Mavi. Photo by Vivian Khanounsay
A companion incense for MAVI’s long-awaited third album shadowbox has been long-gestating, the byproduct of a chance meeting at an A.P.C. store overseas while on tour some years ago. One of the employees was also working on a fragrance brand, kindling the spark that would eventually lead to the collaboration (MAVI describes the scent as cherry forward and woody, with a frankincense base). Incense is an apt encapsulation of shadowbox, which the North Carolina rapper says is about “reframing my relationship with a part of myself that destroys.” Aromatic compounds years in the making are carefully distilled, amalgamated and reconstituted — only to be turned into ash for a fleeting moment of multisensory transcendence. But long after the haze clears, the memory lingers, a feeling you can’t quite shake.
The fastidious attention to every minute detail has MAVI particularly invigorated about his latest release. “That’s part of the reason why I’m so confident about it,” he says over a video call when I ask about the album process. MAVI and his friends recorded “50, 60 songs” last summer, then went through and made their own tracklists, trimming digressions and honing in on repeated themes.
He tells me he felt very little pressure while recording, “like I finally stepped out of the shadow of Let the Sun Talk.” You can hear that slack assurance in the album’s beats, which move from the woozy currents of “open waters” to the slinky pulse of “too much to zelle,” and in his raps, which saunter and skip whether MAVI is feeling wistful (“The promise of another life cool, but what’s on the other side?”) or incorrigible (“Today my grandmother turn eighty / And I’m on three Percocets, I ain’t even ate yet”). When he leaps hurdles on mid-album rhythm etude “the sky is quiet,” assonances and alliterations unfurl in a flurry: “The mayor and the maker and the bakerman shakin’ hands / They pay to see a baby of enslavement do the label dance.”
MAVI songs frequently feel like eavesdropping on a conversation with an imaginary therapist, or maybe God, but his instinct for candid introspection has sharpened to a vicious point on shadowbox. That clarity is mirrored in his vocals, which ring through with far more fidelity than 2019’s Let The Sun Talk and 2022’s Laughing so Hard, it Hurts. Even so, MAVI’s voice on shadowbox occasionally fizzes with static or falls low in the mix as if the Carolina rapper were a Lilliputian figure wandering amidst the enormous instrumentation. But on previous LPs, the aural obfuscation could go beyond lo-fi takes to instances where samples deliberately overlap bars as if to preempt scrutiny on the emotions undergirding his lyrics. MAVI chalks the shift up to a more polished recording setup, though it’s easy enough to trace a line between that legibility and his desire to share “honest accounts of how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, what my life is made of.”
shadowbox is a “counter” to Let The Sun Talk, “or the more mature version” of MAVI’s debut album. He’s been finetuning the details of his visuals and rollout too, growing noticeably animated when we discuss the platinum palladium print album cover and a series of promotional images and single covers by the multidisciplinary artist Saint Ki. The latter of these are all black-and-white physicals scanned off paper, passing through approximately four sets of hands in meatspace before appearing on your Instagram feed; their digital fate only reinforced MAVI’s desire to make something tactile. These drawings evoke the cutout silhouettes of Kara Walker and the literally black figures that populate Kerry James Marshall’s oeuvre, though they maintain a playfulness more akin to Kodone.
MAVI tells me he’d actually wanted Ki to create the cover art for his previous album, Laughing So Hard It Hurts, but scheduling didn’t work out; as with the incense, MAVI seems particularly gratified that these ideas have finally come to fruition. With the stars aligned and the pressure off, he’s grown more circumspect about his goals, focused on internal improvement over external competition: “I can just make my best rap album, you know? I can just paint this shit in my style, the way I see it, the best.”
The FADER: I was curious if you had any thoughts on the current election season and the use of rappers for clout by both the Harris and Trump campaigns.
