There are certain things that are immediately clear about the musician and producer Steve Lacy: he’s abnormally confident for a 21 year old. He’s good looking.
His career is built on an alchemic combination of serendipity, raw talent and vision, which, when added together, result in a pretty clear picture of an artist on the cusp of something huge.
So my heart drops when I realise that I’m not going to be able to avoid asking him what it means to be cool. The only thing less cool than talking about the meaning of coolness is asking someone why they think they’re cool.
Part of his mystique is the fact that Steve Lacy has built the kind of DIY music career that we assume doesn’t exist any more, and he’s done it with an enviable self-assurance and maturity that has helped him maintain a staggering amount of control in an industry that tends to place power in the hands of executives more than artists. But it isn’t just this. Whether he’s producing, working on his solo albums, collaborating with the band he’s part of or lending his signature guitar tone to records by Solange or Kendrick Lamar or Vampire Weekend, Lacy’s musical style comes with ambient layers of depth. Even a quick guitar lick or muffled keyboard loop conveys well-worn emotion and a nuanced understanding of the ins and outs of life.
On an unseasonably warm January afternoon, Lacy and I meet at a small coffee shop called the Waterlily Café in Topanga Canyon, a world away from Compton, where he grew up. Topanga is the kind of LA neighbourhood that probably shouldn’t exist any more. It’s only about an hour away from downtown without traffic, but it feels like a different world. A boutique sells unisex kimonos, yoga pants and hula hoops right near a specialty foods store with homemade pasta, but it also feels secluded, like a quirky mountain town that’d be a good location for a Netflix show. Like Hollywood, Topanga is selling escape, only the version of escape that Topanga is selling involves a small-town atmosphere with plenty of new-age crystal shops, cafés that don’t play music made after 1976 and, somewhat incongruously, a steady stream of scrubby, perma-stoned dudes emerging from the private recording studios that dot the surrounding lush hills and secluded winding roads.
When Lacy walks in, he offers a brisk handshake, orders an iced latte and melts into a chair at one of the few available tables. It’s less than a week after a particularly tumultuous Sunday in Los Angeles when, on the morning of the Grammys, it was announced that LA basketball hero Kobe Bryant had died in a helicopter crash. Impromptu memorials dotted the grounds of the Staples Center, where the Grammys also happened to be held, but Lacy’s energy is so serene that it feels like it all happened in some distant, alternate universe.
Additionally, there had been a swirl of controversy around the Grammy Awards themselves, involving allegations of sexual harassment and unethical voting behaviour. Lacy attended the ceremony. His debut LP, Apollo XXI, was nominated for Best Urban Contemporary Album, but he lost to Lizzo, which he doesn’t seem remotely bothered by. ‘I think it’s fun to get acknowledged, but I don’t let it hold too much weight for me,’ he says. ‘It’s public information that it’s not the best system... you would think that with all the backlash and people noticing things, they would change something, but they haven’t. I’m seen by all these people who are there .It’s good PR, whether we like it or not, but it is also a big game. I just have to get more famous. I know I’m in it for the long haul.’
Still, the Grammys offered Lacy some chance for introspection: ‘I went at 17 and then went again this year, so I compared the experiences,’ he says. ‘The first time, I went in this suit from downtown. I wore the same suit to my prom, for like 120 bucks. I put gold buttons on it. [This year] was pretty similar, but the clothes got more expensive.’ Lacy wore a grey Comme des Garçons dress, a grey-black blazer and black Rick Owens combat boots with thick laces that sprawled across the boots haphazardly. ‘I just wanted to do some crazy shit, but quiet,’ he says. ‘Quiet but disruptive as fuck. It wasn’t the most colourful. It wasn’t the most sparkly. I killed them in three pieces. I looked around, and I was like, “I’m definitely the best-dressed dude here.”’ In an article about red-carpet looks, Vogue called Lacy the Grammys’ best-dressed man.
