Nick Bollinger investigates the indie rock/hip-hop crossover of Dirty Projectors.
The worlds of hip-hop and indie rock once seemed separated by a yawning chasm - sonically, culturally and aspirationally. But when Kanye West calls Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon his favourite artist, and Vernon makes an album laden with samplers and Auto-Tune, you know the borders have shifted. And that’s not an isolated event. If you saw a skinny, bearded white guy in the company of Kanye – or Beyonce or Solange – in the past year, it wasn’t necessarily Vernon. It might have been David Longstreth, the 35-year-old Connecticut-born, Yale-educated musician who for the past 15 years has recorded under the band name Dirty Projectors.
David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors Photo: Supplied
His new album, his first in four years, has the simple title Dirty Projectors. It’s not a simple album though.
Take the track ‘Little Bubble’. After a prelude of strings, the song settles into a glitchy drum-machine groove, as Longstreth, his voice heavily affected with Auto-Tune, croons a melody that has a lot of the characteristics of contemporary R&B while still managing to sound like a pointy-headed white guy.
That description could be broadly applied to the whole of this album, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who heard his work on the great recent Solange album, A Seat At The Table, where Longstreth brought some of the same arty, indie sensibility to songs that all the characteristics of classic soul.
Longstreth’s affection for soul/R&B – and desire to make his own blue-eyed version of it – puts him a long tradition of white guys that includes Darryl Hall and Scritti Pollitti’s Green Gartside, both of whom he reminds me of at different times.
Behind the hip-hop sonics, though, you’ll find other traditions at play; ones that are intrinsically associated with mainstream rock. For all his 21st century genre-busting, what Longstreth has created essentially fits that old singer-songwriter template, the break-up album. Somewhere between the last Dirty Projectors album Swing Lo Magellan and this one, Longstreth broke up with his long-time partner and bandmate Amber Coffman. There’s little question that the album’s opening song is an autopsy of a relationship. And beneath the glitchy beats, fragmented samples and comically pitch-altered vocal is ‘You Keep Your Name’, a classic piano ballad Elton John wouldn’t be ashamed of.
The self-referential aspect of that song is doubled by the use of a sample from Swing Low Magellan (“we don’t see eye to eye”), which would seem to have been prophetic. As for lines like “What I want from art is truth/What you want is fame”, one could hear them as bitter or irredeemably pompous. Or else one could remove them from the breakup scenario and apply them instead to the hip-hop/indie rock divide discussed earlier. Imagine he’s singing those lines to Kanye West – which is not out of the question – and they make an entirely different kind of sense.
But the whole record works like this, moving from micro to macro and back; appearing one moment to be your classic singer-songwriter confessional, the next, a commentary on broader cultural phenomena, and sometimes the two at once.
If Longstreth uses his lyrics to say two things at a time, the music does the same juxtaposing Longstreth’s rangy, romantic melodies with seemingly unrelated, yet far from random, sound fragments, to create intense and sometimes jarring compositions.
Contrary to the indie slacker stereotype, David Longstreth is a super-hard-working, ambitious guy and Dirty Projectors is the latest and best-realised result of those ambitions. It’s busy; at times exhaustingly so. In can also be breathtakingly tuneful, and touchingly heartfelt, even through the vocal effects.
Longstreth was reportedly disappointed that his last album didn’t achieve the breakthrough to mass-audience he was hoping for. This new one, though a little more direct in its lyrics, is no less challenging. You might wonder why he didn’t save himself the grief and simply present these songs as classic singer-songwriter rock, with guitar or piano. And yet, as we’ve already seen, he’s caught the ear of hip-hop’s heaviest hitters. All he needs now is for their sizeable audience to catch on.
Songs featured: Little Bubble, Winner Takes Nothing, Keep Your Name, Up In Hudson, Death Spiral, Ascent Through Clouds, Cool Youir Heart.
Dirty Projectors is available on Domino.
