Wax Poetics - Jesse Boykins III

Wax Poetics
Issue 53
RZA
The Delfonics
Bryan Ferry
Nite Jewel
Pleasure
Mac Dre
Leroy Sibbles
Persona Records
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson
Sinkane
Mara Hruby
The Gaslamp Killer
Karriem Riggins
Jesse Boykins III
Under the tutelage of Bilal, singer/songwriter Jesse Boykins III
learned to embrace the totality of life as a key to unlocking
music’s secrets. A leader of the Romantic Movement, he revels
in honesty and the female perspective. After quietly releasing a
grip of material over the past few years, including his new project
Zulu Guru with close collaborator MeLo-X, Jesse has slowed his
pace to work on his upcoming magnum opus, Love Apparatus.
by Marisa Aveling
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J
esse Boykins III was eighteen when he started vocal lessons with Bilal. He arrived
at the singer’s Jersey City apartment and was greeted at the door by a diminutive
figure, resplendent in a Japanese silk robe that framed a thermal onesie underneath.
Bilal’s dreads were styled in twists, and speared into one of his locks was an incense
stick, which was burning. As Boykins remembers, his adolescent mind was blown.
That first day, Boykins didn’t do any singing. Bilal instead focused the lesson around
breathing and meditation. “When you inhale, you inhale the room. When you exhale, you
become the room,” he told the mystified younger singer. Over the course of his lessons,
Boykins realized that Bilal wasn’t only coaching him vocally, he was delivering life lessons
too. As the esoteric Mr. Miyagi of Boykins’s career, Bilal showed the R&B upstart that it was
okay to show vulnerability in his music—something that the now twenty-seven-year-old
singer/songwriter carries with him today.
Jesse Boykins III knows little about the two Jesse Boykins that came before him, with
the early life of the Brooklyn-based artist marked by strong female figures instead. Boykins’s
grandmother Pearl and her daughters took him to church in Jamaica every other day as a
youngster still in single digits, where he learned the difference between right and wrong
through song. When Boykins was ten, he returned to his mother, a former track Olympian,
who was waiting to heap love upon her son in Miami. He stayed close to her side for a good
seven years before leaving for the New School’s jazz program in New York City.
Similarly to the way Boykins absorbed Bilal’s willingness to show emotion, the female
touch isn’t lost on his music either. He espouses a thoughtful brand of R&B defined by
contemplative lyrics informed by an interest in poetry from favorites like James Joyce and
Langston Hughes. In addition, Boykins touts himself as the “reawakening of the Romantic
Movement” and approaches songwriting accordingly, combining openness and vulnerability
with overt sensuality.
Boykins’s introduction to the world as a recording artist was the self-released Dopamine:
My Life on My Back EP (2008), an offering from the bleeding heart of a twenty-two year-old.
While his single “Tabloids” reached number two on the BillboardVideo Monitor, some critics
thought his cerebral musings were too deep for a kid who was barely old enough to drink,
and he reeled it back only months later with The Beauty Created LP. With sleek production
highlighting the aphrodisiac nature of Boykins’s voice, these releases contextualized him in
the landscape of urban troubadours as a skilled lyricist and inadvertent panty-dropper.
The next major solo project Boykins is sitting on is his magnum opus, Love Apparatus,
a collection of songs he’s been working on with friend and producer Machinedrum since
2009. He’s been tweaking and perfecting the songs for so long that he managed to release
the collaborative Zulu Guru LP with fellow Romantic Movement member MeLo-X in
between. Incorporated into Boykins’s music now is a fascination with countering his male
perspective with female vision, which he has been pursuing by piecing together interviews
he’s conducted with over two hundred women into a documentary.
Until he releases Love Apparatus, it seems that Boykins will continue his research,
continue to tour, and continue living what he calls a schwaza life—striving to stay true to
himself and influencing the world in a positive light.
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A pivotal point in your earlier years was
getting into the Grammy Jazz Ensemble.
How did that come about?
My mentor at the time—her name is
Shenita Hunt and she was my teacher—
she taught me so much. My senior year
came around, and she was asking me where
I wanted to go to school. At first, I didn’t
really want to go to college. I was like, “I’m
gonna get a record deal, everything’s going
to be fine, I’m just going to do my demo
when I graduate, that’s what I’m going to
do.” But then she put it in my mind that
I’m going to go to school, so one of the
ways she said was if you audition for this
jazz ensemble thing.
And at the time, I didn’t know what the
fuck jazz was. I knew reggae, R&B, gospel,
and listened to some rock. Barely. She put
me onto jazz, and then I auditioned and
I made it. It was like me and twelve other
singers from around the nation.
I feel like that was a pivotal moment
when I was like, “I don’t wanna just be an
R&B singer. I wanna make music.” Before,
I wanted to be an R&B singer—literally
dance, all that. And then I started listening
to all these different genres of music, and
I’m like, “Damn, this shit is limitless. I could
really do whatever I want to do.” And that’s
pretty much why I decided to continue
studying jazz.
Did you get any feedback from them as to
why you got in, seeing as though you had
no prior experience in jazz?
I have no idea. It was so weird, ’cause I was
out of place. I find that usually I’m a black
sheep in a lot of situations. When I was
home in Jamaica, I was the black sheep—
I’m the cousin. Even when I was in Miami.
I’m Jamaican, I had an accent, I don’t talk
the way everyone else talks. I had to adjust
to that. So when I went there, it was the
same shit.
Your years in Jamaica and feeling like a
black sheep seem to inform what you do,
even up until now.
