July Collective Collaborative Blog: Who's That Masked Artist?

Wearing a mask can provide anonymity for an artist, or even provide an alter-ego for a musician to create an entire mythos around. For the July collab blog, the collective discusses dozens of their favorite masked artists and the eccentric concepts behind their characters. (And remember to do your part -- wear a mask, save a life!)

Brittne's Picks

Artist: Leikeli47
Favorite Song: “Girl Blunt”
Album: Acrylic
Masked Brooklyn rapper Leikeli47, is never seen without a bandana covering her face with slits for the eyes and mouth or a ski mask of similar style. In an interview with Hot 97, Leikeli47 reveals that her mask keeps the focus on the music.  With the mask there’s not a spotlight on race or gender or her true identity; in these ways the mask is also about freedom. With the mask she is invincible, she tells VICE.

While the mask may detract from direct focus on her gender or race, her music is focused on story-telling; telling personal stories, centering themes that empower women, and especially highlighting Black beauty and style. Her age really remains a mystery due to the mask but she released her first self-titled EP in 2015 and her two albums are titled Wash & Set(2017) and Acrylic(2018).

The song I find especially fun and empowering is “Girl Blunt” off of Acrylic. “This shit is a girl blunt…I only smoke girl blunts,” rings the repetitive chorus over a clappy beat. I listen to this and I’m like ‘Yah! I only wanna smoke girl blunts too! We should all be smoking girl blunts.’ Leikeli47 is promoting women with this track. She’s making money and listening to this I feel empowered and capable and confident.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Leikeli47’s music on my rides around town and getting down during quarantine home dance parties. It adds another element, wearing your own mask, listening to a masked rapper. Put on your mask and feel invincible too. As I now wear a mask more often, I feel that freedom the mask provides, the anonymity. While I’m grateful masks keep up safe, they’re also a mega fashion statement, and for that we’re all lucky.

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Artist: Orville Peck
Favorite Song: ‘Dead of Night’
Album: Pony
Orville Peck came riding in last year on his album Pony as the gay masked cowboy I never knew I needed. 2019 was a big year for the modern gay country-tinted star… we were given Orville and Lil Nas X; I’ll never get “Old Town Road” out of my head. Both artists have a reclaimed flashy cowboy aesthetic, but Orville’s trademark leather bondage mask adds to his enigmatic celebrity in a remarkable way.

Orville is a man of mystery, again the mask conceals while granting the artist complete freedom behind it. Perhaps Orville’s transparency and honesty in lyric is helped by this concealing of identity. His songs run the gamut of heartbreak, love, sex, change, romanticism all while maintaining a familiar country twang, musically, lyrically, and thematically.

Orville’s songs are heartfelt and deeply move his listeners. His voice is powerful, deep, unique. His past is mystifying. Peck’s music makes me feel sad, and sexy and want to sing along. He also put on a couple great YouTube quarantine living room shows that were fun to watch. I don’t even want to know what he looks like behind the mask.

Artist: Tobacco
Song: “Hairy Candy”
Album: Fucked Up Friends
Tobacco’s musical repertoire is vast. Starting with Black Moth Super Rainbow, his solo projects, collaborations with Tucson’s own L.A. transplant Zackey Force Funk, Beck, and most recently a project called Malibu Ken with Aesop Rock.

He famously stays quite removed. He makes very few interviews and wears masks on album covers and in music videos. If you’ve seen Black Moth/Demon Queen/Tobacco or any interpretation of Tom Fec he is usually masked or keeps his head low to the synths on a fog-ridden stage.
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His anonymity is fitting to his experimental music vibe which ranges from whimsical, dreamy to more electric/funk and sometimes dark and witchy. Those in attendance at his shows wish to do just the same, keep their heads low, stay anonymous, dance in the dark. It would be strange for Tobacco to have a big stage presence or make a habit of interviewing and being the ‘face’ of the band. Tobacco doesn’t need that; Black Moth Super Rainbow doesn’t need that. Tobacco’s music allows the listener to step into another dimension where human form is questioned and faces are not necessary.

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Noa's Pick

Artist: Sbtrkt
Song: “LET THEM IN”
Album: SAVE YOURSELF
Aaron Jerome is Sbtrkt, an English musician and producer who actively avoids the spotlight. You may recognize the name from his song, "Wildfire", because anyone who has heard it has had that distorted bassline stuck in their head at some point. However, it seems rare that fans of that track dug deeper, and even rarer that those who did have remained avid listeners through the years. I write this to encourage a revisit to the masked musician, which I was overdue for myself.

