It was in the middle of March 2020—the day stay-at-home orders were issued in California—Dijon was drifting through Perfect Circuit, the music-equipment store in Burbank. He hadn’t yet made his debut album, Absolutely, but he did have his first label-advance check, “like, five dollars,” he remembers, burning a very small hole in his slacks. While he was fiddling with a mixer and waiting for a lone employee to find his order in the back, the shop’s only other customer, Jay Electronica, approached him. “You seem like you know what you’re doing with that thing,” Dijon recalls him saying. “Is that worth getting?”
“I’ve never seen anybody drop dough like that,” says Dijon, who, even among 33-year-old rap obsessives, is an all-world Jay Electronica scholar. “It was like a Louis-store vibe: ‘I’ll just take one of those, one of those, one of those, one of those, one of those.” The legendarily elusive New Orleans rapper explained that, since he was going to be stuck in LA for the foreseeable future, he was trying to re-create his Eurorack setup from back home in his hotel room here. “There’s a warmth to that dude in a real way,” Dijon says. “Gold fronts, the most beautiful and inviting smile I’d ever seen in my life.” Perhaps appreciative of the advice on hardware, Jay gave Dijon his number, which Dijon promptly lost.
Dijon Duenas is the rarest sort of popular artist: one committed to pushing formal boundaries in a way that makes him and his audience sincerely uncomfortable but who seems to get more famous the less he compromises. His second album, Baby—a meditation on heredity, shredded and reconstituted in a $10 DJ program—was released to rapturous acclaim in August. The record happened to come out squarely between a pair of LPs from megastar Justin Bieber that are composed largely of sessions with Dijon and four months after he appeared on Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE.
Actually, I was on the phone with Justin Vernon as I drove past a giant billboard for One Battle After Another, Dijon’s first film appearance; a pair of smaller billboards for his upcoming shows at the Greek Theatre floated by later. “I was like, ‘Look, dude, I know I just met you,’ ” Vernon recalled of his first time in the studio with Dijon, who had just listened to some works in progress. “ ‘But can you please play that whole thing for me again?’ ”
As little as 12 months ago, all of this seemed impossible—not just the leaps in public stature but the existence of a second album at all. Baby followed a protracted period of writer’s block and was unmistakably shaped by it. Dijon made a whole other album, which sat languishing on a hard drive, where it still lives today. And even after his creative process transformed, and a personal crisis begot a tantalizing concept, he found himself more discouraged than ever about the way his art might be metabolized by robots and suits and narcotized listeners.
“I’m a little bit embarrassed that some of my iconography is deconstruction,” he says, sitting on a curb in Burbank, gesturing vaguely toward an unseen freeway on-ramp we’ll be taking. “It sucks that that’s where I’m at: My influence is the rawness of a thing. I wish I had a more definitive—” At this point he imitates one of the 4-counts that became a signature of Neptunes beats: dunnnnnnn--dunnnnnnn-dunnnnnnn-dunnnnnnn. “I wish I had more of a thing. But I guess my thing is mistakes.”
Five years after that trip to Perfect Circuit—and still no Jay Electronica music made with the particular synthesizers Dijon saw him purchase—we’re tucked into a booth at a dimly lit but perfectly tidy bar in Eagle Rock, northeast of downtown LA, and Dijon is telling me things I probably could have inferred. “My manager says I try to make everything extremely difficult,” he says. He’s exhausted by the state of contemporary popular music and angry at the economy that leeches off of it; he’s dreading the tour insofar as it will take him away from his almost two-year-old son and pregnant wife, the stylist Joanie Del Santo. He yada-yadas the milestones. “Life happened, we toured a little bit, I had a baby,” he says. “I woke up one day and was like, ‘I should probably do an album now.’ That was maybe six months, seven months ago?”
Wait. What? This is early October, which places the beginning of the sessions that would yield Baby well into 2025. That’s the point at which, in a “fit of frustration,” Dijon sent to the Grammy-nominated producer Andrew Sarlo the title track, a contorted and manipulated pass at an idea that had been gestating for much longer. Sarlo wrote back: This is the album. The mutes, the dropouts, the sense that an idea had sprung from the artist’s chest, been scrambled into code, then reassembled in a fugue. The nagging feeling that someone is behind the scenes pulling the levers—but only because they can’t help themselves.