The first time Lacy went to the Grammys was with The Internet, the new-age funk and soul group he joined up with for the collective’s 2015 album, Ego Death . The Internet – the project of Odd Future’s Syd and Matt Martians – had already carved out a space for themselves as practitioners of lovelorn neo soul that existed in a zonked-out sun-smog of permanent sunsets and exhausted epiphanies. Lacy started playing with the group at the urging of former Internet keyboardist Jameel Bruner, who he met in jazz band at the LA performing arts high school his mom encouraged him to attend after she noticed that he was playing Guitar Hero all the time. Guitar Hero tends to promote theatrics over musical craft, but when Lacy actually picked up the instrument, he found that he began to play in a different style.
‘[Guitar Hero] is how I fell in love with guitar,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think I’d be a renowned guitar player. I don’t think I’m that good. I’m not a guitar player’s guitar player.’ While talking about this, Lacy demonstrates the way of thinking that seems to have helped him find
a niche in a music industry that is undergoing major transition: ‘All the people I looked up
to were fucking amazing at playing for other people, and I never saw that for myself,’ he says. ‘I was like, “Maybe I’m not a guitar player,” but then I realised I could create songs, and could find a distinct sound that I could call mine, rather than having the most technical – I know people that can play all the...’ Here, he mimes a rapid guitar solo with his fingers, like he’s playing Guitar Hero in his Compton living room all over again. ‘... but their chord game is fucking wack.’
Lacy joined The Internet while in high school, and was on a worldwide tour with them pretty much as soon as he graduated. ‘I always knew there wouldn’t be a plan B,’ he says, as a troop of teens wanders into the coffee shop to ask for paper cups full of water and ice. ‘I didn’t know what plan A was, but I knew I wasn’t going to have a plan B. I was firm. I was very strict about that policy with myself. My mom would always bug me about it, but I was like, “I feel like the fallback would require more time than the [plan] A, so why would I do that? I’ve foreseen my future.” You know that end-of-the-year talk you have with your teacher, where they’re like, “What are you about to do?” I was like, “I’m going to produce and tour next month.” And then I had the Kendrick [Lamar] and [J.] Cole features months after that talk. I literally graduated and went on tour. I wasn’t dumb.’
Lacy loves feedback. When he was a kid, living in a house with his mom and three sisters, they’d all try on outfits, going from bedroom to bedroom to workshop what they were wearing. Though he’s regularly surrounded by music’s power players and no longer lives with his mom, he still runs his music by her. ‘I think I am very hands-on, but I also like to listen,’ he says. ‘Even if I don’t listen to your advice, it’s going to contribute to my decisions. I think it comes down to when I was younger. [My mom and sisters and I] would kinda style each other. We’d come into one another’s rooms and be like, “What do you think about this?” and she’d be like, “Mmm, lose the shoes.” Then I’d ask my sister and she’d be like, “No, I actually like it.” It makes me come into an opinion of my own. My sister is like, “You always do the opposite, so what does it even matter?” But I just want to hear.’
Somewhere in amongst all that touring and recording and writing and growing, it was decided that each member of The Internet should also release a solo project. Lacy mentioned he had something brewing called Steve Lacy’s Demo , which he’d recorded alone as a teenager at his mom’s house, on his iPhone. ‘I was like, “Well, I’ve got this,”’ he says. ‘I don’t know why, but I was passionate about it. I was like, “I’ve got some songs on my phone” because I just make music. I just like the art of it. I don’t make music for things. I make music like I breathe or talk. Like
I put on clothes. [My manager] was like, “Are you going to mix this? Are you going to re-record these vocals? You going to re-record these drums?” I’m like, “Nah, dude. This is it. Steve Lacy’s demos on my phone. This is it.”’
It turned out to be a smart move. Steve Lacy’s Demo, besides having an easy press hook (in2017, Wired ran an entire feature about how he recorded it, and a lot of other music, on his iPhone), is a perfect distillation of who Lacy is: a willful outsider surrounded by the most insidery-insiders. The kind of guy who has no problem dropping a lo-fi release that isn’t really an album as his first major artistic statement, and is doing everything in his power to not fall into the trap of empty promises of collaboration or the purgatory of vacant networking that comes along with music-industry success.
