In August, Ian Isiah gave an irrepressible live performance at the New York launch party for Blood Orange’s Negro Swan, an album on which he’s a featured vocalist. Sporting tattoos, finger rings, and a flowing mane of black hair, Isiah stood behind the DJ booth, flashing a canyon-wide grin, delivering his silky, seductive falsetto into the microphone on his slow jam “247.” Always turnt up to a permanent 11, Isiah fuses his penchant for ghettocentric glam—he’s long been a standout denizen of New York subcultural nightlife community GHE20G0TH1K—with a knowing wink-wink about his proclivities.
Seemingly drowning in sexual excess and describing himself as genderless, he sings about women, threesomes, and strip club pussy. He’s committed to black awareness but is also eager to make sure his music caters to the white girls he believes he needs to make his career pop off. If he sounds like a strutting oxymoron, let it be known that Isiah also hasn’t strayed far from gospel music and his traditional church roots. Simply by being his provocative self, he manages to press Christian aesthetics and God worship in service of a progressively pansexual, pangender, panracial, pan-everything sensibility.
“I’m all about an easy flow,” he tells me over comfort food and rum punches at the cozy Imani Caribbean Kitchen & Bar, one of his favorite Fort Greene, Brooklyn restaurants. Though he’s normally the life of the party wherever he goes, on this rainy night Isiah happens to be surprisingly contained, studiously texting on his smartphone, rocking a low-key black Margiela sweatsuit, his hair demurely braided up. Just as his futuristic R&B swings between polarities of dancefloor carnality and boudoir chill, Isiah himself can veer between flamboyant rambunctiousness and contemplative focus.
Born in Brooklyn and raised at the rough and tumble Vanderveer Estates housing complex (now known as Flatbush Gardens following a gentrification update), Isiah was brought up by his mother—a nurse turned police athletic league teacher—while his steel-pan-playing Trinidadian Rasta father lived in close proximity. He honed his lithe falsetto in the Pentecostal church, participating in gospel groups and perfecting the tight, divinely resonant harmonies that have become his trademark sound. Floating in Auto-Tune, those multi-tracked harmonies are the centerpiece of lascivious songs like “Bedroom” from his first new release in five years, Shugga Sextape Vol. 1, due out later this month. While he continues to work on a “grown and sexy” proper debut album, Isiah describes Shugga Sextape as an appetizer: “This is the fun, amusement park EP. Get dressed, go the club, you wanna fuck—this is that for you.”
In his late teens, Isiah developed his musical network by crooning background harmonies at Sunday open mic nights in downtown New York’s Village Underground nightclub, and he paid the bills by way of a six-year retail stint at Urban Outfitters. He ambitiously stepped up his fashion game, becoming creative consultant to high school BFF Shayne Oliver, founder of successful avant-streetwear fashion brand Hood by Air.
Using edgy fashion-world branding as a springboard, Isiah put his vocal skills to work, signing with left-of-center NYC label UNO and collaborating with alternative pop notables including Arca. His 2013 debut mixtape, The Love Champion, featured cameos from queer underground mainstays Le1f and Mykki Blanco, and established him as a sonically forward, avant-garde R&B act. Since then, Isiah’s kept a low profile: Besides releasing a couple of standalone singles, he’s opted for strategic features on projects by Blood Orange and Chromeo.
Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 continues where The Love Champion left off. Brimming with steam-generating sex and gospel-drenched salvation, the eight-song mixtape—featuring sampled interludes of interview clips from artists like gospel workhorse Tye Tribbett—is as much a showcase for Isiah’s nimble falsetto runs as it is an opportunity for producers like Soda Plains, Juice Jackal, and long-time collaborator Sinjin Hawke to go buckwild with stuttered beats and experimental textures. If Little Richard recorded a sexed-up R&B record on a spaceship to Mars, it might sound something like this.
On the rain-drenched night we meet in Brooklyn, our dinner conversation is as rich as the extra side of oxtail gravy in which Isiah douses his hamburger. Since it’s hard to hear in the bustling restaurant, I hand him my iPhone to better record our conversation; he saucily holds the phone up to his mouth like he’s living his best life interviewing himself for his own reality TV show. He’s got a jones for the word “yaas,” and the way he industriously reworks slang is a thing of comedic genius—he self-deprecatingly calls himself “auntie” when he means “old school,” and he says things like “that’s gonna concrete me” when he wants to explain how a life lesson can make him feel more grounded and emotionally solid.
Having just watched the new Quincy Jones documentary on Netflix, Isiah is obsessed with getting his entrepreneurial game on. He hopes to make an enduring mark on the culture industry, not to end up as what he calls a “one-hit-wonder queen.” But he’s also quite clear about his strategic path to upward mobility: The best way to stay winning is to just be his wildly eccentric self, and to remain rooted in the local New York hood vibe that helped shape him.
