{"id":164369,"date":"2023-05-26T11:00:58","date_gmt":"2023-05-26T15:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164369"},"modified":"2023-05-26T12:50:31","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T16:50:31","slug":"fucked-for-life-bladees-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/05\/26\/fucked-for-life-bladees-paintings\/","title":{"rendered":"Fucked for Life: Bladee\u2019s Paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_164372\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-164372\" class=\"wp-image-164372 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/img-3839-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/img-3839-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/img-3839-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/img-3839-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/img-3839-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/img-3839-2048x1536.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-164372\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas R\u00f6nnberg, <em>OCB Dinitrol<\/em>, 2023. Photograph by Olivia Kan-Sperling.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>This summer, we<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019re launching a series <\/span>called Overheard<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2014which is more or less about what it sounds like. We\u2019re asking writers to take their notebooks to interesting events or places; they&#8217;ll record what they see, but mostly what they hear. In the first of the series, Elena Saavedra Buckley goes to a TriBeCa gallery opening for an exhibit of collaborative paintings by two Swedish hip-hop artists, and surveys the scene.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The art show I was going to was risky to google, because it was called <em>Fucked for Life<\/em> and took place in the basement of a gallery called the Hole. It had been raining, and the humidity followed us downstairs, where the low-ceilinged room felt like the hull of a ship. The paintings reminded me of more focused, imaginative versions of the kind of thing your friend\u2019s stoner older brother might make in his room\u2014they had barely shaped demonic faces at their centers, orbited by tagged abstractions and blooms of neon, all lacquered and dripping. Some sat in ironic-seeming ornate gold frames; others hung against long stretches of loose fabric layered with graffiti, which had been made the day before and seemed to be releasing damp chemical wafts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This was the private opening of new collaborative paintings by Bladee and Varg2\u2122, whose real names are Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas R\u00f6nnberg\u2014two Swedish artists affiliated with a Nordic brand of underground hip-hop that\u2019s been gaining steam since the mid-aughts. The two collectives at its center are the Sad Boys\u2014helmed by the fairly famous Yung Lean\u2014and Drain Gang, which was started by Bladee.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I didn\u2019t know much about Varg2\u2122 before this weekend; he\u2019s a techno producer who used to go by just Varg until a German metal band of the same name sent him a cease and desist. (He then released an album called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fuck Varg.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) But I love the warbling, auto-tuned, alabaster Bladee\u2014the second <em>e<\/em> is silent\u2014who raps as often about Gnosticism and demons<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">as he does about weed and being depressed.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He has obsessive Zoomer fans like the rest of Drain Gang, though his are made especially rabid by how difficult he is to grasp. You can barely see him from behind his hair, hoodies, sunglasses, and blasted-out photo edits; one comment on a recent music video reads, \u201ci don\u2019t think i\u2019ll ever get used to seeing high quality footage of bladee,\u201d and a four-second clip of him saying \u201cDrain Gang\u201d\u2014just the audio!\u2014has 132,000 views. He says he was once struck by lightning in Thailand.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">None of these rappers have become household names, but Bladee has gone from posting his songs on SoundCloud to designing capsule collections for Marc Jacobs and Gant. Are the paintings, priced at an average of ten thousand dollars (and which Bladee\u2019s fans bemoan on Reddit for costing \u201c1460 hamburgers\u201d), evidence of an evaporating underground ethos? Visual art isn\u2019t much of an artistic stretch for these two, nor is working side by side on the same canvas, as they did for these pieces. They both came up as taggers, and Bladee made the merch and promo images for Drain Gang before his work with big designers. Even his use of language feels painterly; in \u201cReal Spring,\u201d he sings: \u201cWhite light shines towers up in gold \/ Hawk flies low, strikes like my pose \/ Three stars dance over the globe \/ Life unfolds, faith comes unfroze.\u201d That\u2019s Hilma \u201cas fuck\u201d Klint, I think, recalling something I read recently: that the paintings of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">that <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">notoriously mystical, also Swedish artist had in fact also been made collectively\u2014by as many as thirteen artists in total, in \u201ca realm inhabited by a plurality of spirits.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After their rapid laps around the room, some attendees congregated in the middle. One group of twentysomethings was talking about visiting Australia. \u201cDon\u2019t go,\u201d one guy said. \u201cIt sucks.\u201d His friend offered a defense: \u201cYou know, what\u2019s crazy about Australia is it\u2019s a place where animals have had so long to evolve.&#8221; \u201cKangaroos are descended from deer,\u201d she said. There was some confusion about whether this was right before they pivoted to the true nature of kangaroo pouches, which is sort of the Godwin\u2019s law of Australia 101\u2013type discussions. \u201cI thought there would be hair in there, but it looks like an access point to their insides,\u201d she said. It\u2019s actually somewhat difficult to find pictures of the pouches online; I\u2019ve tried. This group struggled to google them. Others discussed summer itineraries, plugging their plans (Marseilles, Bermuda) or reminiscing on unsuccessful past trips (Dublin, where the only thing to do other than drink, reportedly, was spend ninety dollars on orange blossom water at the Joyce-themed pharmacy). A sliver of the floor had become slippery in the damp conditions, nearly sending many extremities into the paintings, and one woman predicted that her friend would sooner save Bladee\u2019s work than she would her. \u201cSave the paintings,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2018Save the whales.