Over the next six weeks, working almost entirely from shards of songs that Dijon had started but never quite finished over the past several years (“Yamaha” would be the only newly written track), he, Sarlo, and his other close collaborators holed up in his Glendale garage and finished the LP, mixing it well into the week of its release. Some of the time crunch was industrial—“they sort of suggested there was a tour,” Dijon says, “they” presumably being his booking agent but just as plausibly referring to some unseen hand of the market—and some more metaphysical. “My body is like, This is the music,” he remembers thinking, at the point when no new sounds were coming. “It’s almost as complete as it could possibly be.”
Baby’s 12 songs run comfortably under 40 minutes. Played in the background, at a distance—as Dijon laments it might be—the record could pass for gentle. Heard from one room over, “Higher!” or “Automatic” would seem uncomplicatedly delightful. But Baby is a thorny and at times harrowing reflection on what it means to be one link in a chain of frustration, compromise, and neurosis. The artist’s father and grandfather hang over it like a fog; that title track, which opens the album, seems less like an introduction than an endpoint, the making good from a misspent youth. But where are you supposed to go from there?
Dijon hoped Baby would be radical and doubts whether it is in all the ways he set out for it to be. “I wanted my music to be positively embarrassing to play in public,” he says. “There’s a passivity that’s built into music right now. I was like, ‘I refuse for my music to be viable as a background thing.’ I want it to be embarrassing. I wanted, initially, for the volumes to fluctuate pretty intensely, so that you would have to constantly turn it up or turn it down.”
That last idea was scuttled only because he ended up running the entire album through that DJ app, which processed the music so much that it couldn’t be conventionally mastered since it was already so compressed. This is a case of the macro imitating the micro. “So many of these songs are scraps,” Dijon explains, that retrieval from the ether became the project itself. He didn’t privilege his new ideas over ones that he’d previously abandoned; this suggests some amount of resignation but ends up being wildly freeing. He could finally write about his Chamorro grandfather’s experience during World War II, then mute, process, and trigger it just like it was RZA’s voice.
So while the jagged shifts in volume were abandoned, Baby still pursues a disorienting effect on the listener. The blurring of the borders between one song and another, between Dijon’s new vocals, old takes he found buried in his computer, and samples only enhances that effect, allowing him to (at times) depersonalize things in service of isolating an emotion, or (at others) to hop and skip over decades of masculine repression. “I don’t even know what a song is anymore,” he says now. “I was so obsessed with this idea of trying to make a new kind of thing, new kind of record.”
Baby is original, despite being pretty ambivalent about the definition of “new.” At one point during our time together, Dijon offhandedly says, of his creative philosophy, that “everything is data.” It seems a funny word choice, given how averse he is to making things measurable. But he’s exactly right. Dijon’s work is based on the notion that once he’s articulated an idea, be it in his Notes app or an orphaned Pro Tools session, it can be treated the same as a snare sound he finds particularly crisp. So the failures become stutter-steps toward something else.
But it was terribly difficult for him to arrive at that premise. “I was having a really hard time with the rec-ord,” Dijon says. “Like, psychosis-level shit.” A friend even staged a mini-intervention to get him to stop reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. (“You shouldn’t do that, it’s so paranoid,” he remembers this friend saying. “And he wasn’t wrong.”) He describes driving home from studio sessions sobbing, listening to Anita Baker’s “Caught Up in the Rapture,” full of sorrow that he was so far from those heights. Music is so fucked, he thought to himself, and my music is so bad.
“I was having mania,” Dijon says. “I was having all sorts of ups and downs and a true disbelief that I was supposed to continue to be making music. That maybe I’d contributed all I could contribute with the last record and the video and, like, there was a part of me that, having a kid, panic was setting in that I’d chosen a really volatile profession and brought a child into this world and I’ve only made one album and What have I done?”
At some point, he, his close friend Mk.gee, Andrew Sarlo, and the Detroit producer Black Noi$e convened to make a record. This was before he and Sarlo had formalized the thesis behind Baby’s songs, but the quartet was inching toward it. There would be “drum stems from a jam a year before that Andrew pulls up on Pro Tools, and [Black Noi$e] puts in a 404 that he just had—it’s pitched up to shit, it’s got artifacts of somebody else playing the keys in it, and it’s just this new rhythm that’s completely maligned and bastardized. But it’s all source material from our own archives.” It sounded, Dijon says repeatedly, like the future.