Ian Isiah: Church storefronts. Beauty supply stores. Hoes. Gangstas. Corner stores. Backwoods. Beauty supply stores again! Mr. Softee Ice Cream trucks. Dollar cabs. Loud, blasting, re-put-in bad feedback speakers in a Honda. Boys jumping double dutch. Gays voguing. Sunflower seeds in all flavors. Saying “saltpepperoilandvinegar” all in one word. I’m a Brooklyn girl. I can’t see myself living anywhere else for a long period of time.
I somehow became Big Shugga this past summer—that’s my alter-ego of being very street but very sweet. My friends would play around and call me Shugga all the time. I have this very auntie vibe to me. Yaas, I’m an auntie out here in these streets. Big Shugga is an auntie from Brooklyn who gets her hair done all the time, in everybody’s business but not really. This is possibly my Sasha Fierce moment.
I wasn’t in a rush. Even now, I’ll never be in a rush to put out music. I always want to make sure no matter how far I go, it’s about the music. Sonically, I am really concerned about growing. I always want to make music that other musicians can study.
It’s a celebration of you living out your wildest dreams sexually. I want people to have freedom and options—is there a way to be free and optional at the same time? I’m trying to see what that formula is in music. But love is definite. Being able to love who and whatever you want. All-the-time love. Consistent love.
The-Dream is still it for me. He knows how to take what’s normal and make it sexy and oil it up. The-Dream’s approach, that execution, is just so on. There’s so much oil underneath everything he’s ever put out.
I listen for oil. In the black church, or in any non-denominational church, when somebody sings good, we like to say, “That’s a lot of oil.” It means the Holy Ghost got it. You can tell the difference when someone has the gift and when someone is basically anointed, chosen, to be set apart, to be different. But it doesn’t have be gospel for me to have that oil. I look for oil in every artist; Lil Wayne is anointed to me. That oil is when musicians push boundaries. I guess it could be translated as passion. Because there’s only 12 notes. What makes artists cool, or what makes things sound good besides tone and vibration, is you doing everything that you can do inside of those 12 notes and really fucking it up.
No, no, no. Cause we can all be fierce. I’ve seen some girls that are fierce but that don’t mean they got the oil. We can both have cars but that don’t mean we both got Lamborghinis.
You can deepen anything. I will put a record on and repeat it and play it back and repeat it. I’ll listen to Jazmine Sullivan and copy what she does until I get the full understanding of what it is. That’s my homework, listening to singers like her and Brandy and Kim Burrell.
Oh yes! Love that, love that. Kim Burrell is from the old school. I love that.
According to what I believe and how I was raised, I’m not supposed to do certain things, and certain things are not the Will of God. However, I believe in love and no titles. And I believe in giving everybody a chance to go off. Fashion helped me realize this. Pushing those boundaries in fashion first taught me I could push boundaries in general. I know the “no gender” thing is trending right now, but love is love. And God is love. I’m not going to miss out on blessings because I’m living in some sort of rulebook. Even though my sexual orientation is what it is, even though I don’t know what it is, I would never take God away from being who He is. I’m not ashamed of Him. It’s a love refreshment era. A love refreshment decade, possibly, and I just happen to be a part of it. You gonna make me start preaching in a minute.
Look at how he woke up. Reformation is fab! Redemption is fab! I’m so thankful that being awake about everything is the new thing. We’re in a sexual revival right now. It’s a horny world we live in. I don’t stand with any male chauvinist situation. Actually, I only hang out with straight men and I was raised by straight men, but I don’t accept the mentality that certain men have. This is men’s time to change, for atonement. It’s not a time to hide in the shadows, or use ego in a way that’s gonna fuck up the next generation.
My writing process is the hardest thing ever! But it’s easier when I start off with my singers. The first thing I do in the studio, I make my girls…
Yes, “my girls” are really just me doing backgrounds. Once I get comfortable in the studio, I build up the sound for my girls—which is me. And then production comes in and can make something beautiful out it.
Killup means tearing your waist up real good, breaking up the punani.
We all grew up at Empire Skating Rink in Brooklyn, and that’s where we heard dancehall. We would cut school to go to a friend’s house so they could DJ the new hundred-track CD that we got from Flatbush Junction and we would have a party so we could learn dances together. In high school, my physical education was Afro-Caribbean dancing.
When he was coming up, he had to do what I’m doing now. He would glam up to be appealing to white girls so they could get him performing in the club, and this is what changed everything for him. And Little Richard was fucking these white girls at the end of the night too. I was like, “Wow, you the man.”
Yaaas. “Bleach Report” is a political track, actually. I was writing a notation, like, “Hey white girls, I’m here.” Making my presence known. It can possibly mean a salutation to the white girls.
You said it! I didn’t say it.
Any chance I get to discuss any sort of black awareness I’m ready to go! The color of your skin is something to protect after years of being enslaved mentally and after 150 years of being unslaved. Is unslaved a word?
I am ready for my “We Are the World” track with me and a few of my homies.