Although we haven’t heard from him since 2016, his latest release SAVE YOURSELF contains more experimental electronic sounds than previous albums and EP’s. Sbtrkt’s (pronounced subtract) creations are able to range from the catchiness of tunes like Wildfire to the more experimental end of the spectrum because of his willingness to break away from his club-influenced past. Hence, songs like "LET THEM IN" came to be as songs in the style of "Living Like I Do" stayed behind, although features from Sampha remained all the while.

This ability to experiment is also made possible through the usage of his mask, which encourages listeners and potential collaborators to remain focused on the most important thing - the music. The anonymity goes beyond the face covering (which does an okay job at only covering his eyes) and extends to his alias and the absence of his own voice on his tracks. It’s pretty difficult to find video interviews of Sbtrkt too, aside from this one. 
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According to an interview with Clash, not only does the mask allow him to “get on with writing music and not spend my life talking about it”, but there are also anti-social motivations behind hiding his face. Being able to have the status of a successful musician without the public harassment and judgement that goes hand in hand with the career seems like the right way to handle the spotlight, if you ask me.

Kurt B.'s Pick

Artist: The Residents
Favorite Song: “Satisfaction”
Album: Various Artists - Best of Ralph (Ralph Records, 1982)
Ask not “Who are the Residents?” but rather “WHAT are the Residents?” Since 1972, the Bay Area combo in the giant eyeballs has gleefully eviscerated canonic staples from Christmas music (“Santa Dog”) to Gershwin, James Brown, and Hank Williams (their 1986 remix of “Kaw-Liga,” complete with bass riff nicked from Michael Jackson, became a favorite of Balearic DJs in Ibiza). They’ve also wrestled with epic original narratives (the Mole trilogy), composed soundtracks for the Discovery Channel, ran the bizarre Ralph label, and concealed their true identities better than Banksy in a witness-protection program. Digging into their prodigious catalog takes lifetimes, but there’s no better jumping off point than their take on the Rolling Stones signature song - which crawled out from the underground a year before Devo’s herky-jerky version. What are the Residents? A goddamn American treasure, that’s what.

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Alex's Pick

Artist: Wes Borland
Favorite Song: “Sour” by Limp Bizkit (but the song in this video is “It’ll Be Ok”)
I feel like every band that came out of the late 90s needed at least one weirdo, and I believe every band that gets near universal hate has at least one truly talented member that stands out from their band mates. In Limp Bizkit, Wes Borland fills both of those roles. He came up with some truly avant-garde riffs during his time in that band. His work with Limp Bizkit saw fluid use of two-hand tapping, octave-shifting “dive-bomb” riffs that were inspired by jazz trombone players, and spacy verses that wouldn’t sound out of place anywhere on Tool’s discography. He is also an extremely talented painter, and his on-stage persona features him wearing an array of costumes, body paint, makeup, and blacked-out contact lenses that make him look like one of his paintings come to life. His side projects, especially the more industrial Black Light Burns, further highlight his experimental nature. It’s easy to make fun of Limp Bizkit because Fred Durst is one of the most cringey frontmen in the history of rock and roll, but it’s also hard to ignore Wes Borland’s outside-the-box approach when it comes to playing guitar.
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Parisa's Picks

​Artist: The Locust
Favorite Song: “Recycable Body Fluids in Human Form”
Album: Plague Soundscapes
There’s nothing quite like post-monsoon season in Arizona. The beautiful rain storms have settled, and for the rest of the summer you’re stuck in disgustingly humid 100 degree weather and the egregiously loud buzzing soundscapes of the cicadas. There’s something about that loud, shrill sound accompanied with the unbearable humidity that is just so fucking brutal. Arizonans have to shift from the most beautiful season of the year to the most vile, inhospitable environment that makes you physically and sonically suffer until the start of fall. (You might not think something as small as a cicada could be such a nuisance, but they’re actually the loudest insect in the world. According to BBC Earth, cicadas have been measured buzzing at a whopping 108.9 decibels!)

That scenario reminds me of the music of The Locust. They’re an experimental noise punk band with heavy roots in grindcore and powerviolence; they’re loud, shrill, and torturous. Although the desert is quite slow-placed and doomy, The Locust's chaotic, frenetic time signatures and sonic assault of trashing instrumentation reminds me of the being stuck around shrieking insects in extreme heat. The group fittingly wears locust outfits on stage, giving the appearance like they’re about to sweep you up in a plague of noise. While I know cicadas aren’t exactly locust (they’re more related to crickets, whereas locust are more in the grasshopper family), you get the point. It’s just brutal, man.

