How Kenny Mason learned to follow his inner visions
In a city teeming with eccentricity, Kenny Mason's emergence is strange even for Atlanta.He's exactly what one might expect from a third or fourth generation ATLien in a sense.
Yet he's also an outcast in a city of them.An isolationist at heart whose saving grace ranged from Smashing Pumpkins to Peewee Longway, the rap-rock iconoclast's third studio album, BULLDAWG, is so seamless a hybrid it's hard to tell where his devotion to one genre ends and his experimentation with another begins.But if rap's corporate-backed output is engineered by starched suits profiting from a programmatic diet of Black pathology and predictable drum patterns, then the question is: How did an anomaly like Kenny Mason manage to squeeze through? Even more to the point, how does a rapper emerge from Traplanta without sacrificing his alt identity at the altar of conformity?These were some of the questions top-of-mind when I interviewed him over the summer, as BULLDAWG began earning critical praise.
And from what Kenny told me, the making of this album forced him to reckon internally with doubts of the same kind.In the midst of a creative crisis, Mason found himself wondering "am I just like every other artist that's caught up in this thing? Or am I actually doing this for a reason? Do I actually know what my music is doing?' I was asking myself a bunch of questions."His initial answers were equally unsettling, more attuned to industry metrics than his inner compass.
"It was always numbers or scale, things like that.And to me, I sounded like a label or a non-artist.
All of my answers were outside of art and real purpose," he said."I realized I had to remind myself why I'm doing what I'm doing and why I love what I'm doing."The nonconformist wondered whether he was straying too far into a formulaic approach.
"I always felt I could identify what type of sound could blow up faster in Atlanta where I'm at.So I was making that type of stuff — or I was making my version of that type of stuff...