There was one problem: He couldn’t write lyrics for it. At first, he thought that he just needed to figure out a new way to write for this new kind of music. A year went by. Nothing. From the outside, this appeared at first like a normal bump in the road. Black Noi$e, zen-like, said it was simply “like watching a piece of the human experience.” Eventually, though, Dijon encouraged Mk.gee to take the instrumentals and use them for an album of his own. What am I gonna do with it? his friend said. You were supposed to write these songs. So it was out of sheer necessity that the palette for Baby became discarded songs. The writer’s block didn’t end, it just gave Dijon constraints within which he could work.
When I ask Justin Vernon about what it was like to see his friend go through this struggle, he insists he never had a doubt that Dijon would persevere. “There’s no way this guy’s going to fail,” he remembers thinking. “He cares too much and it has too much swagger.” But Vernon concedes that Dijon’s mission was difficult. “What he’s doing is truly trying to reorganize the world in his vision,” Vernon says. “You could tell that he was struggling with trying to find what it was, and it’s serious. When you’re working your whole life on something, it gets pretty scary. Also, it’s like, he’s got the kid on the way, he’s got this pressure. But it was never pressure to succeed. It was pressure to make something good.”
Despite creative paralysis, the machinery that would eventually put him on those billboards kept churning. Dijon speaks warmly about Bieber, first telling a story about listening to him wearing headphones on a ferry to see the Microphones play in Seattle. Dijon’s contributions to SWAG and SWAG II are the product of only a handful of sessions, which he remembers as refreshingly loose and collaborative. (Dijon is the sort of guy who, even at his most morose, is irrepressibly funny; he twice says to me that the Bieber experience wasn’t as “Machiavellian” as he wished it was.)
Speaking of funny, Dijon’s brief but notable turn in One Battle After Another (an adaptation of another Pynchon novel, Vineland) was the product of one of those arachnid LA social webs. He speculates that Paul Thomas Anderson saw the 25-minute film he made for Absolutely, but it wasn’t until a friend of a friend saw the writer-director at a Dodgers game that any contact was established. What came first was an invitation for Dijon and his wife to have dinner with Anderson and his partner, Maya Rudolph. Months later, a script arrived in the mail.
“Paul is so loose, truly on some musician shit,” Dijon says. “There would be days—everything was on location—he would pivot shit around and be like, ‘Eh, I don’t like the way this looks, do we have that parking garage?’ And he’d move the entire set.” Anderson decided Dijon looked too young to die during the film’s extended prologue and changed his part so that he could reappear later.
Not all of this mass exposure has gone so smoothly, including in Dijon’s personal life. “I got into a lot of shit socially because of my song getting sampled by Kanye,” he says. (“Stars,” the opening track from last year’s Vultures 1, samples “Good Luck.”) “People were just like, ‘He’s going through a fucking psychosis, why did you approve that?’ And I was like, ‘One, I didn’t.’ ” (After the song debuted at a live listening session, Dijon’s management got in touch with Kanye’s camp and worked out a solution.) “But two, I believe in sampling. I just love sampling so much.”
That can certainly be gleaned from Dijon’s music, or from hearing him talk about how Funcrusher Plus rewired his brain. He can wax poetic about sampling as a workaround for the constraints imposed on hip-hop’s early iterations, or as a way to draw out tension between two seemingly disparate ideas. But it’s also a convenient vehicle for his instinct to self-immolate on the business side. “There was a little bit of being a fucking asshole,” he concedes about the way he stuffed even more samples onto Baby at the 11th hour. The attitude became: “ ‘Fuck it—there’s no money in this shit anyway. There’s no money here. Give the whole song away to 500 different people. I don’t care.’ Which seems, like, insane when you have a kid.”
While he’s never before been this visible, Dijon’s contempt for the commercial market is still razor-toothed. “I’m totally aware of the naivety of even trying to resist it,” he says, also acknowledging that the ease of uploading and distributing songs is what made his career possible in the first place. But, he asks, when streaming services often seem like a “testing grounds for machine learning,” why not try to fuck things up a bit? “I don’t have much to say in terms of macro assessments of the universe,” he says, “but it’s like, if I’m going to do the fucking thing, if I can be a sore thumb within the thing, just by making the music a little bit more difficult to just sit there…. Why not do that?”