Definitely. I always look at myself as the
underdog, and I write like that. Because I
feel like a lot of male artists always write
they’re the coolest and everything—the
world is great around them, and they walk
into a room and the lights just start strobing,
and it’s like, “No, motherfucker, that’s not
reality.” I fantasize about a lot of things, but
I always try to fantasize and bring it back to
reality as well.
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So much of being a male singer in R&B
and soul is about being an alpha male.
Do you consider yourself to be an alpha
male?
I mean, definitely, I consider myself to be
an alpha male in the sense that I know to
submit to the omega. [laughs]
What does that mean?
The omega is the female. If you look at it
from a wolf kind of view, the omega wolf
leads the pack and she’s a female. The alpha
male is her lover, and he’s under her; he’s
not as strong as she is.
You feel like you’re always deferring to
the female?
I feel so, yeah. I’ve learned more from
females. You guys are better at sharing and
wanting to better things, period. And more
sensitive, so you’re more aware of things
and talk different. Dudes are like, “Yeah, I’m
good.” They don’t really express things in
the depth that things can be expressed.
Listening to you talk makes me
understand your position in music more.
Yeah. I’m a little emo. [laughs]
Not emo, but in the sense that some of
the interviews I’ve read about you portray
you as a ladies’ man.
I don’t like those interviews. I was just
talking to someone about that, because I
was in a magazine and they wrote, “When
Jesse’s not traveling the world, he’s wooing
women.” I’m like, “Whoa, when did I say
that?” Just because I express my appreciation,
and I want to connect with the depths of
a woman’s living? How you guys perceive
life is different from how we do, and I find
it interesting. It’s something I’m curious
about, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going
around wiling out, acting crazy.
How mindful are you of this when you
cultivate your image?
It’s hard to balance everything, because I feel
like the past three years of my life, I’ve been
researching things that you would think I’m
trying to be this sex [symbol]. Reading up
on Kama Sutra and tantric sex—I’m serious
though, ’cause I’m interested in sexuality,
and I’m interested in the spirituality in
sexuality and the connection with those
two things. But it’s not because I’m trying
to go outside and be like,“Women, come to
me, right now.” I just feel like it’s an aspect
that when I grew up, it wasn’t talked about
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like a mind frame and a state of being that
I was in that was different from how I am
now, and how I was before. Like, I can go
back and I can sing how I did on my first
two albums, and I can sing like I sang on
Zulu Guru, but I still haven’t been able to
grasp why I did Love App, or why I’ve been
processing or creating Love App the way that
I have, especially with my writing.
You talk about Love Apparatus in a really
interesting way, very removed from the
rest of your discography. What kind of
mental space does it take up for you?
The rest of my work, anyone can understand
it. But the way I wrote Love Apparatus was
like, some songs are understandable and
it’s cool, it’s natural, but then some songs
I don’t even know what I’m talking about
yet. But I feel there’s power in that, because
the music lasts the longest. ’Cause when
someone writes a song, it’s like you come
up with a different reasoning or feeling
every time you listen to the same song. And
I don’t feel like that’s really done anymore,
or I don’t know many artists that can create
music like that.
You said that you like to make sure all
your projects are conceptual. What’s the
concept behind Love App?
in a light that it should have been talked
about. So I’m relearning what I felt like I
learned wrong and actually conveying my
point of view on those aspects of life, ’cause
I feel like it’s important.
How do your experiences inform the
music you’re making?
A lot, actually. Way of a Wayfarer [2011], that
EP that I did when I took those Gold Panda
tracks and sang over them, my writing is so
different on those compared to The Beauty
Created [2009] and Dopamine. It was just
because the way that I look at things is
from so many different points of view and
perspectives, but I used to always just write
from one. Now I can write from all of them.
Like, every emotion, I can write from it.
And every point of view that I see, I can
write from it.
In a previous interview, you said that
your music acts as a life time line as
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you continue to learn and grow. Can
you tell me about this aspect of your
songwriting?
I try to write for the moment as much as
I can. ’Cause people write future [tense],
they like to speak things into existence in
the music or fantasize about something and
write about it. Or [write about] the past.
I always try to blend all of those things all
together. I feel like it’s important to see the
movement, especially if I can do that in one
album where I write about five years ago
and then write about what’s going on now
and write about how I look at life, or how
life’s going to be for me in the next two,
three years. I try to do that in my music.
Is that one of the objectives for Love
Apparatus?
Yeah. But that happened naturally though.
I didn’t do it on purpose. How I wrote on
that album and the way I’m singing on that
album—I haven’t been able to match it, it’s
Balance. Balance between yourself and
another human being, balance between
yourself and the environment, balance
between yourself and your subconscious,
finding that shit in all of those things.
Acknowledging it. There are love songs on
there, but they’re about balance. There are
songs about life—they’re about balance.
Balance in between these two people.
Balance between yourself and the world.
Trying to find that shit. The whole album,
that’s what it’s about.
So on a personal note, how have you
managed to find balance for yourself?
Acknowledge my mistakes. Unlearn things
that I thought was right when I grew up.
Like on a super, super personal level, it’s
like as a man growing up in America, we’re
raised to be masculine, we’re raised to be
not vulnerable. Always showing strength,
and emotionless in a sense. So I had to
unlearn that shit. The people that I care
about the most are the people I am most
open with, and most honest with. If I don’t
give anybody else reality, I give the people
that I love reality. Mistakes, flaws, and all—it
doesn’t matter. .
Photos shot exclusively for Wax Poetics by Kwesi Abbensetts.