(Not to spoil the fantasy, but if you’d like to see The Locust unmasked I’d highly suggested this late 90s recording of vocalist Justin Pearson on Jerry Springer. It’s a very juicy episode where “SECRETS COME OUT!”, and Pearson apparently got beaten up by the security guard during commercial break for hawkin’ a loog on the carpet.)

Artist: GWAR
Favorite Song: “Saddam A Go-Go”
Album: This Toilet Earth
I mean, this one is a given. What I love about GWAR is their intricate storytelling and mythological science-fiction background behind their grotesque costumed characters, and how those stories have been the basis for all their music, videos, and shows.. You can read the mythos behind their barbaric interplanetary warrior personas on their official website. They’re not a band I listen to at home all too often, but undoubtedly a band that I would never pass up seeing live. No one does theatricality and elaborate masks/costumes like GWAR,..period!

​(And for more Jerry Springer action, I also recommend this mid-90s appearance on a "shock rock" episode that rocked my adolescent world when I first saw it. This interview still holds up so well, especially how much they talk shit on El Duce from The Mentors.)

Artist: The Knife
Favorite Song: “Marble House”
Album: Silent Shout
I’ve probably written about The Knife, and this song, and even this particular performance of this song, about a hundred times on this website. However, I’ve never considered how the anonymity of the masked duo affects my perception of the song ‘til now. It’s already been mentioned in this blog how masks can provide privacy for the artist and lend more focus on the music itself. I think in the case for this song, the anonymity adds another layer of distance in an already very cold and harrowing song. The contrast between The Knife duo singing in complete darkness, with the huge, close-up projection of guest vocalist Jay-Jay Johanson's face, mimics the balance between cold, emotionless electronica and the warmth of Johanson's human voice. I'm finding it really difficult to put into words how The Knife's music can feel so personal yet detached at the same time, but I think the masked aspect really plays into that deeply stirring mood. (P.S. - You can find a link to stream this full concert in my Concerts to Watch From Home blog.)
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Welp, since there are just so many masked artists I wanted to write about but don’t have enough brain juice in quarantine to discuss them all, here are some highlights with quick descriptions:
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Sun City Girls

Sun City Girls were an experimental band from Arizona that incorporated tape music, free-form jazz improvisations, and beat poetry with traditional musical elements from the Middle East, Africa and beyond. Their elaborate stage costumes added to the very ritualistic atmosphere of their shows that would, as Wiki states, "often verge on performance art".

Aside from diggin' into the vast discography of Sun City Girls' music, I also recommend checking out guitarist/vocalist Alan Bishop's label Sublime Frequencies. It's my favorite label for discovering obscure music oddities from around the globe.

Dead Prez

Although Dead Prez doesn’t really fit the bill for masked singers, I couldn’t help but include their video for “Hip Hop”, which features close-up, fish eye lens shots of the crowd in masks. This album just celebrated it's twenty year anniversary, and I couldn't think of a more relevant album to listen to in our ongoing conversations about racial justice and defunding the police. As stic.man says, "This real hip-hop/And it don't stop 'til we get the po-po off the block."

Pussy Riot

Pussy Riot have used their masks to further their movement as protesters. This punk  collective is known for their guerrilla performances in public places in Russia to spread messages of feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and opposition to Russian politics. If you don't already know about the arrest of two members (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina)  for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred", I suggest reading more about it to understand how this masked band is more of a movement than just a musical group. 
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MF Doom

MF Doom is the only artist I can think of that uses a mask to put on a "super villain" persona. I think he stands out apart from the rest of the masked artist category in that he carved his own niche, and used his creative persona to compliment his humorous word-play and lyricism. And I should just casually mention that Operation: Doomsday is one of the best hip-hop albums of all time, so mask or no mask, the man is a damn legend.
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Blowfly

Blowfly is the godfather of "weird". From 1963 til his death in 2016, Blowfly had been making X-rated parodies of funk and r&b hits. Here is fantastic compilation of all the times Nardwuar talks about Blowfly's important legacy with various interview guests: link. 

The Mummies

The Mummies have been dubbed the “Kings of Budget Rock”, and the shtick of dressing up as shitty, B-movie toilet paper mummies gave them the true authenticity to earn that title. All gimmicks aside, these guys pioneered the garage rock revival and influenced an entire generation of lo-fi, raw garage punk bands to follow. Never Been Caught is still one of my all-time favorite garage albums, it rips so hard. ​

Bob Log III

A hometown (Tucson) favorite! He's the self-proclaimed masked-one-man-guitar-dance-party-mess. This 2015 show review on Taipei Times does the best job describing his act: "So when you see a man in a jumpsuit and full-face helmet rigged up with a telephone receiver come barreling down the honky-tonk stairs in a lifeboat while beating away on a hollow-body guitar, don’t get out of the way. Jump right in there with him. And as long as you live, you’ll never forget what he taught you."