Imagine: It’s the middle of the night in the early 2010s, and you’re pulling into the 24-hour Walmart in Lansdowne, Maryland, just south of Baltimore. Going the opposite way is a striking young man, on foot, carrying a massive box—the new TV he’s just purchased with the tips he’s saved from waiting tables, now on its way to the renovated Victorian house where he was living then. He thought to himself, They got me. “I remember being like, ‘This is fucked,’ ” Dijon says. “I’m so broke, but now I can watch Archer.” Instead of chipping away at the impossible goal, he was streaming, streaming, streaming.
Dijon is the son of two career-military enlistees. His father is from Guam and his mother from a small tobacco farm in Maryland. They were never really together. This, and the reality of military life, led Dijon to grow up all across the United States—on both coasts and throughout the Midwest—as well as in Hawaii and Germany. When he was with his dad, he often lived alongside various members of his extended family. He mentions the feeling of horror he had when he learned of his classmates’ more conventional family structures, which to him seemed suffocating.
That distaste for supposed normalcy continued into adulthood; unsurprisingly, it catalyzed a love for routine. Yet for as much as he says he likes doing simple, repeatable things—not just going to the gym but making an unnecessarily long drive to one—music is not part of that regimen. Even outside that period of writer’s block, Dijon writes relatively little. “I don’t shed that much,” he says. “I don’t practice. I don’t tinker.” So as technically adept as he’s become, he is operating, first, from a place of instinct.
“I love first-take shit,” he says. Much of the mixing and reverb throwing on Baby was done live by him, Sarlo, and Mk.gee. “You take all these sources and try one pass of just muting shit, and then it’s like: ‘That sounds good.’ Then we don’t touch it anymore. Once there was some sort of inspired thesis behind what was happening and I knew it didn’t sound like much else, it was really more about completing the arc.”
The arc Dijon’s talking about is thematic, one that was already unspooling from his subconscious. A huge percentage of his songs begin as freestyles; he likens his process to the one that The-Dream has revealed through leaked demos, where you mumble to find cadence and vowel shape first, maybe with some anchor phrases or first passes at full lyrics. “I’m not guided by a force,” Dijon says, before lapsing into a loving but ridiculous impression of one of his idols. “Prince was like, ‘I’m like a lightning rod,’ ” he croons. “And I’m not like that.” It’s an intuitive process meant to give way to a more deliberate one.
Yet anyone who has tried this, or really done any sort of serious creative work, knows that your central concerns will slip to the surface while your conscious mind is preoccupied with form. Baby has been described, very understandably, as a response to Dijon and his wife having their first child. And it is, though “response” is sort of incomplete. The title track, which opens with Dijon singing, “Yes, I did dance with your mother before I knew her name,” was in fact written before Joanie was even pregnant, the lyric an unexpected intrusion into a session of “fucking around.”
“I was always dealing with very similar themes,” Dijon says. “I was always really meditating on eventually having a kid, and the guilt and shame that exists.” So when it came time to arrange and augment Baby in a way that gave it a legible through line, there wasn’t much work to be done. The ecstasy of love and the fear of passing poison through one’s blood are, for Dijon, building blocks as elemental as drums. “Violence has been a subject of all of my music, secretly,” he says, when explaining how he channeled stories about his grandfather in Guam into “Rewind,” adding,“and thinking about internal anger and rage—which I have quite a bit—thinking about passing that down to your kid if it’s genealogical.”
The only real debate he had while finalizing the album was whether to keep or cut “my man,” a brutal bit of emotional excavation for his father. (“Would it shock you if I’ve given up?” he asks, pleading, his voice frayed. “Would it ease your little mind?”) In that moment, it was Andrew Sarlo who clarified the album’s sweep: You should put it on because it’s about your dad, Dijon remembers him saying, and you’re a dad.
Earlier in our conversation, Dijon had breezed through major life events: Life happened, we toured a little bit, I had a baby. Now, with the arrival of his second kid nearly aligned on the calendar with the end of a marathon tour, it’s perhaps inevitable that the collision fills him with dread. “I’m obsessed with my kid,” he explains. Joanie will remind him how much he loves—or loved—seeing new cities, meeting people, playing pool in dive bars before and after gigs. But all Dijon can think about now is what gets ingrained. During one car ride, we talked almost entirely about our kids, who are pretty close in age; even among new fathers, he is particularly glowing when he describes things his son’s learned, ways he’s figured out the world, traits of his mother’s that he mirrors back. He also sounds particularly pained when he notes that his son has already learned that you say goodbye when Dad goes to work. “He’s not going to remember any of this,” Dijon says. “But I can feel the imprint. I can feel what’s happening.”
