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As a child, Daveed Diggs and his schoolfriend William Hutson drew pictures inspired by the space-age album covers of funk legends Parliament, filled with gleaming UFOs and eccentric interplanetary travellers. Diggs would grow up to become an actor, winning a Tony award as the first person to play the roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton. He’s since voiced Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid’s live-action remake and appeared in Nickel Boys, which was nominated twice at this year’s Oscars. But away from Hollywood and Broadway, he’s still dreaming up fantastical sci-fi worlds with Hutson – now through one of the most imaginative, harrowing projects in underground rap.
Along with Hutson’s college roommate Jonathan Snipes – who had a similar childhood experience, inspired by the otherworldly paintings adorning classical albums – the friends formed Clipping in Los Angeles in 2010. Over Hutson and Snipes’s production, Diggs weaves blood-soaked horror stories about racial violence or fables of enslaved people in outer space. On their new album Dead Channel Sky, he raps with mechanical precision over warped rave music, creating a noirish cyberpunk world of hackers, clubgoers, future-soldiers and digital avatars.
Their music has earned them nominations for sci-fi’s highest honour, the Hugo awards, and it’s made all the more distinctive by Diggs’s decision to avoid using the first person in his lyrics. “In an art form that is so self-conscious, is it still rap music if we take that out?” he says on a video call alongside his bandmates. “We discovered pretty quickly that it is, but that it also opened possibilities.” His raps feel like cinema or musical theatre, narrating action and voicing dialogue with characters of – generally – ambiguous gender and race. “What we’ve found from fans is that, because we don’t have much to do with these characters ourselves, it has allowed people to put a lot of themselves into them, to come up with reasons why this stuff is happening, and make links between songs we didn’t think of.”
Implicit in this approach is a critique of mainstream hip-hop: Hutson argues that its “fiercely individualistic” bent, and obsession with authenticity, has bred conformity. “The constraints of what you’re allowed to talk about and who you’re allowed to be as a rapper are so narrow,” he says. “Nobody calls novelists inauthentic compared to memoirists – but in rap music that’s apparently the case.”
Described by Hutson as a “CD compilation you’ve found in a used bin in the future”, Dead Channel Sky is therefore filled with storytelling, with Diggs playing a different character on each song. On Ask What Happened, he’s a troubled socially conscious MC listing human atrocities at warp speed, but over the mid-tempo house of Mirrorshades Pt 2, he becomes someone slick and aloof, describing a nightclub’s strict dress code: “God is not here – he forgot to rock his mirrorshades.” The characters all belong to the same destructive capitalist system, and this imagined society is at war: Welcome Home Warrior, with Diggs’s too-friendly address to “cyber rat-race escape artists”, is done as a military recruitment message.
Hutson says they’re using a classic sci-fi trope, “these colonialist, extractive, brutal wars on other planets”, and it makes a fitting analogy for life in the west today, where our comforts are reliant on fought-over resources. “We are at war all the time,” Diggs adds. “It’s one of the great tricks of capitalism and technology: to allow these things to happen in the name of capitalism, with us all participating in it but not feeling like we’re affected.” His acting ability helps bring these characters to vivid life on record, but Diggs himself doesn’t disappear completely. “Any time I’m acting in something, whatever I’ve been reading, whatever I’m thinking, all that stuff finds its way into the person I’m inhabiting. The Clipping stuff is similar. Everything is in service to the story.”
Plenty of reading material has informed Dead Channel Sky, especially William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which lends the album its title. Hutson says it was a horribly prescient book: “We have a lot of the technology [from Neuromancer], a version of cyberspace, and we live in a corporatist, fascist dystopia.”
But there are less widely known touchstones, too. The track Code samples the 1996 Afrofuturist film The Last Angel of History, in which a character seeks truth by consulting “techno fossils”: interviews about Black culture with speakers including techno music pioneer Juan Atkins, sci-fi author Octavia Butler and Parliament-Funkadelic’s George Clinton. Snipes came across the film, and like Neuromancer, found it prescient. “A hundred years from now, people are going to be finding abandoned data centres and trying to power them up and find out what’s on there,” he grins. “It’s going to be like opening King Tut’s tomb.”
The trio are already well-respected in sci-fi circles. Their 2016 album Splendor & Misery was nominated for a Hugo award – only the second musical project considered since the awards began in 1953. They got their second and third nominations for their 2017 song The Deep and its 2019 novella remake with Rivers Solomon – these imagined an underwater society populated by water-breathing descendants of enslaved people.
But their latest cyberpunk theme has a particularly strong affinity with hip-hop, they say, with both forms flourishing in the 1980s. “The hacker and the hip-hop producer are both ‘hacking’ technology that wasn’t made to do what they’re doing with it,” Hutson says, referring in the latter case to turntablism and sampling. “They’re building a future out of the mass-produced garbage around them.” (The group’s friend Roy Christopher made this argument in his 2019 book Dead Precedents, exploring rap as “Black cyberpunk”.) Hutson sees those early days of hip-hop as very creatively liberated, and says the album’s different rapping styles attempt to “harken back to that time, when we didn’t really know what rap was yet. You could rap over fast stuff, slow stuff, laser sounds – all this other silliness.”
As well as hip-hop, cyberpunk is closely allied with rave music – think of the club scene in the Matrix, or Underworld, Orbital and the Prodigy on the Hackers soundtrack – and so Dead Channel Sky hops between dance sub-genres, including big-beat (Change the Channel), acid-house (Keep Pushing) and drum’n’bass (Dodger). But Hutson sees “a weird contradiction” here. “A rave is the most corporeal, embodied sense of joy,” he says. “It’s not about the connectivity of the internet – it’s about being in a warehouse with a bunch of people.”
This unsteady, contradictory relationship between the digital and the physical lies at the heart of Dead Channel Sky, where imagined realities prompt questions about our own: whether virtual realms of “pixelated wind” are any flimsier than ours. Diggs suggests: “If we are currently living in the apocalypse that the cyberpunk fiction of the 80s and 90s predicted, this is the music.”
