Even within the realm of hip hop – a genre where beautiful music is so frequently made by slamming together jarringly estranged elements – Daveed Diggs’ CV doesn’t really make sense. He’s best known in the straight world for originating the twin roles of the Marquis De Lafayette and President Thomas Jefferson in cultural phenom Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-garlanded Broadway musical, which won Diggs a Tony (he’s also won awards and nominations for his performances in the TV adaptation of Hamilton and Snowpiercer).
Real heads, however, know Diggs from his dark flipside: the unsettlingly cool-headed MC with LA-based avant-garde hip hop trio Clipping. Diggs’ cold-blooded flows upgrade the already-scarifying digital shrapnel scored by bandmates William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes to the sort of din you’d dare not listen to while home alone. Their 2019 full-length There Existed An Addiction To Blood and its 2020 follow-up Visions Of Bodies Being Burned were aural horror movies that proved slasher flicks don’t require you to see the gore to feel the terror within. As befits a group who’ve twice been finalists at sci-fi’s Hugo Awards, their latest, Dead Channel Sky, is a cyberpunk epic that swings from futurist club bangers to opiated Blade Runner-esque soundscapes, an hour-long reminder that wherever the cutting edge might be located, Clipping will be found operating beyond its frontiers, governed by their own maverick creative compass.
For Diggs, everything begins with George Clinton. “I grew up obsessed with Parliament-Funkadelic,” he confesses, calling from the home he shares with his partner and their 16-month-old baby. Within the limitless context of Clinton’s extended funkaverse, he argues, anything is possible and everything makes sense – even the polymorphous spree of Clipping’s wildcard output, and the idea that a star of the biggest Broadway smash of the 21st century could also be one-third of one of rap’s most challenging crews.
“What George did clarified a lot of what we do in Clipping,” Diggs continues. “Those records were themed; they took place in sci-fi universes; they had characters in them; they were often allegories for fallout from the Vietnam War and stuff like that. There’s a lot of really heavy stuff going on in there. But it’s also fun party dance music! And that is what we try to accomplish in Clipping, too.”
The group aren’t plotting their path into rap’s furthest reaches alone. Their previous releases have featured appearances by fellow travellers including punk-rappers Ho99o9, Lightning Bolt drum hurricane Brian Chippendale, west coast rap elder King Tee and Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker. Dead Channel Sky fields a similar murderers’ row of offbeat collaborators – iconoclastic rapper Aesop Rock, guitar malcontent Nels Cline and, on new expanded edition Dead Channel Sky Plus, puckish and inimitable turntablist Kid Koala – helping them flesh out the album’s nightmarish digital visions.
“We’ve had the great pleasure of working with some of our favourite rappers and singers and noise musicians,” says Diggs. “And though we’re doing these really heady projects and these really specific ideas, we work really hard to create a framework for them to do the thing that they love to do.” They’re careful to seek out kindred spirits, but once chosen, these fleeting colleagues have free range to do what they want. “If we want somebody on our song, it’s because we think them doing their thing is going to be perfect,” Diggs adds. “That’s one of the reasons we get such great stuff from collaborators on these records. The Aesop Rock verse on this album is so crazy good. He’s one of my top two favourite rappers, so whatever he said was going to be incredible. But, man – what a genius. I was immediately like, ‘we got to make sure we frame this appropriately…’.”
For artists who deal in dystopian visions and blood-curdling violence, Clipping’s greatest nemesis is the pigeonhole. Sure, there’s a sizeable egghead quotient to their noise, but Diggs says they work to make tracks like ‘Dominator’ and slo-mo acid-squelch groove ‘Keep Pushing’ that also function on the dancefloor. “A lot of my favourite rap music is probably best suited to listening to on headphones while sat down,” Diggs says, “as a rapper, some part of it has to also function as party music.”
It’s a duality the MC inevitably traces back to his primary influence. “I think Parliament-Funkadelic understood that better than anyone.”
Clipping’s Dead Channel Sky Plus is released on 19 September via Sub Pop
To begin reading Daveed Diggs’ Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