It also helps that the songs are great. Steve Lacy’s Demo is like an alternate history of outsider California funk and soul distilled into 13 minutes of hazy meditations on love, prophecies of doom, paranoia and the pain of giving too much. It sounds like the sort of private-press record you’d happen upon in a bargain bin and then treasure for its off-kilter wisdom, wonky lyrics (‘Damn I wish I could have been a clone/ Date myself/Anyway it’s all my fault’), and ability to convey the kind of lived-in knowledge that typically comes from decades of living hard and with abandon. The song cycle positioned Lacy as older and wiser than he actually is.
If Lacy had dropped the demo and then disappeared back into the cavernous grooves of The Internet, it would have been understandable, but in spring 2019, he released Apollo XXI , his first proper solo LP, on the day after his 21st birthday. The album was written as a diary of his experiences after the release of Steve Lacy’s Demo. That meant it contained songs about break-ups, success, his evolving view of himself and the world and, on the three-part epic Like Me, his sexuality. In 2017, Lacy had publically identified as bisexual when a fan on Tumblr asked if he would ever date men. Lacy’s response was a breezy ‘Sure, why not?’
Like Me is an anomaly in Lacy’s discography. It’s a nine-minute exploration of loneliness, alienation and recalibration, as Lacy struggles to figure out who he was and who he is becoming. Though the song is cloaked in the same kind of compelling new-age cockiness that has defined his work to date – he’s quick to mention that he only sees energy, not gender – it’s also a catchy paean to the loneliness he felt when he initially decided to come out, with a chorus that echoes from his chiming guitar like a schoolyard chant: ‘How many out there just like me?/How many others not gon’ tell their family?/ How many scared to lose their friends like me?’
He doesn’t attempt an answer, but the questions aren’t hypothetical, either. Like Me is compelling because it asks big questions: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How can I manifest that? And how does my sexuality impact my art? ‘Clothing has always been a way for me to manipulate whoever is looking at my outfit into thinking I was of a certain stature or a certain way of living or being,’ he says. ‘To this day, if I’m going somewhere to eat I’m like, “What character am I going to be?” It could be a little tough sometimes. A slight identity crisis. But I love it.’
It’s this last personal observation that gets at the intangible coolness of Steve Lacy: plenty of people in their early twenties make music. Plenty of them dress cool. It’s par for the course for musicians to try on different personalities and styles, but the freedom Lacy has, the confidence that things will work out, even if they don’t necessarily work out the way he imagined, is what pushes him into a rarified category.
Then he says something that flies in the face of the very concept of fame in the 21st century: ‘Sometimes I hate the knowledge I’ve acquired. But then I think it changes my mind and my philosophy and intentions. Now I’ve been saying, “I just want to be the least annoying. What can I do to be the least annoying in music?” There’s so much stuff out there and so much space that’s filled already. I’m trying to make it feel like it did when I was just
dropping shit on SoundCloud just because I wanted to. I’m trying to figure out how to translate my feelings into the new realm of life I’m into. There’s been nights where I’ve been crying, looking at old photos from my mom’s house, with the keyboard in my bed, sleeping. I can never go back to that. I just have to create those times now, and adjust.’
After he says this, I tell him that I’m going to ask him something that I really don’t want to ask because it’s about being cool, and whether he thinks he’s cool. He doesn’t tell me not to ask, but he does grin a little bit when I finally spit it out.
‘I think it’s just freedom,’ he says. ‘Freedom is cool. People can sense your freedom and how much you don’t give a fuck. It’s an even meter of selflessness and selfishness. You should be both.’
This is about as good an answer as I could hope for, but there’s one part that gives me pause: the part about not giving a fuck. It’s true that Lacy is forging his own path and succeeding at it, and it’s also true that he’s done it in an industry that can be hostile and callous toward new talent, but it also seems like he very much gives a fuck about having a strong sense of self, about staying true to who he is, even if that’s constantly mutating. He also definitely cares about making art that he believes in, no matter where that art might end up. It’s admirable and a bit anachronistic, but not unrealistically so, which is a lot like his music. In Lacy’s world, the only constant is confidence and, hidden just below the surface, a drive to keep things moving forward. It’d be easy to call it a fear of stagnation, if Lacy seemed particularly scared of anything at all.
GQ Style’s Spring/Summer 2020 issue is out on 12 March via newsstands and the GQ Style app.
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