MAVI: I liked American politics more when nobody gave a fuck about what rappers thought. This shit is a little bit embarrassing. It’s one of the lowest forms of manipulation to me. It’s like a celebrity guest star on a Disney Channel sitcom. It’s like a cheap pop in wrestling, I don’t fuck with that.
As a person from hip-hop culture, a Black member of the youth who has experienced social pressures, poverty, and got family history of different things, there are certain issues that are critical to the culture of hip-hop that no candidate has properly addressed enough to have all of this endorsement from this kind of culture.
Both within your music and in your interviews, you’ve talked about the engagement between hip-hop culture and politics. I’m curious where you feel the artist’s role in political advocacy or activism exists in the current landscape.
The role of the artist in politics is the same as the role of the artist in the studio or at the museum: to tell the truth. And I think the truth of what’s being exchanged for these kinds of endorsements or the truth of I’m insecure about making this endorsement because of this issue that I’m intimately aware of or involved in is not being addressed.
There’s very little transparency by the hip-hop artists that get involved with these political campaigns to their audiences about the pushes and pulls that caused them to do these things, you know? And that feels kind of dirty. Feels too secretive for me.
How do you as an artist maintain a focus on truth-telling?
You can’t have an extrinsic motivation to tell the truth. I want to tell the truth because I want to tell the truth, even if I never get rewarded for it. And I think that keeps me focused and grounded on what I actually feel. And even if neither of the big parties having a shouting match represents that, that’s still what I feel.
Where do you find that intrinsic motivation to tell the truth when there isn’t an extrinsic reward for it?
Because God done beat the shit out of me for not telling the truth. In ways that like… you know how sometimes the truth of existence be revealed through the events of your life in a way that, even if you shared all the events in your life with somebody else, they couldn’t extrapolate the same overall messaging and themes? I’ve been running from the truth about certain types of things about myself for a long time. And that has really, really fucked up parts of my life, and it caused me to make the same mistakes over and over. So now I enter into marriage with the truth at any cost.
It’s interesting because maybe five years ago now, just before the pandemic, my friend Josh Svetz interviewed you about Let The Sun Talk. What you’re saying now about running from the truth and then confronting it does remind me of some of the things you were saying in that interview then. And so it’s funny to hear you talk about it as, “Oh I used to be running and now I’m confronting stuff.” But I feel like your discography has always been about trying to confront that shadow self.
Exactly, exactly. I was riding to the airport with my creative director, and I was self-flagellating a little bit. I was doing a little bit of woe is me, I’m like, Oh I’m this, I’m a fucking womanizing alcoholic, I’m this, I’m that. He’s like, “Well, I don’t think you’re a womanizing alcoholic. I think you’re a person who’s learning.” And I said, “Well, I don’t think I’m a womanizing alcoholic, but I do know that I can be if I allow myself.” And I think that’s what embracing my shadow self is, acknowledging that you got the propensity to be all the things that you would be scared to admit that you are and choosing the truth. Whether it means admitting that or changing it, because “shadow” has a negative connotation.
When I first started making the album, I was going to name it Starving My Shadow because I had this whole concept of, “I can feed my spirit or I can feed my shadow. I can nourish my spirit with things like love or the written word or meditation or healthy food or good experiences. Or I can nourish my shadow with things like money, sex, drugs, hedonism.” And I’m like, “Okay, I want to starve my shadow self.” And I was telling my friend Knockout about that because I got really excited, like, oh, I know which part of myself I need to kill. And he said, “No, you can’t kill your shadow. You need your shadow.”
Your ego ultimately is the CPU of your sense of self running in the background, always trying to confirm and establish selfhood. That’s important for self-recognition, but it’s important in a controlled way. The things that I don’t like about myself, like, “hey, I can lie to people sometimes” — but I can lie to people because I don’t wanna hurt people, you know what I’m saying? A lot of my bad comes from the urge ultimately to be good, but putting bad and good on shit as labels really just further obfuscates the truth, at least in my experience. And so when I operate in truth, it’s like, “I don’t want to hurt this person, but I have to tell them this in order to hurt them as much as is necessary today.”