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There were infantry waves of outfits. The straight couples in all black came first, the men asking the girls which paintings were their favorite and the girls shrugging in response\u2014\u201cthe buyers,\u201d as someone later called them. The youth followed, wearing many kinds of camo, low-rise trousers, unflattering glasses, and contextless outerwear. The most out-of-place accessory present was a Park Slope Food Coop tote bag, lugged by an affable and exhausted <em>GQ<\/em> photographer who had been following the artists around all day. Of course, there were a lot of tactical pants. The best of those, in leather, were worn by Ecco2K, another Drain Gang member, who also wore a balaclava topped with what looked like black hair from a troll doll. I wore a taupe Calvin Klein chiffon slip dress and black Tecovas cowboy boots, with\u2014and I was not alone in this choice\u2014a giant windbreaker, my attempt to step into the Drain Gang headspace. At one point, a girl approached me to say that she used to own earrings by the same designer as the ones I was wearing, but that her ex-girlfriend had stolen them. When I told her to buy them for forty dollars on Depop, like I did, she said that the same ex got her banned from the site.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cHow does someone get banned from Depop?\u201d I asked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cShe gave me a necklace for my birthday that had her blood in a vintage Balenciaga vial,\u201d she replied. (Bladee, describing the concept of \u201cdrain,\u201d has said: \u201c\u200b\u200b<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Everything me and my bros do is connected to that concept\u2014we might drain some blood for good fortune<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u201d) Post-breakup, this girl listed the necklace on Depop, after which the ex-girlfriend reported her to the company for hawking biohazards.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cSo now I can\u2019t scalp anymore,\u201d she went on. \u201cMy ex kept saying I was \u2018the epitome of a scumbag.\u2019 \u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cI think my feelings would have been hurt if you had tried to sell <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">my <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">blood,\u201d I said, smiling weakly. She looked a little guilty. And then Bladee arrived!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I felt maternal toward him, this rapper two years my senior, who was wearing a relatively unassuming fit: black crocodile dress shoes, crinkled jeans, a plaid shirt and gray hoodie, Oakleys, and a black cap. He accepted such feelings with a boyish affect\u2014he kept fiddling his long brown curls into a small ponytail under his chin. I remembered how sad he\u2019d seemed on some of his most beautiful tracks, like 2018\u2019s \u201cWaster\u201d: \u201cJust running through the days, running through the pain \u2026 Sorry, Mom, I know you hate to see me this way.\u201d Most of the feeling came from the situation, though, since standing next to one\u2019s paintings on a wall is an inescapably childlike position. Every object becomes a macaroni necklace, every gallery a school gymnasium, every wall a refrigerator. A woman gave the artists two bouquets of yellow roses while they shuffled around the room, up and down the stairs, as the attendees quietly egged each other on to go say hi.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My conversation with Bladee and Varg2\u2122 was brief; I approached them upstairs, near the ros\u00e9 station. Varg told me about the buildings they had been tagging downtown. Bladee was sweet and relaxed. We discussed af Klint\u2014\u201cI\u2019m a huge fan,\u201d he said. After spending most of the trip in a friend\u2019s studio to prep for the show, he was leaving New York in two days for Stockholm. \u201cIt just turned to spring there,\u201d he said, though he wondered whether he should stick around until the rain quit. \u201cBut it\u2019s so expensive,\u201d he said, giggling. He gets it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There was a private dinner at Lucien planned for after the opening. It was funny to imagine Bladee eating food, especially leaky bistro stuff like moules frites; it&#8217;s possible he snacked at the gas station that appears in the \u201cObedient\u201d music video, but he seems like a breatharian to me. Other attendees were going to a \u201cCaroline Polachek party.\u201d I decided to leave for a birthday at a bar in Brooklyn. Some friends had brought two bouquets of flowers for the birthday girl and boy: orange lilies and some kind of violets.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That made four bouquets for the night, the two from earlier and these ones\u2014vibrating symmetrically in two boroughs, two drops of paint folded into loose canvas to make two mirrored pairs across the river; a plurality of spirits. There is a section of a Jonathan Williams poem called \u201cWhat the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,\u201d in which he quotes John Clare: &#8220;<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I found the poems in the fields \/ And only wrote them down.&#8221;\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m not sure if those fields, where we go when we make our art, are very accessible through the underbellies of Manhattan galleries. But I do think people like Bladee go to them often, and always with their friends. That\u2019s real spring.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em><i>Elena Saavedra Buckley is an editor of <\/i><\/em>Harper\u2019s <em><i>and <\/i><\/em>The Drift.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cHow does someone get banned from Depop?\u201d I asked.\u00a0\u201cShe gave me a necklace for my birthday that had her blood in a vintage Balenciaga vial,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2327,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68673],"tags":[68669,68671,67827,67,6412,68670],"class_list":["post-164369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-overheard","tag-bladee","tag-draingang","tag-featured","tag-painting","tag-punk","tag-swedish-rap"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - 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