The rehearsal room is one in a complex of many, the complex itself a mirror image of the competing one across the street. There’s a tennis court in the middle of the parking lot, for some reason, and the Verdugo Mountains off on the horizon. Inside, Dijon and most of the band members he’s assembled for his upcoming tour are in the early stages of mapping out a version of Baby’s halting “(Freak It).” Sarlo is here; so are Henry Kwapis, Mike Haldeman, and Jack Karaszewski. Sometimes, rooms like this seem to have been tailored to the fussiest, most unpleasable celebrities—mood lighting, custom stationery, a dozen types of candles. But this one is oddly bright and almost comically bestrewn with computers, Taiwanese food, American Spirits, 12-channel mixers, cardboard boxes, and LaCroix. Less Zyn than you might think, which is not to say no Zyn.
Later, Dijon will rave about Mike’s intuitive grasp of rhythm, and will tell me something unexpectedly heartbreaking about Jack and Henry, calling them the “first people I met here, likely the last people I’ll meet here.” Dijon loves LA in his way, but the combination of its sprawl and our age—the trade-off of the joyful domesticity he details on Baby is a constriction of one’s social circle—brings with it a bit of melancholy. For now, he’s trying to bury himself within this closed ecosystem. “Can you send a little bit less of me through that stuff?” he asks, as Sarlo, seated at a desktop 10 feet away, nods without looking back.
Over the next hour or so, the quintet works through exploratory, sometimes still skeletal versions of a handful of songs, all from Baby. Dijon, in a navy blue toque and a matching shirt with cartoon hands making the “hang loose” sign, darts from table to cheap folding table, singing and twisting nobs and manipulating BPMs in a way that sometimes unsettles but eventually, invariably, excites everyone else.
The idea, Dijon says, is to keep the show interesting for those on and off the stage. He says he’d like to randomize the sounds in a sampler each night of tour; the people he’ll be playing with laugh, then realize he means it. But he’s done this before. “Sometimes in the live show I’ll take an Aretha Franklin chord progression and just play it, and then that’s our beat,” he says. The only time over our many hours together that he asks to go off the record is when he names a song by a famous singer-songwriter whose drums he intends to lift as scaffolding for his band, “taking a loop from one second, and doing it live—and everybody having to find it, to find where our song lives on there.”
Propped portrait-style on a black chair is a whiteboard with the tour set list written in green dry-erase marker. During one lull, a debate springs up about whether a red X next to a song title could scan as “good to go,” or would instead connote the need for triage. I take the opportunity to ask what the blue dots, currently only affixed to “Baby!” and “Automatic,” signify. Does that mean they’re finished? Not exactly.
A month after that rehearsal, Dijon played the Greek Theatre, a 6,000-capacity outdoor venue on the southern edge of Griffith Park. This was the second of two nights; fans were packed shoulder to shoulder from the stage until the point where the risers terminated in the clear black night sky. Between songs, Dijon wondered aloud what phase the moon was in. The production team aimed one of its cameras upward, but the image didn’t come through clearly.
Wearing a red-orange hat with the Toyota logo and the phrase “Made for War,” he stood downstage, in front of the band members and a rotating array of guest vocalists, including Amber Coffman and Mk.gee. (The latter joined for “Higher!” and an extended encore rendition of “Big Mike’s.” “That’s my best friend,” Dijon told the crowd.) Sometimes, Dijon’s vocals were buried the way he’d asked them to be during rehearsal. But the set was punctuated by instances of nakedness that were nearly shocking: the spare intro to “(Referee),” the stretch during “my man” when everything but his wailing voice simply disappeared.
Just as the abandoned demos had been recovered, reconfigured, and turned into songs that felt inevitable, many of these arrangements did not match what I’d heard weeks ago. But that, of course, was the idea; after the show, I learned just how much they’d evolved from night one to night two. And it was easy—or maybe impossible—to imagine how they might molt next.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs and videos by Julian Klincewicz
Special thanks to Joanie Del Santo, personal stylist to Dijon