Orion

Jimmy Ellis was a country singer that went under the masked persona Orion, and had a singing voice and appearance remarkably similar to Elvis Presley. They were so similar, in fact, that both Ellis and the record label would start conspiracies that Presley didn't die in '77, and that it was actually Presley singing on his recordings. I think Orion is such an icon for doing that. If you’re gonna have a masked persona, you might as well go all out and start conspiracy theories around it.

Goat

Goat is an experimental worldbeat group hailing from Sweden. Their music blends together afrobeat, psychedelia, and various traditional instrumentation from around the world. On stage, they're always adorned in a hodge-podge of masks and costumes that represent their fusion of world influences. (Thanks to my boyfriend Kellen for reminding me about this one!)

The Gorillaz

I mean, The Gorillaz really took the idea of masking to a whole new level. Some people  (aka my boyfriend) might argue that they shouldn't count on this list, but I think that creating a fully conceptual virtual band to be the face of your music totally represents the same point of being a masked singer. I recommend this full concert from 2006 to see how the Gorillaz  put on a show to feature the virtual band along with their various collaborators It's genius, really. 

Kamen Joshi

Kamen Joshi is a J-pop and heavy metal band from Japan. Their name translates to "Masked Girls", so you know they're going to deliver some LOOKS. I'm not very well-versed in their music, but all I know is that I'm a big fan of whatever's going on in this video.
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Buckethead

My dude made a career out of shredding and wearing a KFC bucket on his head. What a dream. 

Imperial Triumphant 

I was recently introduced to this band from fellow T&E writers Noe and Daniel, and I’m so grateful for them to turn me onto this blackened death metal/avant-garde jazz brilliance. The golden-cast masks really add this level of grandeur to their already epic and gargantuan sounding music. Noe also did a fantastic photo shoot of an Imperial Triumphant concert that shows the mystic feeling of their masked stage presence here. 

Daft Punk

What can I say, I enjoy listening to robot music made by robots (we should thank Kraftwerk for this concept). Reminds me how I know a guy who knows a guy that’s in that big Daft Punk cover band. They got replica helmets and dance around on stage and pretend they’re DJing. In reality they just push play on a Daft Punk playlist on their laptops and get paid thousands of dollars per gig. The moral of the story is that if you’re going to start a cover band, cover a masked DJ group for a very easy and lucrative career. 

On a more serious note, I highly recommend this thinkpiece from T&E writer Ronny the critical missing bit on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories: here.

Ghost

Again, instead of talking about the band myself, I'm gonna point you to another T&E article that does the artist much better justice than I could ever do. Here is a fantastic piece written by Alex on seeing a Ghost concert during the deadly wildfires in Northern California: link.
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KISS

I know there’s a fine line between artists who wear a literal masks and those wearing make-up, but I think in the case of the artists like KISS or others mentioned on this list, we can argue that the make-up is being used in extreme measures to create an alias, character, or a level of anonymity (whereas an artist like Alice Cooper or Klaus Nomi are using make-up to create an exaggerated look, but not necessarily an entirely new face/character). Regardless, KISS have paved the way for many masked artists today (especially Wes Borland, ICP, etc.). They certainly didn't invent the idea of being masked on-stage, but brought a whole new level of showmanship around it than hadn't been seen before. 

All that being said, I'm not really a KISS fan, but I do appreciate their influence. I linked this video of them doing a Wal-Mart commercial instead of one of their music videos because it's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen. 10/10 great cringe content.

(Bonus: I spoke with Slasher Dave from Acid Witch on how Detroit has been hugely influential for theatrical artists like KISS and ICP in this interview here.)
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Insane Clown Posse

Crazy how society’s relationship with ICP has evolved over the years. Remember we all used to make fun of juggalos until we realized they’re a part of the resistance? And ICP spoke out more prominently about public safety during a pandemic than our own president? Well, I gotta give to them, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are probably the most iconic masked singers of our generation. Even their whole juggalo army gets masked up in face paint to show their allegiance. 

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of their music. Like, not even in the slightest. But hey, nothing but respect to the juggalo fam, y'all keep enjoying yourselves!
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Slipknot

I’d be a fool not to leave this here.
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