And that shows you, it can’t be that my spirit is this thing that’s [only] good, generative, constructive, and my shadow is this thing that’s self-interested and destructive. Because there are things that you need to destroy for benevolence. There are things that you can hold onto and preserve that are ultimately destructive. So it’s about reframing my relationship with a part of myself that destroys.
When you think about the part of yourself that destroys versus the part of yourself that creates, what do you feel like you destroy that’s negative for yourself? And what do you feel like you destroy in a way that’s positive and clearing space for what you want to create?
Well, I think they’re the same thing. In the negative way, I’ve destroyed the self-perception of someone who is always going to get it right and who’s always going to do the right thing every time. That’s negative because that was so attached to my idea of what trying to be a good person is. But I liberated myself to actually be a good person. You have so much choice in the matter of being a good person. It’s not such a dichotomy where it’s like, I’m destined to be a good person and anytime I stray from that, I’m now a bad person and I have to really overcompensate, on some Homelander shit from The Boys, to establish [that] I’m good. When I took the idea that “I automatically have to be, and finish my story as, a good person” off the table, I ended up being able to be a better person to a lot of people that I care about. Because I’m willing to hurt you to preserve an honest world to you. That’s more loving than me lying to you in a way that’s gonna affirm an insecurity, you know?
Moving on to the more specific idea of being a good artist or a good rapper, I’m curious if you feel pressure to put together a project that does X, Y, or Z based on the strong fan and critical reactions to Let The Sun Talk and Laughing So Hard It Hurts.
No, actually. When I was making [this album], I told my manager I feel like I finally stepped out of the shadow of Let the Sun Talk. Which is so weird because it’s the counter album to that idea, or the more mature version of that. They’re very similar in certain ways.
But at first I felt a lot of pressure, especially during So Hard It Hurts. And that’s one of the things that sours my memory of the rollout and the release and of the record itself, which is that I felt that I had to rap this amount of good, the beats had to be this amount of good, the transitions had to make this much sense, so I can live up to how good the other stuff was. Now I trust myself a lot.
I’ve been in the museums a lot. And it was fucking Van Gogh and Monet in the Met, right? There are two still lifes of some sunflowers. One is by Van Gogh, one is by Monet. And on the placard of the [Monet] painting, [Van Gogh is] talking about how he likes Monet’s still life better than his still life. And that made me think, there are a lot of cultural forces that make hip-hop competitive, beyond it just being this healthy youth culture that we purport it to be. Some of those things is like, the dehumanization of Black people that comes from slavery, where Black people’s lives are judged on how impressive you are, on some basketball card shit, slave chattel worker shit. So it made me think like, “what does it mean to be the best rapper?” And then it made me think, “who is the best painter?” Like that is not even a question we ask. “Who’s the best poet? Who is the best writer?” I don’t think that’s really a thing that exists. And it’s part of a force within the black community to like be the most impressive black person to the outside a.k.a white gaze that motivates this will to step on every other rapper in order to shine alone in the light.
So when I really broke that down to myself, it’s like, what am I even trying to fucking do if I make the best rap album? I can just make my best rap album, you know? I can just paint this shit in my style, the way I see it, the best. And I don’t know what better than that actually is, you know? I don’t know what I could do better than that. That’s all I can do. Nas, when he released his first album, he was a kid rapping about his fucking project from Queens. And we attached all sorts of literary value to the fact that he’s a kid from the project from Queens and seeing stuff and can recount it. The things that are critically or commercially the best are just stuff where they have strong perspective and they have strong style. And both of those things for me is related to honest accounts of how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, what my life is made of. So I just lean into that.
Going forward, it’s trusting myself, that my perspective and my style can change and that I have enough technical ability to make whatever direction I try a cool and rewarding listening experience. So I don’t really worry as much anymore. I got a different level of confidence, I can say that for sure.
