I'm kind of funny where—I guess this is actually quite normal for some artists—but a lot of my music doesn't sound the same from record to record. Even though there may be certain threads of me being an artist and the music I make, a lot of times I separate my music from 2012 until about 2020. That's when I really started changing and spending way more dedicated time in the studio and, to be super honest about it, became more invested in the composition of my music—exploring things sonically that I didn't think I was going to be able to do. In the earlier part of my career, there was a lot of me continually having to showcase myself and all of these different sides of my artistry, because when people would write about my music, there were always so many layers of identity politics. It was really difficult, in those virtue-signaling years, for anyone to just talk about the music. It was always "gay activist rapper," with seven or eight titles—and, at some point, they start talking about the record.

You mentioned working with FaltyDL. Talk to me about what makes your creative partnership sing.
Every time we get ready to make a body of music, we have a moment where we're like, "Oh, we still got it." There's a certain level of trust. When you work with someone in that creative context, you start to learn each other. I can bring Drew so many different ideas that I want to explore, and he's so excellent at fleshing those ideas out into really great production. In the beginning, we didn't work side-by-side—I didn't live in the same city as him for a while. But with Postcards from Italia and this record, it was this really nice process of never really being a producer ever myself, but having a heavier hand in composing my music.

Another person you worked with on this record is Patrick Holland, who I've had on the newsletter twice now. Everyone I talk to always seems to be working with him. He's in demand amongst smart people.
I met Patrick through one of my best friends of 20 years: Daniel Fisher, [aka] Physical Therapy.

Who I've also had on the newsletter as well!
Daniel introduced me to Pat, and their whole thing that they have going on is really special and magnetic. We did two or three days in the studio and created some things very quickly that I felt really great about. Pat and Daniel are two people that I actually want to work with a lot on my next record, because that was really a wonderful experience. We locked in really quickly. There was a song that didn't make the album because it never got fully fleshed out in the time, but "Butt Sex" came together really quickly—and maybe that's also because, lyrically, it's a very simple song. When we did that, we started fooling around and sketching it out, but we started to actually get more serious about it in the span of, like, 30 minutes. I was like, "I've never made a song that sounds like this." An obvious influence for that track is LCD Soundsystem, but I was also listening to a lot of Saint Etienne and Stereo Total.

There's a certain fearlessness now that I didn't have when I was younger. When I get into the studio now, it's really fun because—and I hope this doesn't sound weird—but when I really get into that focused, disciplined way of setting [creative] intention, I have more confidence now because I'm like, "Okay, some songs are gonna turn out good." At least I have enough confidence in myself as a musician at this point in my career to be like, "Okay, yeah, let's do this." One of my favorite songs on the album is "FOXES," because I'd never made a song that had that energy—but that's the vibe of the music that I listen to. It feels very freeing when you can make decisions creatively where you're like, "You know what? No, these lyrics aren't good enough. We're going to stop, or make the song six minutes and have an extended drum solo." Making music in that full-body way has definitely transformed my love of doing this—which is in stark contrast to 2012, when I'd just show up and rap to a premade beat that was given to me by a producer.

When we last talked in 2016, you told me that around that time you'd stopped using drugs for a little bit. You told me that you had an anxiety attack after choosing to do so because—this was the exact quote—"There wasn't enough to block out the stuff that I hadn't dealt with yet." That's obviously a pretty intense thing to go through.
[Laughs] Oh my God. I really used to share a lot in 2016.

I'm curious to hear you talk about your relationship with drugs and mental health now. What's it like?
A big reason why I'm living in a place like Tangier—which, like I said, has this crazy, interesting history that literally goes back to ancient times—literally just yesterday, I got back from Amsterdam last night because I had a gig this past weekend, and the week before that I was doing a festival in London. I live a 15-minute walk to the sea now, and I can get really fresh, almost gourmet-style seafood in little cafes and restaurants—and it's, like, 12 bucks. I love going to the fresh fruit and vegetable market here. What I realized is, for me to be my healthiest, I'm no longer a big-city person. I can go and work, or do a little sublet, but Even during the time I was recording the record, I was there on an advance from the label. But there were some crazy moments where I was like, "God, I don't know if I would be able to live [here] the way that I want to live."

My big goal is to be able to live between here and Paris. That would be a really good mix. Right now, I have this house in Tangier, and I never would've thought I'd be living in the kind of house this is. When I found it, I was like, "Holy shit, is the universe giving me a gift for my years of toil?" It's a nicer house than I thought that I was able to afford. Being very openly queer, people asked me, "What's it like?" Because Morocco's a Muslim country. Because of the nature of this city, everything is definitely more underground, because it has to be—but it's also way more visible than people who would have never been here would think, because I definitely did.

Let's talk about your relationship with being online at this point in your life.
It's crazy that I don't use Twitter anymore—well, I use it, but I don't say anything on there. I still follow a bunch of accounts. But to have been a heavy tweeter for eight years and then see that go completely out of vogue...I don't know what year it happened, but people just started to like say less. Maybe because people were so tired of getting, like, canceled, right?

I think that was part of it.
People were just so tired of doing one fatal misstep. I mean, there are a lot of contributing factors. I remember when Blood Orange left Twitter, and I was like, "Do I still have to be on Twitter?" That period of 2021 to 2025—the TikTok shift, where people were like making you feel like if you weren't using TikTok, somehow you were failing—now, even though there are a ton of indie artists on TikTok, there are also a ton that have at max four or five videos because they're not a TikToker. It's interesting how that little period has come full circle. We put it like this: Would I totally love and benefit from like having any song of mine become a viral sensation on TikTok? Sure, because that's the nature of the beast. But I also kind of love that the snake really ate its own tail, with so many people during that period having these viral TikTok moments. Obviously, I'm not trying to be a hater or begrudge anyone who has a viral TikTok moment.

I totally chalk it up to my age and the kind of person that I am—but, [Twitch streaming] is something that, maybe I overthink it, because I've never really liked it.

Me neither.
The simplicity of it, and the fact that people are really engaged on it in this mass way, really fascinates me. I'm not missing out on absolutely anything, right? But it's one thing that I had to be hyper aware of before I started promoting this record. Listen, I'm not going to be a dork and complain about an Instagram algorithm, but it really was interesting seeing that I have to post something really attention-grabby to then post the thing that I actually want people to know about. When you say it out loud, it's actually quite a small thing. It's like, "Okay, whatever, I guess I'll adapt with the app." But this time also feels so weird, because people are already exhausted by a certain kind of influencer. But algorithmically, these apps still platform these people and how they create. I don't think that they've found a way to balance out content creation with artists need to still be using these platforms to share their new collaborations and campaigns.

Have you seen the trend on Instagram where people post fake Notes App apologies to get engagement for whatever they're promoting?
I have a song on the album being released tomorrow, so maybe I need to make that. You might see that tomorrow.